Growing Together

Well, it’s officially the weekend! 😄 And what a first week it’s been!

Getting up at 6am, wrapping up as warm as we can 🥶 before eating breakfast and then packing the kids off to school (they’re gone from 7am til 4.30pm), then worship times together, a variety of lectures and teaching before our daily chores (‘Base Duties’). - We’re on fire duty for the first 3 weeks which means chopping wood for campfires and making sure the hot water gezers are lit each day so people can shower, wash up etc. All the students have different responsibilities - cooking, cleaning, gardening etc and despite this being quite different to life just a few weeks ago, it’s definitely good to be serving each other and growing as a team.

One great thing about this week has been the chance to hear each others various stories and testimonies. Because it’s dark by about 6pm each day, we’ve not had that long together as just a family but we feel privileged to have spent so much time getting to know the other students on the DTS. Some of their lives have been really hard and their journeys here quite moving.

One of the distinctives of this DTS over other YWAM programs is its focus on adventure and discovering God in the outdoors. So yesterday for example, we went out tracking zebra, giraffe, impala, Eland and Kudu, taking time to listen to the sounds around us and all we could see and smell too. And a few days ago we were exploring the Wood Wide Web - reflecting on how all the trees actually were in a network of roots and connections that support each other beneath the surface. There‘s so much we  can learn from God’s creation and it was fun to see how we might use the outdoors to engage young people in helpful discipleship activities in the future.