Christmas in Cape Town

It's weird to remember that it was Christmas here just a couple of weeks ago, since it is summer here and the weather is nice and warm and there are only a few remaining signs of Christmas in the form of the occasional Christmas lights on a house. This Christmas was certainly a new and different Christmas experience for me, having it be not only my first Christmas away from home but also my first in another culture. Needless to say, it was really nice and we did our best to make it actually feel like Christmas.

The weeks leading up to Christmas things began to slow down here significantly. Most things seem to just get put on hold until the new year arrives and people mostly check out during the second half of December. We did have 2 weeks of Holiday Club with the kids. I spent my time in Red Hill as usual with the kids there. We had a lot of fun playing Christmas games, and acting out and telling the Christmas story, eating food and having water gun fights. Our last day of club for the year, we gave each of the kids a small gift bag, each of which contained a water gun. So as you can imagine we arrived back from Red Hill that day pretty much soaking wet. It was so much fun!

It is a different experience talking to these kids about Christmas really being about Jesus and not about presents and gifts, when a lot of these kids don't even get presents at Christmas. They still, like any other kid, love getting toys and things, but it's hard to realize as you talk about "Christmas is about Jesus not Santa" that a lot of these kids have never experienced Santa. We did have a fun week celebrating Christmas in the hot summer weather and it was good to be able to give out some gifts to each of them for Christmas. Actually, most of what the kids do get if anything at Christmas is new shoes or new clothes, and man are they proud of their new stuff! I remember getting clothes when I was 8 and having to pretend to be excited, when really I was secretly hoping that my new shirt was really a magic shirt that when you press the sleeve it turned into one of the ninja turtles. But for them, they're all about some shoes! Several times on Christmas day as we were driving around I saw people stop in front of a window of a house or store and check themselves out with their new shoes on. It was quite cool to see them so excited.

We spent Christmas eve with another US volunteer who is here for a few years, Pat Ball, at her house. Without meaning to we gave Christmas eve and nice Mexican theme. While the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, the day before Christmas, for us, became Tortilla Day. We started the day with some breakfast enchiladas that I decided to make after we discovered the recipe in a Southern Living that someone had brought with them from the States (well done Southern Living on that one). At Pat's we enjoyed some tortilla chips and dip followed by a dinner of tacos accompanied by some classic Christmas movies. I don't think any of us have had any form of tortilla since that day. It was a great day though.

Christmas day we went to the Christmas service at Capricorn church (here they do Christmas day services rather than a Christmas Eve service) where they kids put on a wonderful Christmas play. They had a big lunch there for the community but we had been invited to Christmas lunch at Jakes' house (Jakes is the Team House manager) so we couldn't stay for that. Instead we spent the afternoon at Jakes' aunt's house with her family, which was wonderful. We ate outside and had a huge feast and just enjoyed spending time with a family, even if it wasn't our own. We finished off the day at home by opening the Christmas presents we had from each other and from our families who had mailed us some wonderful things to open on Christmas day, which was great. It really turned out to a be a nice, yet rather different, Christmas. Luckily, it being summer and all here, it didn't ever really feel like Christmas, which helped us to not be too sad about missing Christmas at home.

The day after Christmas we (Simba, Danielle, Lynn and myself) drove out to Stellenbosch, the second oldest city in South Africa (second only to Cape Town). We explored Stellenbosch and had a great lunch there and then drove out into the country and drove part of the wine route there. We stopped at the Rustenberg Estate and explored what might be one of the prettiest places I've ever been. The estate was gorgeous with an amazing garden and some incredible views. We also stopped at a goat farm that produces cheese and got to participate in a cheese tasting, which was delicious. They had a 'goat tower' out front which is essentially a climbing tower for goats... who knew.

New Year's Eve was a bit uneventful but intentionally so. Lynn had left to go back to the States, and Simba was gone for the day, so it was just Danielle and myself. We decided to just stay in and watch a South African movie and enjoy some new year's apple pie and ice cream. As I said, not very eventful, but it was a nice and relaxing way to bring in the new year.

Now things are back into almost full swing. A team of 13 college students arrived last night from University of Delaware and will be staying until February 1st. Jeremy McClure is coming today and will be here for 3 months which will be great! For those of you who don't know Jeremy, he is a friend of mine from Dalton, also from FBC Dalton. It will be a lot of fun to have him here! So there will be lots of people around for the next month, which is great! The group from Univ of Delaware will be working with the kids at Holiday Clubs next week and then working on the new Living Hope property, doing a lot of clearing out and fixing up to get it ready for people to move onto. That property is where the volunteer housing will eventually be and where a lot of the Living Hope offices and classrooms will be moving to as well as some of the ACTS offices. So it will be exciting to see that transition happen.

It's been a fun holiday and an exciting new year already. It's still hard to believe that its 2009 already, which I'm sure many of you feel the same way. Right now, I'm working to finish putting the curriculum together for the Music Academy for this year. We will be starting back with the kids on January 16th and I'm pretty excited to start hanging out with them again. There's a lot of positive momentum for the academy going into this new school year (their school year follows the calendar year, so January is the beginning of the school year) and some good things happening. I'll update you more on that as we get further into it.

Well, I hope everyone is doing very well and that you all had a wonderful holiday! Pray for Jeremy as he travels today and for him and the new college team as they transition into things here in SA and for their ministry while they are here. They are going to do some really cool things! I have lots of new pictures but need to finish going through them and will post them as soon as I can get to an internet cafe to do that, so sometime in the next couple of days I'll have new pictures up, including ones of the snake which I finally have!

PEACE