Buses and Taxis and Planes OH MY!

The official countdown for Outreach is now 7 hours!! I couldn't be more thrilled. I'm so excited about the ministry we are going to be working with and all the children we are going to come in contact with. Please be praying for us as we travel there. It's going to be an interesting trip. We are taking a taxi from our base to the airport in Johannesburg which is 4 hours or so. Then we are taking a plane from Johannesburg to Lusaka, Zambia which is a 2 hour flight. Then we are staying the night in Lusaka and the next day taking a bus from Lusaka to Mpulungu which is a 17 hour bus ride. There are 20 of us travelling together. 3 Leaders, 15 Students and 2 Staff members that are coming for the first week. Please be praying that we make it there safely and that we don't get too irritated being with each other for so long in such a compact space. We need to get used to it because all 18 of us will be living in one house for a month! I know it's going to be a trip of a lifetime. We fly back to Johannesburg May 13 and stay there for 3 weeks so I'm also really excited about that even though we aren't quite sure what we will be doing there.

They fixed our internet today so everyone is getting in there calls and blogs before we leave. Here is what has been happening since you last heard from me. On Good Friday we had a Love Feast at Rich and Lynn's house (they live off base). All we were told was to dress up and we had to have a talent for the talent show that was taking place afterwards. The Love Feast was a dinner just for us DTS students, it consisted of steak, mashed potatos, salad, etc. It was amazing! I haven't had a steak since I've been here and it was delicious. The talentless people in our group, those of us who don't have singing voices......made up a dance. Not just any dance either. It was a boy band dance. We made a mix of songs from Backstreet Boys, NSync and Britney Spears, dressed up like boys and did a dance for our talent. It was so much fun! I'd have to say ours was the most creative. Everyone else was phenomenal with their real talents but ours was fun and creative and we had a blast.

This past Friday we stayed the night at Lynn's house so we could get up early on Saturday morning and climb Mt. Legogote (means head of the Lion). We woke up at 5, checked the weather, got ready, made sandwiches and off to the mountain we went. The climb was so much fun but being on the top was Amazing!!! I climbed a mountain in Africa! How cool is that? I'm pretty sure we took about 1,000 pictures up there. We stayed at the top for a good hour or so and just took pictures, enjoyed each others company and ate our lunches. It was good to do some physical activity and I have definitely felt it for the past 2 days. It was a good ending to a wonderful lecture phase and a great beginning to what I know will be an amazing outreach phase.

Missed Me?

I’m baaaaaack. Well for this one blog at least. That’s all I can guarantee for now because our internet on base still isn’t working. It’s been a week and a half since our internet broke and the week before that we were on our community stays so I have been disconnected from everyone. There’s no telling when our internet will be fixed because this is Africa and that’s just the way things work. So for now I am writing ya’ll from a internet cafe.
For the past week a team from Texas has been here and it’s so good to be surrounded by southern accents. They have been such a blessing since they arrived. Their preacher taught our class this past week on relationships and did an amazing job. Today they cooked us breakfast….homemade deliciousness. We had eggs with bacon, cheese, tomatoes, peppers and onions, biscuits and sausage gravy, fruit salad and coffee. A little taste of home.
I know everyone is anxious to hear how our community stays went. I stayed in Kabokweni, one of the communities we have a feeding program in. I was wrong about the child-headed household, instead we stayed with families. I guess they didn’t think it was safe enough for a bunch of white people to be staying with just children and no one to protect us. I say white people because literally most of the people we came in touch with or saw had never seen a white person before and definitely not an American. We were famous for the week, everyone wanted to meet the American and Canadian girls (my partner was from Canada, Shayla). Our family consisted of Mama (I still don’t know her name), Prudence age 24, her daughter Siphesihle age 6, Nothando age 18 and Khosi age 14. A house full of women, something I’m very familiar with. The girls gave us their bed and they slept on the floor. Our room came complete with one wall decoration…a picture cut out of a magazine of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. It wasn’t as hard as I imagined it to be. We had a bed, a T.V, DVD player, good food and good company. The hardest part of the whole stay for me was the baths. It consisted of a jug of water and a bowl. It was interesting to say the least. I don’t know if I quite got the hang of it and I can’t imagine washing myself like that for the rest of my life. My hair is so long and thick that the only way for me to wash it was for me to lay over the bowl and for Shayla to wash it for me like in a beauty salon. I really wish someone was there to capture that moment on camera. We had a lot of good laughs about bathing and Nigerian movies that they made us watch. Their toilets are outhouses or permanent port-o-potties as I like to call them. The part I can’t get over is that they wipe with NEWSPAPER!!!! I did not partake in this activity. People on base had already warned us about this before we left so we brought our own toilet paper with us! Newspaper….can you imagine? I don’t want to. Shayla and I became part of their family for the week and probably for the rest of our lives. They told us stories of their hardships and what they wanted to do with their lives. They taught us words in Saswati and laughed when we tried to pronounce them. We made dinner together, ate together and watched the daily soap opera every night at 8pm together (subtitles included). Our last day they called the community cameraman to come and take “family portraits.”
It’s no coincidence that this last week was relationship week because the enemy has been in full force against relationships here. Without going into too much detail I will just say we had a long family meeting yesterday morning. People had a chance to let out their frustrations, hurts, and angers. I think I can honestly say I have never had an experience like that where people shared their feelings and it didn’t turn into a conflict. Everyone was respectful of each others feelings and no one became defensive or tried to fix it all. Instead it was a relaxed time to just get everything out in the open and pray for God to bring us unity, mend brokenness and heal the hurts and unmet expectations people had. This family meeting couldn’t have come at a better time because in less than 2 weeks we leave for Zambia and then on to Johannesburg. Our team needs to be getting along and unified for God to use us with all his glory and power. And I believe those are the intentions he has for us. We are now flying instead of taking a bus, which is a blessing. And once we get there all 18 of us are staying in the same house. So we need to start getting along here before we are thrown into harder circumstances where stress and conflict could arise much easier. In Zambia we are working with Good News Ministry and they have lots in store for us so I’m very excited. I’m most excited about the youth camp we get to be a part of. We get to be camp counselors for a week long youth camp where I’m sure great things will happen. After a month in Zambia it’s off to Johannesburg where plans still aren’t real clear. We aren’t quite sure what we will be doing there but I’m sure God will reveal his plan when we get there, so we are just praying and trusting him. Next week's lesson is on hearing God's voice. Apparently our teacher is going to be Amazing and everyone on base wants to sit in on our classes. Her lessons are interactive and I could always use more training and ways to hear God speak to me and through me, so I am more than ready for it. Tomorrow night is a surprise night for our team. It is called a Love Feast at two of our leaders house who live off base. We have to dress up nice for dinner and there will be a talent show after dinner. Everyone has to participate in the talent show even the leaders so it could get interesting. Some of the girls and I already have our talent planned out we just need to practice it tomorrow. The non-singers in our group are just going to do something silly and leave the good talents to the talented people on our team. Well my time at the internet cafe is almost up so I will leave you with some pictures of my teammates; Kelly and Manuel, and me working at one of the places we serve at. We dug 20 holes for posts in one day, my body was killing me for the rest of the week. Hopefully there will be another blog before we leave for outreach.....if not please keep me and my team in your prayers!