Today we walked onto the campus of USP at 8:30am! After a bit of confusion over which table/tent was ours, we figured it out and put up the Student Life banner, placed freshmen survival kits on the table, stacked our surveys beside pens, and set out to meet the first year students! These students are fairly similar to those in the states, i.e. they walk around in large groups, they look nervous, and they want to feel connected with people! What a perfect time to meet them, introduce them to Student Life, and prayerfully, give them an opportunity to come to know the Lord personally!
It was definitely a long, and hot day; but proved to be such an encouragement as we finally got our feet wet, or in this case, pretty muddy (the grass under our tent was more like 2 inches of mud!) into ministry, and it felt SO GOOD! My team got to meet tons of students as we initiated conversations and encouraged students to fill out the surveys and come claim their free gifts! I met one girl in particular, who was a third year at USP. She told me that she was so excited to hear about Student Life because she has been looking for that type of community for the past 2 years! I made sure to take down her number personally and I'll definitely be calling her to invite her to Student Life opportunities in the upcoming weeks!
As the afternoon flew by, we found ourselves packing up our materials at about 4pm, and heading back home. We had to make 2 trips during the day to return to our apartments to get more freshmen survival kits, because we had run out! Brian counted how many surveys were filled out today, and we found out that we had connected with 511 students! And this is only day 1! Orientation, and this student activities tent area, apparently gets extremely more crowded as the week progresses! God is definitely doing some HUGE things here in Fiji, and it is such a blessing to be witnessing them first hand at USP! Thank you for joining with me as my team and I trust the Lord to use us here to help students come to the know Him personally, and how to grow in a relationship with Him!
A few new things we learned about the Fijian culture today:
-students don't mind drinking juice that may or may not have little bugs floating in it
-students are also very frugal, so they believe in community juice cups
-Americans are way more bold than Fijians
-I am very loud compared to the average USP student (not much of a surprise though!)
-students call candy "lollies"
Below are a few snapshots from this past week of ministry!
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| My team with some of the Student Life Leaders at our party last Saturday! |
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| Me holding a centipede my teammates found...this took a lot of self control to stay this still for the picture! |
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| Students filling out surveys at our table today! |
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| Us girls with some students who were involved in Student Life last year! |
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| My feet are the ones in the bottom center of this picture. The ground was pretty gross! |
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