Participant Blogs

I'm writing to you from Saint Louis, Senegal! The journey here as been phenomenal. To get here we had to cross one of the harshest environments on earth: the Sahara desert. In my mind I always thought of this leg as one of the more difficult parts of this year. And it wasn't easy. It required quite a few miracles and a lot of prayer. Let me summarize the challenges of this journey: 1. Between Dakhla in the Western Sahara and the Mauritanian border there is a 320km stretch across the desert without public transport. 2. Getting your visa for...

The time we have left here in Brazil is allready coming to the end! Which seems crazy. I have been amazed at how quickly a place very different to NZ home can really become home. The extremely welcoming nature of the people here definitely helps. I think in the past three weeks I have hugged more people than in my enture life up till then! As well as how giving and generous they are, which I have realised after our whole team has been fed feasts on many occassions. A quick run down on what we have down in the...

I am bored so let’s see how creative the Global Challengers are... We are staying 4 days in Malaysia airport. So I am challenging all the Global Challengers (new and old and staff) to give me the most creative things to do on an airport

  Our team went for our last two bowls of R2 ice cream and quickly passed our room in the church before we walked to Besaida's house for the last supper with our Cuban friends. By the time we were already a bit late (not by cuban standards though) and we tried to pick up the pace just a little bit when a lady stopped Keneilwe asking for money. This is not strange as it was obvious that we were foreigners, and foreigners usually have a lot of money. Somehow this was the very first time I felt I should...

(John 8:36)   If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I had the privilege of visiting my Thai ‘parents’ for 10 days during the April holiday where I also met up with the Global Challenge Northbound team.   Although I have been in the country many times, I just again realized the bondage on the people there.   During the month of April, the people in Chiang Mai has a tradition called nam moa .   During this time you have to visit your elder family members, taking them some food and presents.   Then they...

“Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us. He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day that we will LIVE before Him. So Let us KNOW, let us press on to KNOW the LORD. HIS going forth is as certain as dawn; and He will come like rain, like spring rain watering the earth.” Hosea 6:1-3      The last couple months have been a journey. I left my home and country with anxiety and...

So we arrived safely in Nepal yesterday, but there is a great story (testimony) about how we got here... We we started planing the Hidden World journey in the beginning of the year, the idea was to go to New Zealand in September before going to India. That unfortunately was never in budget, probably because God had very different plans. So arriving in India on the 7 September we had 3 ministry points (all being orphanages) to chose from and where we need to go for the month of September. We started praying about this and the evening when I...

If you can remember in one of the team blogs we told you about the expensive dinner we had with that Chinese boy. Well we paid that with a heart of: ‘Lord this is for your glory and so we sow this into your kingdom’ type of heart and the Lord heard it as He usually does. So I’m about to tell you about what you sow you will reap... in abundance!! Since that day we as the global challenge X group have received so much from the Lord.

That night Detlef had a dream that someone needed help driving a blue Land Rover all the way to the Mali border and that we agreed to help- which solved our transport issue!   We weren't sure if we needed to take it serious or not, but in any case would have to start moving. So we decided to take a local bus to the first big town on the road to Mali, which was Kaolack, 200km's from where there.   Our Senegalese bus was soon packed to the rafters and became quite unbearable. To make things worse it broke...

Indonesia: 258 million people spread over 13 000 islands and the reason I joined Global… Generally speaking I have a rule to not build expectations but rather approach every situation with an open mind and teachable spirit. Unfortunately this was not the case in terms of my view on Indonesia. I have never had much interest in travelling to the east so when my attention fell on Indonesia one night while praying, I knew this country was special. Since that evening more than a year ago, I have not been able to shake the idea that God wanted me to...