U-Turn

On Monday we spent the entire day at a homeless ministry, called UTURN.  This ministry is connected to the denomination of Point Community.  They focus on meeting not only the immediate needs (food, clothes, etc) of the homeless in South Africa, but also the long-term needs (permanent housing, employment, etc). 

We spent our day helping organize the clothing store that they offer to the homeless in the area.  This is a unique store in the sense that the homeless and needy can earn clothing vouchers by doing some type of small job.  Once they earn a voucher they can come in to the store and "purchase" clothing.  

We walked in to this room of clothes.....

and spent the rest of the day dumping out bags, organizing, folding, and setting up the store.  

we got to work right away carrying boxes and bags and setting up work stations

I can not tell you how many article of clothes we sorted and folded, but it was a lot!  

We actually made it really fun.  It was a great bonding day for our team and we laughed a lot while we worked!  

We also found many interesting articles of clothing.  Sometimes some of us just couldn't resisit trying something on. Ricky's sporting what some might call a bathing suit....and you can see me laughing hysterically in the background.

At the end of the day the volunteer coordinator at UTurn, Sean (pictured in the back with us in the group photo) told us that we did the same amount of work in 1 day that would take their team 1 year to do.  We were so thankful to be able to serve this ministry and help set up a clothing store for them.  

After a long day of work we decided to take the team to Camps Bay for dinner 

Perryn, Joanna, myself and Amy.  We all roomed together (plus Erin who is not pictured) while in Cape Town.  we had such a fun time living together!  

The two team leaders!  

Team devotions in my room!  We lived in a hostel all week, so we stayed in very nice dorm type rooms. I felt like I was back in college!  I loved our nights of devotions together.