Family, Seminary, and Matt Damon

Hello all!

Sorry for the delay since my last post! Things have been going well and it has been an exciting few weeks since my last post.

My Valentine's Day was pretty special, with my family arriving for a week-long vacation. Mom, Dad, Brent and Sarah arrived that day, and we had a great week! We really did about as much as you can do in a week, including all the touristy things, helping out at my ministry projects, and meeting some of the people I live and work with regularly here. It was great to have them here and be able to show them all the things that they are always hearing about. So that was a great week.

Also, as many of you know, I applied to seminary back in December after discovering that calling. Well, I found out a couple of weeks ago that I was accepted! So I will be starting seminary in the fall at McAfee School of Theology (Mercer Univ.) in Atlanta, working towards a Master of Divinity degree. I'm pretty excited! So that helped finish off February as a very exciting month!

Saturday was the Cape Argus bike race, which is the largest bike race in the world...35,000 people ride in it...and it does the entire Cape peninsula (110km). So we went to watch it, since it is such a big deal and we had a couple of friends riding in it. Well, we found out afterwords that Matt Damon was in it! Apparently he was riding a tandem bike with his brother. How crazy! We found out later that he is here with Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood filming a movie about the 1995 SA Rugby team and Morgan Freeman is playing Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon is playing the big rugby star. Apparently he and the rugby star that he is playing, Francois Pienaar, decided to ride in the race for a charity...so they did, and Matt was riding tandem with his brother. So we actually saw him...since we saw all the tandem riders (they were in a group) but we didn't know he was in it or to be looking for him so we didn't know that we saw him. Pretty crazy! It would have been cool to actually see him and know it...but, oh well...

The Music Academy continues to move forward. We've actually hit a wall with this first approach to the academy and therefore we are beginning to move into 'Phase 2'. This second approach will be to actually get involved into the schools and do very basic, large group, music classes during the breaks in the school day. From those large groups we can then create smaller classes based on age and ability to do the more focused classes. We are pretty excited about it, since it should be a much more effective approach that will also involve A LOT more kids, which is great. So, things are moving forward and continue to be exciting and encouraging. I've also been able to do some 1-on-1 lessons with Basil, doing some voice and guitar lessons, which have been great. He has such an amazing voice for a 13 year old, and is quite gifted, so its fun to be able to work with him some.

Well, that's about it for now. Like I said, it's been an exciting month. These remaining few weeks will go by quickly, but I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen.

Hope everyone is doing very well!

Cheers!

Pictures

I've just added a few new pictures. Enjoy!

23, Table Mtn, and the Eye of an Elephant

Hello everyone!

Well, since you last heard from me, we have moved into our new and permanent home, climbed Table Mountain and celebrated my 23rd birthday. It's been a very busy but very good couple of weeks!

Last Monday, February 1st, we moved from the Team House to our new home on the new Living Way campus, the former False Bay College campus. It's been something of an adjustment "settling in" to our new home. There was much work to do before we moved in to make this former office building into volunteer housing, and there was still plenty to do once we moved in. Gordon and Frans and Jade, the plumber, worked very hard for a full week building and installing 2 new showers into the house. All new furniture was moved in and the entire place was painted. It really has come a long way and has transformed into a pretty nice place! Jeremy and I are sharing a room, with Danielle down the hall, and our newest volunteer, Chris (from the UK), also down the hall. I'll be adding pictures soon for you to see the house and property and some of the progress that's been made.

Last weekend, Jeremy and I joined Kate (another US volunteer) and her mom, who was visiting, on a hike up Platteklip Gorge, one of the trails that goes up Table Mountain. It was one of the best and one of the hardest hikes I've done in a while! It's straight uphill for 1 1/2 hours, but is well worth the work once you get to the top. We started our hike in the morning, hoping it would be cooler in the morning, but by the time we were halfway up, it was plenty hot. We spent some time at the top of Table Mountain and then headed back down. Kate and her mom, the smart ones, took the cable car back down the mountain, while Jeremy and I decided to hike back down. The first 15 minutes of our mountain descent weren't too bad, but before too long our knees and legs decided that they had had enough and didn't want to work as well anymore. It only took us 50 minutes to get down, but it was some of the most physically exhausting 50 minutes either of us had experienced in a while. We were quite glad to be done once we got down, and spent the rest of the day doing as little as possible. It was a great time though!

