From DREAM to REALITY
This is a long read, so you better be sitting in a comfortable chair or sipping away on some good organic coffee or chai latte 🙂
Our heart yearns for the street kids and orphans of this world. Now that we have our own 4 children we have an even greater heart for street kids.
When Dale and I lived in Cape Town 12 years ago, studying acting, stunts and working in the film industry, our lives were deeply influenced by the street kids of Cape Town city center.
It broke our heart to see the fight and the contrast between what happens just a few streets apart from where we lived in Cape Town.
We were confronted daily buy homeless and street kids, on the one hand, it was annoying and on the other plain sad! When you live in such great contrast you also get used to it and it becomes normality, eventually, the problem seems so big that you just walk past them and try to ignore them.
But there is the third side that is just scary and a side we could not and still cannot ignore. These children are sex victims, they have been abused in all forms thinkable, they are drug addicts from birth and beyond. One can see little 4-year-olds inhaling glue in parks… it’s so sad.
With this in mind, these children are lost, hungry, angry and only live in the present with no perspective. As soon as the city gets dark they come out, looking for tourists they can pickpocket or drunk youngsters of the party mile in Longstreet. The sad heart wrenching, terrible part is that they would even murder for a pair of shoes or a Nike hoodie.
Here is how we got our vision to help street kids…
It was just an ordinary day, I was 18 and Dale 23, those were the days of Internet cafes.
Our regular Internet café had closed down so we walked around the streets of Cape Town City center, we walked and walked and some cafes were just overpriced. Then we came across …street. We saw a big banner stretched on a rather small building, that said “internet cafe”, and a really good price.
We went in and it was a huge room as if it was almost like a really large old hotel foyer. In this Space were about 30 or more desks built up with computer monitors.
Kind of interesting, further to the back was more space, could have been a bar area and other rooms.
Then to the left a staircase. Dale and I were intrigued by this building, both of us sat down and checked our Mails, but I couldn’t really focus much on the PC. All that I could think of was how this building could become a space for street kids, how I would teach dance and how we could even make a studio or a type of a boarding school for street kids.
A thousand thoughts rushed into my head. This is what we call a life-changing moment…our internet time was up. We paid R5 per hr for the internet back then. Both Dale and I got up and walked out of the building, it was such a surreal moment, we walked two steps and both at the same time turned back at the building…looked at another and just couldn’t believe it. It was right there in that moment that our vision was birthed and both of us just knew. We spent hours walking the streets after that praying and thinking, hearing from God. This was such a Holy Spirit moment, no one could tell us other wise.
Where were we Spiritually at that time?
We were freshly engaged to another, working in the Film Industry of Cape Town. We were figuring out what our mission in life was. How could we be so passionate about Filmmaking, yet have such a heart to help the needy. How could we want to get married so young, bare in mind we were 18 and 23 years old, and how did we know that we were meant to be? So many thoughts, so little time for everything, we thought. On this day we knew God had a much bigger plan, we knew that he was in control. We knew that God was exactly what we needed, be it God as a Mother or Father, we knew we needed to seek God. We lived together for 2 years before we got married, but in actual fact, Dale and I got married within the first week that we shared our apartment. We lit a candle and spoke our vows, we invited God to be the number one in our lives. Then we slept with another and were married. No one else could tell us differently, but how did people understand this, not many Christians did. We church hopped Cape Town while we were working in the Film Industry and studying. We felt that there were many question marks for people. We realized if we wanted to really make an impact and achieve all that we wished for, like having children then sharing a name on paper would have to be an option. Traveling the world and living in different countries, was a part of our vision already back then. We knew we´d have to get married in the way that this world sees marriage. So that’s just what we did.
More about our lives since then…
We always wanted children even though it almost seemed impossible.
Between our own “marriage” and the legal marriage, we had 3 miscarriages. Another followed after we got married. We went through a hard time getting pregnant, with specialists involved and realizing that much had to do with the fact of Melissa having childhood cancer.
