It's that time again...

1.       Happy Birthday Mandela (for Wednesday)! 94 and still going strong! And the whole country celebrated by doing 67 minutes of community service projects in their area. At Living Hope, we had some navy guys and school students come through to spruce up our grounds and the Health Care Centre gardens. It’s looking so good.

 

I went with some friends to paint some rooms in a women’s and children’s shelter yesterday. It takes a surprising amount of organisation and planning just to paint a room! But after the usual confusion of absent staff at the shelter and misunderstandings of which rooms we were decorating (there had already been several other groups coming to serve in this way before us!), we finally got busy cleaning, and taping and painting. Sadly I had to leave at lunch time, but I’m hoping to see some pics of the finished rooms soon!

2.       I’ve just come back having had an elegant sufficiency of the yummiest lunch ever! I was visiting my gran at the clubhouse of her retirement village. We had Sunday lunch together and it was sooooo delicious. I’m salivating just thinking about it now! And I think it's the first Sunday roast I've had this year.

3.      Talking about food, I’ve definitely been spoilt this week. One of the short-term teams at Living Hope, held their annual Mexican dinner on Thursday night. This started about 6 years ago and has steadily grown in popularity so that there were over 70 people at the Teamhouse enjoying the authentic burritos and taco salad. And I should have listened to all the conversations in the office about starving/eating tiny amounts during the day so that the maximum amount of space was left in our stomachs for the food! Again, salivating right now!

4.       Maybe it’s a good thing I’ve been so spoilt this week. Because from tomorrow morning until midnight on Wednesday, I’m going to the take the ‘Live under the Line’ challenge. This is happening through the church I go to on Sunday mornings, where we are all being challenged to spend only R10 a day on food for these three days, as if we were living under the poverty line, like the 13 million of our neighbours in this country for whom this is actually a reality. I’m so excited about this challenge. It’s going to be hard, but the aim is to help us to understand and identify with those who live like this so that we can better show compassion to them, as part of living a right life before God (Micah 6:8). So far, I’ve done the shopping, which was already an eye opening experience – having to pass by pretty much everything in the shop (even the special deals!) and buy the minimum basics: apples, bread, peanut butter and pap is what I will be living on! And then I realised that this isn’t even the true situation for the poor – they have to make their R10 stretch to more than just food – what about toiletries, transport, electricity, education etc. etc.? My mind = blown! I probably would have given up before the challenge even started if we had had to go that far. Which already tells me something...

Sunday Four!

1.       Right now I’ve barricaded myself into my flat – that is as much as is possible when the balcony door and several windows can’t actually be closed fully or locked – because we have some chancy neighbours wandering around Capri. I arrived home to find this guy casually swing himself over the gate of the neighbours across the road: 

      My landlord’s dogs were going mad inside our garden. So, while I was waiting for the baboons to move on before opening the gate, I got to thinking...if it came to a showdown, who would win – baboon or boxer?

2.       Yesterday was a sort of first for me. I and 44 other people (that’s right, 44!), mostly from the States, went to watch the rugby at Newlands. It was the final game for the Stormers in the Super Rugby before the play offs stage. I’ve never been to see a game with that many people, but once the action started I hardly even noticed. We won...of course ;) Now if we can just reach the final, it will be a home game. I wonder how many people I can go with to watch that match!

3.       I’m very excited to go to MBC here in Cape Town tonight! That’s Meadowridge Baptist Church, not Mutley, obviously. It feels weird to be calling another church MBC, but also slightly appropriate because so far it’s the closest church to Mutley that I’ve found. And after the rainiest week and day here it will feel especially like home!

4.       On a serious note, after doing a lot of reading and thinking, I’ve finally woken up to the seriousness of sexual abuse and how it impacts victims’ lives in so many ways (socially, emotionally, physically and spiritually – this penny dropped after several of sermons preached on sex and marriage the last few months). This is now horrifying for me when I see and hear of so many children who are affected by this. Someone told me that in our area, sexual assaults happen every 43 seconds. And the worst part is that it has just become a part of life for people in the communities – in fact this week we caught a group of 4-6 year olds ‘sexing in the bush’ (luckily, this time it was just an innocent game of playing ‘mommy and daddy’). Hopefully, Living Hope as an organisation can start to make a stand against this abuse and help to bring God’s healing and restoration to all who need it.

 

The Sunday Four

1. The time has come to say goodbye to Lesli, a fellow volunteer who was based in Red Hill as a Life Skills Educator. We worked together on Saturdays with our girls group. It was a weekend of sad times, last meals and laughs, and the only reason we are letting her leave is because we know she'll be coming back. Goodbye friend! Thanks for all the Mexican dinners and hilarious stories of taxi-drivers and planned bank robberies! And what an awesome legacy you are leaving behind in Red Hill, through your relationships with the team members and the kids - especially our Saturday girls. I'm looking forward to letting you know about all the fruit growing from all the seeds you've planted...

2. Since Lesli's flight was on a Saturday afternoon, it seemed appropriate to bring the regular Red Hill girls to the airport to say farewell. Thankfully, it wasn't too emotional with only a few tears shed outside security! But the experience for the girls was amazing (or at least that's what I think). For them to go somewhere that they've never been before and learn about travelling by plane, pilots, flight attendants etc. etc. was eye-opening. A chance to broaden their horizons and maybe start some dreams about their own futures and where they could go or what they could do. Such a simple thing could turn out to be life-changing! Crazy thought!

3. Lesli managed to escape just as the weather has become winter with a vengeance! There's been so much rain, the rainbow count is up to six in two days. And lots of monkey's weddings, which would be why all the baboons were out in full force on my drive to and from Red Hill yesterday!

4. I don't have anything else to update, but here is a link to an awesome news story I read this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18703171 Enough said.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the week ahead!