Ocean View Kids

I will forever remember today’s Christmas Party with the children and teens in Ocean View – one of our communities. The ER team helped with a beautiful Christmas story, facepainting and games. But the best part by far was that the Ocean View team used their budget to hire some bouncy bounces and a water slip-and-slide! The 150 kids had a ball – the majority of them did not have bathing suits and would either go in their undies or turn their clothes into makeshift swimsuits! You know, I just always associated slip-and-slides with tons of dishwashing liquid bubbles to make the ride so much more slippery.  Well I learned today that that was a privilege of my white-suburban upbringing in South Africa that I completely took for granted. I didn’t realize that it was not norm until we heard the shrieks of excitement as the kids were slipping down covered in bubbles from head-to-toe and until we heard the adults saying they’ve never seen this before! One even said: “Jinne my bru – you could wash a thousand dishes with all these bubbles!” LOL! Well I hope we didn’t come across as wasteful, but the kids had an absolute blast!

One of the most moving bits about today was when one of the Life Skills Educators called a young teen girl to the front and asked everyone (the team, the children and the other teens) to pray and give her a moment of silence. A couple days prior this young girl (that could not be any older than 14 or 15) lost her prematurely born 5-day old baby. It was amazing to see everyone coming around her and supporting her in her mourning. But then the challenging part came again in seeing this same girl playing with the other kids. She is just a baby herself and was having fun like one of the children. I could not imagine this your girl being a mommy herself. But this is the reality in Ocean View for so many young girls – this community has an extremely high teen pregnancy rate. Seeing this young girl just broke my heart to pray for the girls in this a broken community.