A few days ago, Jeremy, Chris and I took another hike to Elephant's Eye, a huge cave at the top of the mountain range behind Table Mountain. What an amazing hike! The view from the cave is pretty amazing and the cave itself is pretty awesome. There are so many places like these to explore, and unfortunately we won't have time to see them all, but I'm glad we're able to take advantage of some of them.

Last Tuesday was my 23rd birthday. It was rather weird celebrating my birthday during the summer, when usually its right in the middle of winter. As you can imagine, I actually kept forgetting it was really my birthday, being in the summer heat and on a different continent. To celebrate, I went with about 13 of my friends here to dinner at a very cool restaurant downtown Cape Town. It is the restaurant in the Fire and Ice hotel, which is this really cool hotel. Basically the menu is every kind of burger you can imagine: beef, chicken, ostrich, lamb, seafood, etc. And they are big and really good. They also have a huge milkshake menu with about every kind of milkshake you can imagine...from oreo or kit-kat to pumpkin and marshmallow or avocado and green apple. The avo and apple one sounds disgusting, but I ordered it (I mean, I had to try it!) and it was really good! . They also have really cool bathrooms; 6 different ones (all one person bathrooms). Each of the bathrooms is themed and decorated differently. For example: one is setup so that the toilet is on this little black stage and the wallpaper is people sitting in an audience and pointing and laughing at you as you sit there...its very weird. Another has rolls or toilet paper covering an entire wall..so you go in and there is like 100 different rolls of toilet paper to choose from. Another is done like an outhouse, with aluminum sides and everything. It was quite interesting, but very cool. I'll also be adding some pictures soon of the restaurant for you to see for yourself. If you're ever in Cape Town, I recommend the Fire and Ice hotel restaurant!

Everything else is going very well. The Music Academy has started back up and is going very well. We are 2 weeks into the new curriculum and it seems to be working quite well. Last week I was able to purchase a keyboard for the academy with money that was raised for my trip for such expenses. So, thank you very much to all those who helped support me and the ministries here financially, prayerfully and through your encouragement and love!

Things in Red Hill are also going well. Unfortunately, I've had to cut back my time there, so now am only in Red Hill on Monday and Tuesday afternoons rather than Monday through Thursday, due to MMA expansion and the having started youth praise team practice for Capricorn church during the week. Working with the kids in Capricorn on the praise team has been so much fun and such a blessing. It's amazing how involved the youth of Capricorn are in that church. What a very cool thing.

That's all for now. Hope everyone is having a wonderful week! God bless!

Music Academy and More Weddings

It's been a very good and busy week! Most of this week for me was spent working to finish the curriculum for this 2009 year for the Music Academy and meeting with people from some of the local schools to talk to them about getting the MMA involved in their schools. The idea was very well received at the Masi Primary School. Monday I'm meeting with the music teacher and possibly headmaster of Christian David, a school near Capricorn. The idea is to start doing some fun, large group music things with the kids at the schools during their long breaks during the school day. From those large groups we could find smaller groups to do the more concentrated lessons like we are doing with the 4 kids in Capricorn. It's definitely exciting to have some of these things come together for the MMA.

