Stay Awake!

On Friday night, we had our very first Youth Group social. Instead of doing something ‘normal’ like having a braai, games night, ice skating, beach etc the group decided to have a ‘Stay Awake’. What is that, some crazy game? Unfortunately not a game so much as a whole night and morning where, as the name suggests, we stayed awake. To help us stay awake, ‘punishments’ would be inflicted on sleepers – anything from toothpaste, BBQ sauce, shaving cream to loss of brows! This proved to be a good incentive to stay awake (I look funny without my eyebrows). In fact, we were so good at staying awake, that some people started to inflict punishments whilst people were still alert.

At one stage, everyone was so paranoid about getting messed up, that we were all sitting 2 pews apart with our backs to the walls just watching each other vigilantly, not talking in fear that we’d get distracted and be ambushed.


































All in all, over the course of 10 hours, we had a great time, watched loads of movies, played lots of games and kept the church relatively clean…

Doing Youth Group here is so different to doing it in our Youth Groups in Sydney because of the different social conditions the youth have to contend with here. In the area that we are working in with the Coloured community, its common to have violence at home - one teenager has to live with her brother and his wife because her father murdered her mother. Others have family members who abuse drugs and alcohol or are physically abusive. All the kids (even little 2 year olds) walk around the neighborhood unsupervised till late at night even though there are gangsters around. We nearly hit a kid who darted out into the middle of the road at night time. The scary thing was that there was no parent to watch over the child - he was just left to do whatever he wanted. I made the mistake once of asking someone how they got a cut lip and the girl shied away from me for the rest of the lesson.

You know how usually when you meet someone or you're getting to know them, you ask them questions about their family? Well sometimes I feel nervous about asking people about their background as more often than not, it includes some sort of skeleton which they dont want to talk about. Ive been told that the kids find it hard to trust people as they have been through so much already. I just really hope that we can build that trust up with the kids here so they can confide in us and find comfort in God.