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...
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