Katy in South Africa

In summer 2009 Katy Bridges packed her bags and went to work with Backdoor in South Africa.

The sights, sounds and smells of the far east are an intoxicating draw for the would-be traveller. Esther’s adventure here took place with her friends for the university course group to see how prosthetics and orthotic devices were being made and used.

South Africa was amazing, the kids were so inspiring. One of the girls there, Speway, is seven years old. Her mum is an alcoholic and beat her really bad, but she beat her really bad one night and she ran away to the Village of Hope which is the base for the project in Backdoor, and they kept her there over night. After that she was put into a different house with a woman in the village named Florence, and she is now in the Childrens Village which opened a week and a half after we left. Her older brother was born with feotal alcohol poisoning and her other two older brother were both shot dead for shoplifting, yet she was just a normal kid who wanted to run about and play like any other seven year old in Backdoor, or in the UK and that just amazed me so much.

Whilst we were there we worked on getting the Children’s Centre ready for all the kids to move in, and we spent time just hanging out with the teenagers as most of them spoke fluent english and they enjoyed teaching us words in siswati and we enjoyed learning them. We also got to run the feeding programme, which ran Monday to Friday from 2.30 until about 4pm, where we would sing some songs with the kids, teach them a bible story and then say grace and then help with getting the food out, or help the little kids so they didn’t spill their food everywhere.

When I was in South Africa God was really testing me to trust him, and to learn that nothing is scary because God is there beside me all the time.