When we finally got pregnant Melissa´s world kind of stopped to solely focus on the pregnancy. We lived in a small town in South Africa and kind of started living a normal life. Yet we still had big dreams of our building in Cape Town, acting & filmmaking. And yet kind of felt like nothing was progressing. I was 21 when I had our firstborn son, Dale was working 3 jobs so that I could stay at home, I had to stay home due to our son being a premature baby and us both being ill after the birth. In this all it was difficult to focus on anything else but our current situation. When our son was 15 months old we moved from South Africa to the UK where Dales parents live. Dale wanted to study Film directing and also obtain international accredits as a Stuntman. Things did not work out as planned. He got a job offer in Germany after we visited my family for a vacation. We then made up our minds to leave England and settle in Germany. It was a big move for us and a whole new life chapter.
We never thought that we would get pregnant so fast again since even specialists said it is almost impossible. Our second pregnancy was a full on “high-risk pregnancy”, from word go. Melissa is in the process of starting a separate blog on this, all about pregnancy, birth, and parenting.
We had a really rough time as a family Melissa almost died at giving birth to our second child and we almost lost our little daughter. She is a real miracle child and we were so grateful, this took us to a totally new level of faith. Yet financially we were struggling all the time, we were on and off State help, Dale was doing odd jobs. Melissa started working again when our daughter was 16 months old. Dale then had a permanent job.
A job and position he hated. It helped us pay our bills, we took out a loan for a car and moved into a house in the countryside..We started a whole new chapter.
Melissa started studying Film & Theatre Acting again and parallel worked as a freelance Wellness therapist, she obtained her qualifications in that before we left South Africa. We kind of “had it together”, we had formed a great friend circle and had family that supported us. Although it seemed like everything was wonderful we were deeply unhappy. Our marriage was crumbling and only God could heal it. We were both functioning but we were not living the life that we envisioned for ourselves or life were called to live. It came to a point that we were both living a blunt lie. And to the outside, we looked like the perfect family.
Our 3rd pregnancy was a pregnancy that brought our marriage to a whole different level, a pregnancy that healed us in so many ways. It was a healthy beautiful very unexpected pregnancy,( we thought we would never be able to have children after the previous birth), so it shocked and took as off guard. But this is exactly what God wanted for us.
We got involved with a church in the city which was an hour drive away and felt lead to move closer. It was no easy move…we all actually suffered emotionally for months after the move, yet were blessed with the best home ever. We helped build up another church during this time, which is still our home church now, ( Kirche fuer Duesseldorf). Even though our input was a small amount in the visible it was a big sacrifice to us and we feel very blessed to have been involved.
Our 4th baby on the way and Dale´s student loan for studying Film directing declined, we hit rock bottom again. We knew we needed help so we asked our pastor and friend to coach us, we had a 90-day coaching plan which changed our outlook on so many things.
Being accountable to him and to another made a big difference. The biggest thing that happened within this time of coaching, was the part where we had to spend time alone, not thinking about what Dale wants from life or what Melissa want as a married couple but what does each of us want as an individual.
What was Dale’s dream for his life and what was Melissa’s dream for hers? Beyond building a house and being parents of four little children …what was it that we wanted?
Amazingly Dale´s dream and Melissa´s dreams still matched up and were still very alive!
That made us realize that more than anything else this had priority. More than settling down, more than building a house or owning anything. We realized that we needed to become team partners in this project. We spent time seeking God and then when we made up our mind as to what we wanted.
The ball was rolling and unstoppable. Everything pointed towards the UofN in Kona Hawaii. Read more about UofN here…
So this is our story in a nutshell And we are off to study and work hard in Kona-Hawaii to make an impact on Generations to come.
What is our plan?
For us, this is the only place in the world where we as a young family with 4 little children can accomplish what we want in being full-time students but also helping in NGO projects. The UofN Kona has a production company called 24 Frames of light which Dale hopes to be a part of once he´s finished studying Film. I have so many creative workshops I can take part in while Dale studies and I tend to the children. Eventually Melissa would like to study scriptwriting and directing too, acting is still very much on her hear but for now, she is fully happy working on other projects and being a mom of four.
Where to first? Why Harpenden England?
The first criteria to be excepted to the UofN is the DTS course, this can be done in over 120 countries. At first, our plan was to do this all in Kona. But then quite a few things did not fit timing wise and everything felt like a big push…we felt like we were missing hearing God´s voice. Through stepping back and letting the Lord lead, Dale was lead to do his DTS in England.