The Craggs

So Friday we moved from our B&B to a new place, "The Craggs". It’s a 3 bedroom apartment that overlooks the beach/ocean and is just around the corner of the main street/downtown area of Fish Hoek, which is a small coastal town that is a lot of fun to be living in the middle of! There are lots of neat little shops and restaurants around and the beach is so close and so nice! There are lots of whales and seals playing in the bay where the beach is, so from our balcony and the walking trail along the coast below our house you can easily watch the whales! Unfortunately our new home doesn’t have internet like the B&B did, but fortunately there is a nice and cheap internet café about 3 minutes walk from our house, so it’ll be easy to keep up with emails and the blog.
The weekend was pretty uneventful, and very relaxing, which was perfect! Saturday is the day we do the Mobile Music Academy and is so much fun! Right now we are doing theory lessons with them at the living hope container just outside their township, and then we take them to a jazz workshop put on by the Glenn Robertson jazz band, a pretty big local jazz band. It’s a free workshop for beginners on any instrument and any age. They do some cool things and the end of each workshop they have a jam session, letting kids switch out on different instruments. Its pretty awesome! Its so cool to see how excited they kids are about music and to give them something productive and meaningful to do! Part of our program includes some music therapy. We provide them with music and the academy as a safe haven and physical and emotional escape from the stresses and issues that they unfortunately have to deal with on a daily basis: drugs, alcohol, sexual/physical/verbal abuse, disease, etc. One day, one of our girls, who until recently thanks to some social work intervention by Living Hope, has been on drugs since she was about 8, came up to Amy, the MMA coordinator and said “Amy guess what! I turned down drugs yesterday cause I wanted to do music instead!” Which makes it all very worth it!
But things are good. Just wanted to give you all an update on the new house and my weekend. Also, as I was walking around downtown Fish Hoek, I came to a cross street and just happened to look at the street sign and was very surprised to see that the street’s name was ‘Dalton Rd’! How weird. I added a picture of it to my slideshow at the top right of my blog. (you can click on the slideshow and see the album much larger and with captions)