Howzit from South Africa!!

Hello!!!! I'm finally here!! And can I say it is amazing here in Africa. I'm taking in every minute. The land is beautiful. Some areas are grassy plains scattered with what I call "flat trees". Some areas are straight up African bush. We are staying on a game farm with 2500 acres of land -- stocked with 35 kinds of "mammals" I'm told. It was a 3 hour drive from the J-burg airport. Still getting used to driving on the other side of the road.

The farm ranger took us on a farm safari the other day where we saw giraffe (with her 3 month old baby), warthog, hyena footprints, and kudu. The food has been great, although they have been babying us with American food. After church yesterday we went to a local restaurant where we were forced to eat an entire native meal. We had chicken (a lot like what I had in Belize), squash (which I hid under my chicken bones, yuckyyyy!), and pap (pronounced pop). It was a TON of food. In South Africa it is extremely rude and insulting if you do not eat all that is in front of you. So our leaders are making us get used to eating everything, regardless of whether we like it or not. We will be having many meals with host families while we're here... and we will be expected to eat everything. Tonight I ate lamb. It was actually really good! There are rumors of meats like cat, zebra, and giraffe being served. Please pray for me. ;) Another big culture thing here is tea time. Every day at 10am you take time to drink tea. Some days you have up to 10 cups of tea because, again, extremely rude to reject a cup.

This week we are learning dramas that we will be presenting in African schools while we are here. The dramas are very creative and engage kids with topics like self-esteem, love, HIV... etc. We will share short personal stories from our own lives of times when we too struggled with different things or experienced tragedies... and relating them back to the hope we have found in our best friend, Jesus. School sizes will range from hundreds to thousands of "learners" (students) I am told. Some areas will use translators-- probably for Afrikaans (language used among the white people) or Zulu/Kosa depending on the area. Many of the kids living here on the farm speak Afrikaans, it is so cute because they interchange English and Afrikaans in the same sentence. I'm exciting to hear Kosa, as it is a "clicking" language. All schools we visit have granted us permission to share in their schools, and BoH has local coordinators that follow up on the work we do.

I have been learning so much about HIV/AIDS. It is fascinating and devastating all at the same time. By 2010, 1 in every 4 people in South Africa will have HIV. I'm sure I will be blogging about it more in the future.

And I cannot leave this out. I was laughing as I packed my flashlight last month. I quickly found out why we needed it. We got in from the airport last week late Wednesday night after a two day travel journey with Delta. (Do NOT recommend the beef dinner, sick!) It was storming and turns out the power at the farm was down. No big deal. We unpacked a little with a flashlight and went to bed on the note of "and do not freak out if you come across big flying bugs or beetles, they live here too. Welcome to the farm". The next morning we woke up and the water pump had burst, so a shower was out of the question. Needless to say we went a few days without a shower. It truly was team bonding at its best. On the fourth day I took a water bottle shower with ice cold water (suppressing squeals) and never felt better. I've never appreciated water more. Now everything's back up and running, no worries. So yeah, when in Africa, right?? ;)