Please Refer to the FB :)

the slow african internet won't let me post pictures here, even after walking 25 minutes to an internet cafe to do so. however, facebook did allow me to add a few recent snapshots, so please check there if you are dying to get a taste of my life! :)

From Here to There!

It has been quite a while since I have posted a blog, and I am sorry to keep you all in the dark about my life here! Truthfully, I feel so overwhelmed as I sit here trying to write this post because so much has happened since the last time I was able to blog on April 1^st. It has definitely been a crazy rollercoaster over the past few weeks, and there has been some drastic highs and lows, but overall it has still been wonderful and I am loving every second of it!

The day after Easter Sunday, our group set out for a week of cultural immersion in two places: a rural Zulu village, and a safari. Because the size of our group is so large, we had to split in half, and while one half went to live with the Zulus, the other half went on their safari, and then we switched halfway through the week. I was in the group that went to the Zulu village first where we stayed for 2 nights, and then we went to the area of the safari after that for 2 nights. The village was an absolutely incredible experience, and we were introduced to many new things about the culture. The way the people live out in the rural areas is much different than the shantytown neighborhoods in the city, so it was interesting to compare the two environments. I slept in a mud hut with 5 other girls, the toilets in the village were outhouses that were basically just a hole in the ground, and all water was fetched from the river. We experienced one of the most incredible thunder and lightning storms we’ve seen while we have been here, and the amazing amount of rain really helped make an amazing amount of mud. That night turned out to be a rather traumatic one in the sense that one by one, members of our group started to get sick, and the first 5 people that were very sick were driven to the hospital about an hour away in the middle of the night. I was not one of those people, but I became sick a few hours after they left, and it made for a rather unpleasant experience at the end of our stay in the village. Thankfully it only lasted about 24 hours for me, or at least the bad part of it did, but in the end I think there were only 3 people in our group of 25 that did not get sick. It put a bit of a damper on our week and many more people had to go to the hospital during the next few days, and the sickness in the group remained even through our safari and even once we got back to PMB. There are many guesses as to what caused the illness, and since it definitely was not a contagious disease, it could have come from harmful bacteria in the water from the river. We still are not completely sure, but we are thankful to finally be over that difficult period of the trip!

On a lighter note, the safari was SO MUCH FUN and I absolutely loved getting to see so many animals! My favorite was the giraffes, and we saw quite a few around the game reserve which was just wonderful. We also saw rhinos and hippos which are both part of the “Big Five,” and wildebeest, impala, and the tracks of many elephants! I am hoping that when mom comes in 2 weeks we will be able to see some elephants on our safari, hopefully we will get lucky!

We arrived back to PMB that Friday night, extremely tired and anxious to get on Skype. Sadly enough, that night and the next day consisted entirely of running errands and packing up our rooms in order to be able to move out on Sunday morning when we would depart to Cape Town. It was a hectic weekend and a sad one too as we said goodbye to the place we had called home here in South Africa for the whole of the semester. So it has been back to living out of a suitcase, and that Sunday was the start of our 6 day trip along the Garden Route, during which we stayed at hotels each night along the coast and I got to put my feet in the ocean again, finally! The views along the trip were absolutely gorgeous, and I just could not get enough of the beauty of every single part of this country! It truly is breathtaking no matter where you are, and I get frustrated with taking pictures because a camera just cannot capture the amazing beauty of it all. One of the days along the stretch we stopped at Bloukrans Bridge where the majority of us took part in bungee jumping off what is known as the “world’s highest bridge bungee jump,” and you know, it is just one of those things that you can’t pass up! It was too amazing for words, and as many of you probably know it was not my first time bungee jumping, but it was still SO much fun and I just can’t get enough of it! We also stopped at an ostrich farm and got a very in-depth tour of the farm, and I got to sit on an ostrich! Annie, I know you will be disappointed that I did not actually ride one, but I hope sitting on one is close enough :)

Getting to Cape Town was an extremely exciting day, one that we have been waiting for for months! The city is absolutely beautiful with ocean views wherever you are, the ocean is on all sides of you basically, and Table Mountain stands high behind. Our group is split in half again while we are here for the last 2 weeks, and we are taking turns doing homestays where we stay with a family in a poorer neighborhood in the suburbs of Cape Town, and staying at a Bible Institute college campus nearby. I am in the first group, and I have been living with a Colored family in the town of Ocean View, which is a dominantly Colored neighborhood (Colored meaning a lighter skin color than Black). Adrian and Francis Presence are my host parents, and they have 3 daughters, 2 of which are married, and the youngest one still lives at home. Her name is Samantha, she is 22, and Alyssa and I spend most of our time with her! They are the nicest, most welcoming family, and they also are very funny and very open with just about everything you can imagine! They keep things exciting, and we are having the time of our lives staying with them. Mrs. Presence is a GREAT cook and has been making some awesome dinners for us each night, and Mr. Presence LOVES to talk and keeps us up late with the great conversations we have with him, and we love every second of it! I have loved getting this opportunity to see from the inside how a family lives here, and having 9 days to discuss with them the struggles of their society and of their people, and getting to ask them our questions about their culture and about their country as a whole. This is a family who was displaced during the Apartheid era and was forcibly removed from their house and put into the tiny little home they have now among thousands of others who were placed just like them. The conversations that we are able to have with them are so eye-opening and really educational, and this experience is really something that I am valuing more and more, and I am trying to invest myself and my time into this homestay as much as I can this week before I will have to leave them!

