Late in coming...

Greetings everyone. I apologize for the tardiness of this update. Quite a bit has gone on since I last wrote so I will try to condense it into a readable post. In large part what has happened since the last post is classes’. We’ve gone through our Tropical Diseases course, Preaching, Diesel Engine Mechanics, Ministry Ethics, and Culture Course. I’ve really enjoyed all of them as they are very well done. Today began our Wilderness First Responder course, which is a recognized certification course in the states. It is taught by Dr. Frank who is the head of SOLO, a teaching organization in the U.S. that teaches courses from the one I’m currently in to EMT certification courses.
We’ve had two special trips to town. One was for one of the guys from South Africa’s birthday. We went to a country club for dinner and it was definitely an old colonial period club. It was a very English style club and was a lot of fun to hang out in. However the food, though good, was a bit scarce in the portions so after eating dinner there we went to another restaurant and ate a second dinner of sorts. The other was just two nights ago we went to Funky Monkey for pizza and then went to Victoria Falls to see the lunar eclipse, which was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Outside of a few trips to town I’ve mostly been on the base. We’ve been doing everything from extending the warehouse to cutting a new road for going to town on. The road cutting we did yesterday and I will be the first to say that it is a ton of work to cut a road out of woods with only axes, machetes, and one band saw. We worked for roughly eight hours doing that and made it about one kilometer (.6 miles) of the two kilometers that have to be cut. Other things I’ve done is remove all of the seats from one our DAF trucks and re-align and reinstall them so we could fit four more seats in the truck. That took about ten hours of straight work and was done the night before we left to go to the bush. That trip to the bush is the other time since the last update that I’ve gotten to leave the base.
We drove out to the village of Kazapati, which we went to last time we went out. However, last time we were only there for a day, where this time we stayed for three. We left on a Friday and spent most of that afternoon setting up camp. Once set up we played the school team in a game of soccer, which we won, and then spoke with them until about dark. The next day we went out in teams of four or five with a translator and spent some time going to different homesteads around the area, visiting with people and encouraging them. Our particular team came upon a wonderful garden about halfway through the day where they were growing lettuce. It was interesting though because they had a foot pump, which works much like and elliptical machine, and pumps water up a hose to the garden. The garden is set up on a hill so that when the water comes out of the hose it runs down a trench and into a flat space that has the plants in it. Once this flat area (maybe two feet wide and four feet long) fills up they block of the waters entrance to it with dirt and the water continues down the trench to the next flat area. The flat areas are set up like steps going down the hill. It was a great system to see and was probably the only green vegetation we had seen all day. That afternoon we played another game of soccer, in which I slightly pulled my right hamstring (and its healed up nicely since). We then did some more ministry before we headed back to camp for dinner. Sunday we split up into different teams again and went to the four different churches in the area. My team went to the Catholic Church, which had some of the most incredible music I’ve heard in a while. One member from each team spoke briefly in the church they were attending before the end of the service and once church was over we headed out.
We did stop by the dairy we stopped at last time on the way home and ate dinner there. Actually we spent the entire afternoon there hanging out and just enjoying relaxing. We have been so blessed that on both of the village trips we’ve done we’ve been able to stop at this place and relax. The reason we get to stop here is because a married couple that is going through AMT has actually been in this area for two years working at an orphanage and has gotten to be good friends with the owners of the dairy.
Beyond that we’ve had a lot of teams coming in and out of the base. We had a couple stop and camp here who have driven from London all the way down the west coast of Africa, to Angola and are going north again to Kenya before they will travel south again to end up in South Africa. We’ve also had a team of teachers come through from Kansas City who are on a teaching mission for two weeks, and of course, our LIFE and SAM project teams.
So I think that is the bulk of what’s been going on over the past three-ish weeks. Thanks for reading and I hope all of you are doing well. I’ll try to be more consistent in the future since I’m actually at the halfway point of my three months here. So take care and feel free to post responses.