This was another weeding weekend for us. Mike and Pam Talley, the Living Hope volunteer coordinators (from Nashville), befriended a couple from Masi and decided to help put a wedding together for them. I was asked to do the music for the wedding and Jeremy and Danielle helped out as well; Jeremy doing video and Danielle helping with several things. It was fun to not only be the musician for the wedding but actually be the "music coordinator" for their wedding. I met with Brian and Blessing earlier in the week to plan out the music and then spent the week getting all that together. The wedding ended up being very nice and it was amazing to find out how so much for the wedding had been donated or given as a gift, including the cake, the rings, the flowers, etc. Its funny how in less than 5 months I've helped in 2 South African weddings and still have one more that I'm doing music for in May. It's been quite fun!

Jeremy has been busy this past week working with the team here from Delaware on the new property that Living Hope acquired, the old False Bay College campus. The plan for that campus is to house the classrooms and offices for Living Way, the economic empowerment branch of LH as well as the volunteer housing and some of ACTS offices. Unfortunately, we (the volunteers) have to move out of the Team House the 1st of February, but the new property won't be ready for us to move into yet, so we'll have to move somewhere else temporarily until it's ready. One more move for us! The new property is coming together well and it will be so exciting once it's all finished.

That's about all for now. My family comes in less than 3 weeks, which is very exciting! Unfortunately, because of the pregnancy, Jennifer and Christian won't be able to come. But that just gives me more reason to come back here and bring them with me next time! It will be fun to share some of what I'm doing here with family.

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Have a wonderful week!

Photos

New photos are up...finally. The new ones start with the pictures of the snake, which I finally have.

Holiday Club

This week was the last week before school starts back for the kids here in Cape Town. Their school year follows the calendar year, so they are beginning a new school year starting Wednesday. Because this week was the last week of "summer holiday" we held holiday clubs in each of the Living Hope areas. As usual, I worked in Red Hill this week helping out with the club there. It was such a great week! Jeremy also spent those five days working in Red Hill, during which we each had the opportunity one day to lead the bible story of that day. So, Wednesday I told the story the prodigal's son (and acted it out with the help of one of the Red Hill kids). Jeremy told the story of David and Goliath, which he and I acted out. As I'm sure you can imagine there was some serious acting skills being showcased on those days...award-winning for sure. ;)

For this week of holiday club the life-skill educators for Red Hill, Stanton and Mzo, decided to try something different. Instead of doing club in the same location in Red Hill each day, we held club each day in a different area of Red Hill. It was such a fun way to not only see and experience more of the Red Hill community, but to include more kids and be visible to more of the families and community of Red Hill for them to witness what we are doing each day. Each day we had anywhere from 50 to 75 kids, many of whom came each day to all 5 locations, but some who only came and were only able to come to the club in their area. It really was a great week of fun and games, stories and songs as well as outreach to new kids and families.

Friday, our last day of holiday club, ended up being a day with a quite a few special moments. The day started with our sighting of almost 1 dozen baboons on the road to Red Hill, one of which was sitting a top the sign reading "feeding of the baboons prohibited" while the ones beneath it sat eating food that people had thrown out of the car to them...a great photo opportunity, unfortunately the only camera we had was Mzo's camera on his cell phone. We also saw a few ostriches and a mongoose on our journey to Red Hill. Once at Red Hill, we started an intense game of soccer with the kids, which unfortunately ended for me with a rather unfortunate collision with one of the teenage boys. We both went for the same ball in the air with our heads and unfortunately neither of us ever got to the ball, rather I connected with the back of his head instead of the ball. I ended up with quite a good cut on my forehead just above my eyebrow which of course bled quite a bit, which most of the kids thought was "so cool" but some were a bit confused and concerned. However, my newly acquired head wound provided for a much more realistic enactment of David vs Goliath, me being Goliath and now having a real head wound to show as a result of the pretend stone David(Jeremy) threw at me to defeat me.

It's been a great week. January is flying by! Its hard to believe we're already half-way through the month. Next week is back to the regular schedule for us, and the Music Academy will start back the end of next week, which is very exciting.It will be great to be back with those kids.

Hope everyone is doing and enduring the crazy cold front moving across the States that we keep reading about. Stay warm!

PEACE

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