My first fulll week!!

Hi, All,

Here are highlights from my first full week:

* Went to SOS Children's Village twice this week. We lead a club that in which we teach lifeskills and a Bible study, attendance ranges from 10 - 20 kids ages 13-16.

* One of the SOS Moms fixes us a meal on Wednesdays sometimes, so we went did that this Wednesday and it was great to sit down and talk with Trudi, the mom, and get to know the kids a little better. I had fun reading to her younger son, Hendrick, and taking pictures of him, he loved checking out the picture and then he kept posing for more - it reminded me of my nephew, Dalton, he did the same thing with me over Christmas!! Below is one of the pics!

* Going to Maitland Childrens Hospital, its an orthopedic hospital and the services are free of charge, so the children there all come from disadvantaged backgrounds. There are no individual rooms, its one big room for the boys and one for the girls. We go in with books, games, puzzles to play with them and some do puppet shows or we take in a guitar and sing songs. It's so rewarding to bring them a little joy. Most of the kids are confined to their beds for long periods of a time, so when they see us coming they start calling for us, "Auntie, Auntie". We go there twice a week.

* I also got to visit the two schools we have programs in. They are both elementary schools. One is in town and a couple of the volunteers go in and serve as teachers aides. Then the other school is a rural farm school, where some of the kids come from a nearby township. The volunteers teach lifeskills for an hour three times a week. When we arrived there the kids all flocked to us, holding our hands, wanting to be picked up and held, wanting to play or just get our attention. They are all so precious, such warm welcomes everywhere we go!

* On Friday evening we headed to Stellenbosch, where Denzel is from, to go on a hike up the mountain. I had my reservations going in, and for good reason! I thought I was going to die on that mountain! It was not a nice cleared trail like back home. It was just a narrow trampled down trail with branches and vegetaion growing into it, scratching and catching on our clothes and lots of rocks to navigate, climb up. We had big ole backpacks on our back because we camped out over night on the mountain. I really can't believe I made it up to the campsite. Everyone was very supportive to me, but I was holding us up immensely! Then on Saturday I thought I was doing better until I turned my ankle, my mood took a nosedive and the rest of the day was not good! I didn't get to climb up to the waterfall and my ankle throbbed everytime I stepped wrong! I'm still trying to get over the negative effects to my psyche, so please pray for me. It all seemed so easy for everyone else!! Needless to say, I will not be hiking any mountains any time soon!! I need to start a training regimine or something!

* Sunday night we were invited to a Baptist church to give a presentation. So some of the volunteers did their drama. Team Khanya came as well, they are another program YFC does here that does ministry through drama and dance. Members are on the team for a year at a time. They got up and spoke and then I had to get up and give my testimony! I was nervous but it went well. It was fun to be with the Khanya (pronounced like Kenya, but its a Khosa word) again, they are a lot of fun!

Thats about it for this week....please pray for my continued adaptation to living with 10 people, to find my place on the team, that I would continue to see God leading and guiding me through all of this, to increase my dependence on Him!! To share His love with the kids here who are so desperate for it!

Love and blessings to you!!

Email frustrations!!

Hi, my friends!

I just wanted to let you know I've been having lots of troubles with sending emails from my yahoo account. Most of the time I will have typed a whole email, then I hit send and it just goes to a blank compose page! Sometimes I can hit the back button and it will go back to my typed message and I hit send again and then it works, but today that even is not working! It's making me crazy!! If anyone has any suggestions, let me know! I receive emails and can read them fine...its the sending that's not working so well...so please check back here often, I'll try to keep it better updated and maybe not use email much for awhile...please keep the emails coming, I LOVE hearing from home!! =:)

Greetings from South Africa!

Hello from South Africa!!

I arrived at 10pm on Wednesday, Feb 14th (2pm Iowa time!) after flying for about 24 hours, 36 hours with the time change! I had only short layovers in Detroit and Amsterdam. My luggage, however, did not arrive. Apparently the plane was too full coming from Amsterdam so they had to leave some for the next flight, so about 12 of us did not get our luggage. I finally received it Friday morning and it made me soooo happy! I immediately opened them and changed clothes! It was so comforting to get all my stuff!! =:)

It is so beautiful here! The first morning when I woke up I looked out the window and the volunteer house is only a block from the ocean!! We are in a suburb of Cape Town called Bloubergstrand and has awesome views looking back at Cape Town and Table Mountain. If you get on the internet and see pictures that look like they are taken from a boat looking at the city and Table Mountain, they are not, they are taken from Bloubergstrand and thats the exact view we have from our living room window!!

Yesterday Denzel, the International Volunteer Program Manager, took me and Sarah and Jen (from Canada) on a short tour of some of Cape Town's sights. We drove through a little bit of a township, it was pretty sad the conditions they live in. Denzel said crime is very high there so we didn't stay long, but he wanted us to see how many of the children we serve live. We then went up Signal Hill and snapped some pics. Then went to downtown Cape Town and took in a couple of markets with hundreds of people selling all kinds of hand-made goods; African masks, beautiful wooden carvings, paintings, gorgeous stuff! We were just looking this time, but I can't wait to go back and buy some items, though I don't know how to decide what to buy, it was all so beautiful! We had a fish and chips gatsby at a fast food place downtown. A gatsby is basically like a hoagie sandwich, but they put the chips (fries) right on the sandwich. It was very good! We also checked out a library, the train station and a taxi rank, where the taxis (vans) are lined up by areas of town they will take you to.

Last night we went to a rugby match, my first! The match was between the Cape Town team of the Vodacom Stormers vs. the Chiefs (Denzel wasn't sure where they were from, "up country" in South Africa was all he knew). It was pretty fun, though I didn't understand some of what was going on. Denzel and Johnny tried to explain some of it, but I think it will take watching it many more times to get a better grasp of it.

The team I'm working and living with is great! There are 7 other women and 1 man; Denzel also stays at the guest house during the week, so there are 10 of us in the 5 bedroom house! Here is the breakdown:
Sarah, Jodi and Jen from Canada
Tina and Hanna from Germany
Kate and Johnny from England
Sarah from the US (Indiana)

They are all short term volunteers, with terms varying from 3 months to a year. Most of them will be leaving in the next few months. I think by July only Johnny will remain, but I believe there are others scheduled to arrive in the meantime. They are all either on break from college or just finished, so sometimes I feel rather old, but they are a lot of fun! I'll try to get some pics posted that I've taken already so you have some visuals of what I'm writing about....hope all is well with everyone back in the States....I don't miss the snow!!

Later, Bobbi