2-1-09

Here’s how you know you’re in South Africa. Yesterday, wake up completely sunny, in the 90’s all day, about 4 o’clock clouds come over and it rains pretty hard. Wake up to more rain. Go to church, still raining. Come out of church, blue skies and very hot. Welcome to South Africa.
Life continues to amaze me as I become more blessed by the day. The cool things that have happened in the last two days….let’s see. Friday we had chapel, worship went very well, thanks for the prayer. After that I didn’t have class for a while so I went on a run through the game reserve, and on the way back went exploring on a trail. Didn’t see anything but a monkey, but it was still amazing! Had class, at dinner…the usual. At night, we played a game of fugitive (basically it was fugitive/flashlight tag mixed), and it was amazing! As I was tracking through a bamboo forest, or some random bushes, I just kept thinking to myself, ‘I’m playing fugitive in Africa…no big deal.’ That was about it for Friday though, beautiful, sunny, fun, etc.
Saturday (yesterday), we went to a Birds of Prey show. We got to see eagles, and hawks, and vultures, and owls. It was all pretty insane…very cool to see, and the place was set up on a cliff looking over foresty hills – again, beautiful. I’m coming to ask myself, what isn’t amazingly gorgeous here? From the show we went on a little tour of Pietermaritzburg, the city we’re living, and then went to a coffee shop for a snack. I think that was about it. A lot of relaxing from 4 o’clock on…the lack of sleep is catching up to everyone. We’re also getting to the point where we all know each other well enough to move passed the more shallow conversation and really dig into the relational aspects of the trip – it’s a lot of fun!
This morning I went to church. There’s three churches we can get rides too, and I checked out one of them. It’s pretty small (probably 75ish people). They meet at the local college. Very basic, but a very cool community aspect, such as how they take time to simply ask anyone for prayer requests during the service. It was neat.
Now that the suns out, we’re all headed to someone’s house who wants to host us for lunch. They got a pool too so we’ll be soaking up some rays! I’ll try not to get my head burnt. Mom, you’ll be proud to know that I’m one of probably 5 people who didn’t get burned yesterday! I’m taking the streak to two days now! Cherio!