Team Orientation Day

Orientation Day

Thursday meant orientation day for most of our team, unfortunately with Alice having already flown out to South Africa to complete 2 weeks mission before our trip, we met as a 6. It was amazing to be together again, to be sharing stories, laughs and getting to know each other a bit more.

We started the day with some reflections from Alice Scott. Alice talked us through a couple of verses that she had picked out from the bible which would be relevant to our trip and something we can take out with us. This provided a time of reflection for all of us, to think about the words that Alice shared and to think about the stories that some of us shared relating to our previous visits. One thing that Alice encouraged us to think about was who we would class as our Family, outside of just our biological family. We all shared different perspectives of who we would class as our families including colleagues from work, church families, friends and volunteers at the Hands Hub. After watching a few short videos and reading a story of a young girl that has access to a care point, Alice encouraged us to make ourselves vulnerable - this included sitting in silence on our own for 15 minutes to reflect, pray and to encourage silence within our days. Many of us found 15 minutes a long time but it was a good activity to prepare us for what previously may have been awkward silences.

We then came together to talk about some practicalities of our trip which is always good to aid any worries and anxieties about the upcoming trip. Then we shared a delicious light lunch and some time to talk about what we were really looking forward to while in South Africa.

After lunch we ‘talked the talk’. This meant remembering, or learning, Siswati. Which proved a bit more difficult than we expected with everyone remembering different parts of the language but we managed to get a hold of the basics. We then spent some time organising the amazing donations that we had already received for our Care Worker packages - we managed to include a face cloth, a form of soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, nail varnish, a comb or brush and a hand cream or lip balm in all our packages and as we are still collecting donations we hope to make as many packages as possible. From our previous experiences that we have had out in South Africa, we know that the care workers will hugely appreciate what seems to us to be a small gesture.

We were very thankful for the time that we had together for our orientation day and we were exited (and nervous) that the next time we will gather will be Saturday 3rd August for our commissioning service. We would love to see as many people at our service as possible 7:30pm at St Andrews Church, Biggleswade.