It’s been a busy last couple months here at Thrive, sorry I didn’t send out an email last month. We’ve had a lot mission teams out here from the States, which means I spent most of my days driving teams into villages instead of spending time in the office. It’s both good and bad. It’s great to go out with teams and get to know them and hear all the stories they have at the end of the day. The down side is that I don’t get too much time in the office so not too many projects are getting done these months. I’ve done the Joburg 6 hour round-trip drive more times than I can remember. I’m not really sure which I’d prefer… I like to be in the office and get work done, but I’m realizing that it’s a great refresher of why I’m out here in the first place to be out in the villages and be with the people of Africa.

Back on March when we were accepted in the Google Grants program I wasn’t really sure what kind of increase we would see in the traffic to our website. Well, just 4 months later and it’s safe to say that the program is exceeding my expectations. Not only has traffic to the website increased tremendously, but the interests in our internships, team hosting, and staff positions is off the charts. Just to give a quick example, over half of our 16 Summer Interns found us on Google!

I log in to Facebook about once every couple months and hardly ever confirm friends, but it seems to know me so well.

With gas prices at $5.85 a gallon over here it cost me a whopping $93.00 to fill up my truck the other day.

Road trip anyone?

There’s been a whole lot going on here at Thrive over the last month. We had a mission team from Virginia here with us, our village discipleship classes had graduation, over 280 students attended our Leadership Day event, and what would a small town be without the circus coming to town.

For the most part I wasn’t involved too much with those events because I’ve been immersed in designed the next curriculum for our AIDS prevention program, Leadership Summit.
This one focuses on, well, AIDS. We’ve written ones before that talk about AIDS in certain ways, but this one focuses entirely on the subject.

When we asked kids what they would like to learn more about, an overwhelming topic was that of AIDS. You would think that in a country where 1 in 4 people are HIV positive, kids would already know so much about the subject. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Kids don’t really know much at all on the subject. It’s not talked about and it’s definitely not taught in the schools.

The still “untitled” curriculum has a total of 10 chapters and each chapter is split into 3 sections: Truth, God, You. The truth section is all about giving these kids the facts about AIDS. I know it sounds simple, but we still encounter kids here in South Africa that don’t even believe AIDS is real. I know, crazy! The next section focuses on what God says. How He created them to live out their life using their gifts and talents and that He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of that! The “You” section is the application part. In a sense, “we’ve given you all the facts and tools now it’s up to you”.

So far I’ve got about 6 chapters completed and it’s starting to come together rather nicely. I’m always a bit nervous when I start on these projects because it seems crazy that I have about 6 weeks to come up with what is basically a magazine all by myself. Luckily, I’m not alone on this. Marc, an intern here, has been a lot of help with the design.

So what’s next for me when I finished this curriculum…. another curriculum!

In the beginning of the month we packed up our 10 interns and headed out on a 2 day drive to the Love Botswana Outreach Mission in Botswana. This is an annual mission trip we go on to serve the ministry in whatever way we can, most of the time doing things most mission teams probably don’t want to do. This year we spent the majority of our time renovating a 5-bedroom, 2-bathroom house they have on their property It was a huge project that had us sanding down about 1,000 sq. feet of wood floors. We also re-vanished the floors, gave the place a fresh coat of paint, and totally renovated an entire bathroom, thanks to our intern, Matt Moline

It was a lot of of hard work, but very rewording in the end. I’m kind of jealous of who ever gets to move into that house. See photos of the renovation.

Internship Video… We recently made a new video that has our interns sharing a bit about what they’ve been up to these first few months. If you’ve ever wondered what our interns do around here. This would be a great way to find out.

Mass Mailer… Earlier this month I got to create a mass mailer piece that went out to 2,500 churches in the US. The goal of this promo piece is to help gain interest in churches bring out a mission team to us. This is the first mailer we’ve done at Thrive, so it will be interesting to see what kind of response we get out of it.

Nothing says a miracle like going to the dentist and having him not find anything wrong with your teeth. Ok, so maybe that’s the news most people get when they go, but not me. There’s probably a couple reasons why I always get bad news at the dentist. It could be from all the sugar I consume on a daily basis or more likely that I only go to the dentist once every 3 years. Whatever the case, I must be doing something right. No cavities for me.

It might shock some of you that playing a good game of flag football or a pick up game of basketball is near the top of the list of things that I miss most from back home. Since no one plays those sports over here and we live a small town there’s never really a pick-up game of any kind around here. Leaving me yearning to find something… anything.

Well, after 3 years of looking I finally found a weekend game of rugby in town. The only problem is, I’ve never played rugby before and I barely understand all the rules. I knew it would be quite humbling, but I wanted to play something so bad it was worth the embarrassment. It all started off too perfect. The first time Josh and I went out to play they were picking teams and I just saw it coming a mile aways. It started getting down to the last few people and we had yet to be picked. Flashbacks to kickball in elementary school we’re running through my mind. So yes, Josh and I were the last two people picked. Even the 10 year kid was picked for us. Seriously, it really happened. It was pretty funny.

I’ve been out twice now and think I’m getting better, thought I’m still trying to learn all the rules. I didn’t grow up watching the sport so everything is pretty new to me. Think of it as mix between soccer, because the ball is always moving, and football, because you’re running with the ball down field as people are trying to tackle you. You can also kick the ball forward, but can’t through it forward. See why I’m confused. To make things even tougher they don’t speak much English when where playing, so I’ll have no idea why things happen.

Good Times!

I’m happy to report that the container that I’ve been trying to get over here for longer than I can remember has finally found it’s resting place here on our property. True, it did arrive almost two months behind schedule, but it’s here now and I’m just glad everything made it in one piece. As most of you already know the important item, or items on the container were our 30,000 curriculums for our AIDS prevention program. Since I hadn’t seen the final print of the books yet I didn’t wait too long once we opened the container to break open some boxes to get a look at them. And they looked great! These took so much work I’m so happy for everyone involved that they came out looking so good.

Other items on the container were 2 riding lawnmowers and 2 wave runners. The plan has always been to sell these items for a profit over here to help offset the cost of the container. And just in case anyone was wondering the grand total for shipping everything here and also buying the container was a whopping $13,000. That cost was a bit higher than expected and has put the ministry in kind of pinch so we could really use some prayer for extra finances right about now.

I would also like to send out a personal thank you to Joel Chamberlain for putting up almost $3,000 to buy one of the wave runners that was on the container. It all stemmed from a conversation at Dunkin’ Donuts when we were kicking around ideas on how he could help the ministry financially. It turned into a little business deal that he would put up the cash for the wave runner and once we sold it here we would then reimburse him his upfront cost. This only makes sense since we should be able to double our money when we sell the wave runner here in South Africa. In the end, Joel gets his initial investment back and we hopefully make about $3,000 to $4,000. Thanks again Joel for being willing to help us find creative ways for people to invest in the people of Southern Africa.

Anyone interested in something similar. We’re planning on bringing another container over at the end of the year. Let me know.