Saturday the 3rd August 2008 saw FTN 2008 volunteers gathered together for the last time.

It was a time of sharing, swapping war stories and generally comparing notes on some generally hair raising experiences that all the volunteers had gone through.

Like the time the North rally team was traveling from Kang to Gantsi and their trailer had a tire burst!!! The phh-a-a-t, phh-a-at, phh-a-a-t they all heard was the tattered remains of the trailer’s rear wheel.

Or the time in Letlhakane they lived in a real , honest to goodness haunted house!!! The minute their rallies were finished in the left town and didn’t go back to that house!!! They did pray for it but decided that they could handle only one battle a time .

A staff member in one school, on reflecting on the positive influence of FTN in the school, said that the year before FTN volunteers were sent to his school there were 35 reported cases of pregnancy. Since the programme has started in the school the rates have gone down to almost zero. FTN is really making a huge difference.

World Vision in connection with Willow Creek church in the US has held an international competition for churches who are taking an initiative against the AIDS pandemic. It is called the Courageous Leadership Award. Open Baptist Church entered Face The Nation for the competition. I quote from the letter received from them today….

“Through what has been a thorough, careful, thoughtful and prayerful process, we have finally identified our top three finalists. While Open Baptist did not qualify in the group of finalists, the Selection Committee felt that it deserved a Special Recognition Award. Both Committees were impressed by what your small church has been able to accomplish and they loved the local school emphasis—educating the next generation. Well done!

The awards will be presented at a dinner……… Open Baptist will be recognized at that dinner. The winners of the 2008 CLA will be announced during the Leadership Summit session the next day in front of 80,000 church leaders from all over the world. As a Special Recognition church, Open Baptist will also be featured on the Courageous Leadership Award website.

Congratulations!! We wish you God’s best as you continue your efforts to be the hands and feet of Christ addressing the greatest humanitarian disaster this world has even seen.”

Moeding College, a senior secondary school located in the sleepy village of Otse, has been the hub of activity as young people took a positive step in reclaiming a hope filled future. Three hundred and twenty one of them made the pledge for sexual purity. And by honouring this pledge they will rest assured that they will not fall prey to teen-age pregnancies, contract HIV/AIDS or even get infected with the numerous STI’s, some of which are debilitating and even life threatening.

As our north rally team zip and zapped through rallies in towns small and large, Suzzane Taylor tagged along capturing raw footage, with her handy camera, which she hopes to turn into a documentary. She would like this documentary on HIV/AIDS to be refreshingly different and with FTN being a program that focuses on sexual- purity she is not far from her goal.

She experienced first hand the inner workings of a rally team by traveling and living with them for 3 weeks. It was crazy at times, a hectic travel schedule, squashed in a 13 seater van, sleeping in tents in the freezing cold, getting home too tired to cook but too hungry not to cook, but through it all she experienced the passion and faith that drives our volunteers and the essence of what Face The Nation stands for: giving it all for the sake of others.

Who is she? She is a young lady from one of our partner churches in the USA, Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, where she is pursuing her masters in documentary filming. . She is hoping, in time to be able to enter it into student film festivals and of course to make copies available to us for our resource centre.