The only time I have been able to get onto the internet at all is when I am at the Bible Institute for a few hours throughout the week, so that alone has really been a struggle for me. Nate and I have officially been together for one year as of Saturday, and not getting to talk to him has been difficult for me. I miss you Nathan!

Because the internet is not strong either, I can't really upload pictures due to the limit of bandwidth. I hope to find an internet cafe sometime next week and hopefully then i will be able to put some photos either on here or on facebook, because I want to show you a little bit of what has been going on, and I know you probably want to see it also. I will get those on just as soon as I possibly can, just be patient! :)

I love you all, thank you for keeping me in your prayers, and please continue to pray! God is so good and He is doing wonderful things in me and in this country, and all I can do is give Him the glory and the praise!

There Are Hardly Words.

Yesterday was my last day at Walk In The Light, and needless to say it was heartbreaking for me to say goodbye. These past 4 weeks were so transforming and impacting for me and for all of us, and I am coming away from it with different perspectives and countless relationships that I was able to form with people of all ages at both Walk In The Light and in the township of Haniville as well. Having gone through this experience that has really been a big part of this semester and of my life, I wanted to just post a brief overview of just a few different parts of my overall experience in hopes that you all will be able to possibly get a glimpse of why I have been so overwhelmed, exhausted, and joyful these past few weeks!

This is the Walk In The Light building where Phindile (one of the women who runs WITL) has her little office, and where church services and youth groups are all held inside. The walls and floor of the building are cement with a simple tin roof, and before services each week the pastor cleans the sanctuary by spraying out the room with a hose to get the dirt out. To the left of this picture, right on the other side of the grass is a small playground that a previous APU semester group had built, and each day when the kids in Haniville got out of school, they would come play on the playground and run around on the soccer field, and some days we had time to join them and be their own personal jungle gyms!
These are a few of the women from the community who work at WITL in the fields, and in this picture they are on their lunch break, but they are some of the sweetest, most joyful, and hardest working women I have ever met. We had group meetings with these women and some of the gogos (grannies) from the community every Tuesday and Thursday as part of our Community Engagement section of our time there, and in those meetings we sang songs with them (zulu songs, of course), danced, played games, laughed, and really got to know them better and hear their stories and the things they have been through. These women are so full of life and such a joy to be around, and after one of our meetings with them I cried tears of joy for just how present God is and how at work He is in this community and in the lives of
these beautiful women. This is a part of the field that we took weeds and grass out of in order for the women workers to be able to use it for more gardening space. With the big group that we had, we were able to do this whole field in a few days, where it would have taken the gogos and the women a much longer time to complete. We also dug a trench through this area and through the rest of the field and up the hill, and the trench was so that an irrigation system can be installed to water the gardens instead of having to be watered by hand by the women each day. They were so appreciative of the work we did in the field in the hot sun, and we had so much fun doing it since we did it along side them and each other, singing songs in both zulu and in english.
This is a picture of what the inside of the building looks like, and where they hold community church services every Sunday, junior youth group every Wednesday, and senior youth group every Friday. At the beginning of every day when we arrived, we met as a group in these chairs and one of us would lead a devotion and share a few verses to encourage us, we would sing songs together with help from Phindile on the zulu songs, and then pray for our day. It was an awesome way to start each day, to regroup and get back on the same page, and to daily prepare our hearts for selfless service and to invite the Lord to be in all parts of our work.
Each morning we carried all the building supplies from the Walk In The Light building through Haniville to the place where Mandla lived, the man we were building a new house for. Mandla lives in a mud hut like many of the other residents in Haniville, but after doing countless home visits to HIV and TB infected people of the town, it is obvious to me that Mandla's living situation is the worst I have seen. Mandla is also positive for both of these diseases in addition to being paralyzed after being stabbed in the back last year by his daughter's boyfriend. He is an amazing man with an undying faith for the Lord, and the joy he brought us is just indescribable. A few times when we were at his house, his daughter was there with him, and it was such a strong symbol of grace to all of us that he still talks to his daughter and loves her so much, despite what happened. One more thing (of many) that really stood out to me throughout our time of talking with him and getting to know him was that the only picture he had of his wife who had passed away was her passport ID. Just subtle things like that really make me recognize my wealth and the things I take for granted every single day.
Stage 1: we dug out the earth where we would build the new one-room house. (Mandla's current house is seen in the back)
Stage 2: after measuring, digging, and picking through rock, we installed the poles (all with Michael, our zulu-speaking instructor for the building process).
Stage 3: beams for the roof and wire netting for the walls. (32 degrees celcius on these days)
Stage 4: long green branches were nailed across the wiring on both sides, and we filled the empty wire cages with rocks and other rubble that the children helped us collect from along the sides of the road.
I have a hundred pictures of the kids that swarmed our work site each day, eager to play with us and help us build the house. Having them come to be with us each day made it nearly impossible not to form relationships with these children who are desperately thirsty for love and attention. They are the definition of unconditional love, and I was truly blessed to learn the true meaning of joy from them.
A precious girl named Andizwa. I will be praying for her every day.