I Live in Africa...

I have to remind myself of that everyday. Nothing is predictable around here and you have to figure out ways to go about life. Nothing is convenient and time goes slow. So here are some of the things that I sit there and remind myself I live in Africa over...

There are many things that I have been doing but haven’t had the pictures to post about it because many of them have been times that Whit and I have been together and well she always has her camera on her so I figure I’d default to her for taking pictures…so beware this will be a long post I’m sure.
First I’ll start with the night I went to drama and worship practice for the service that I attend. Whit is part of the drama team, she’s just there for critiquing and to help push them along and well this night I decided to go because she had to stay for the worship practice as well since our sups were out of town and I was about to make her get up in the middle of the night to pick up my friend from the airport (yes, this was that long ago). So I wanted to share some pictures of the peeps who are involved in these activities…a few of them we meet with for Bible studies, many of them not, but they are all potential leaders so you can pray that the Lord would give them a vision for spreading truth among their classmates.

Then here are some pictures from a night where we didn’t have any power. It has been really bad lately and very unpredictable when we will actually have power and when we won’t. A little over a month ago, the city went on a seven days a week, no power from 7 am to 7 pm. We are pretty fortunate because we are on the university line, a government run facility, and therefore we still had power, every once in a while it would just shut off but for the most part we had power. But then they decided that it wasn’t fair for everyone else so we went on a three days a week without power from 7 am to 7 pm. Unfortunately things are so unpredictable here that the schedule never held true. And really we knew we wouldn’t have power Monday, Wednesday and Friday but the other days it was anyone’s guess. Then when the team got here, the rest of the city had power all of the time, but we were still on rationing and still we never knew when we would have it or not. Then we had power for a few days in a row and it was great, of course, yesterday it seemed to go back to “normal” schedule, it cut off at 7 am and so we expected it to come back on at 7 pm. Yea it didn’t. It came back on around 830 or 9, then shut off again, then came back on and then shut off again until 1030 this morning. Thankfully we are in short rainy season and it was a pretty cool night (just because it’s rainy season though doesn’t mean it really cools things off, when it’s not raining it’s hotter than hot!). It’s really hard to figure out what to do when you don’t have any power, especially in a place where time just ticks along anyway. We end up reading a lot of books. Unfortunately with that we go through them fast so we will probably run out of books to read before the year is up (so if anyone wants to send us some books they’ve read that they found were good, we welcome it!). So one night when we were in unpredictable power outage, Whit and I busted out our headlamps and played some cards. We had some fun with it!

One of the American girls that we do a Bible study with had a birthday at the beginning of October. They all decided to go out for her birthday and asked us to join along and we thought, hey we hardly ever get out, it could be a lot of fun, besides we get to spend some time with these girls outside of study which is always fun. They ended up going out to Seacliff and well this area is another world. Basically when we go there we feel like we’ve stepped back into the Western world. There are a bunch of white people around, mainly tourists, there is a food court, and little expensive shops, it’s really quite crazy. This night we went into one of the restaurants that was there and it really was like we stepped into America…American music, booths, totally weird. The food wasn’t as good as if I had gone to Chili’s or something of the like, but it was still good. We then went to the hotel in the area and bowled! It was so much fun! We danced to all the crazy American music and had a blast playing the game. I upset a Canadian because I completely out-bowled him. He really didn’t even compare (the unfortunate thing for him though is that if we had played a second game I probably wouldn’t have done as well, I tend to fade after game 1, weird I know). It was a great night though. Then when we had our study with the girls, it was actually her birthday and so we celebrated again. The girls had bought her a bunch of random things, not things that you would take home with you or buy if you were here as a tourist, more household type things, you could only get in Africa. We showed up with some brownies and they went crazy. They had tried to find some stuff to make brownies with but alas that kind of thing is hard to come by and they couldn’t get a hold of us so when we brought them they went crazy. They brought some ice cream and we put candles in the ice cream for her to blow out. There was a bit of wax but oh well, we live in Africa. Then we all ate out of the bowl, passing it around for everyone to get a scoop. The things you do to celebrate your birthday around here.

And lastly here is just a random picture of some guys hanging out on a billboard they are supposed to be putting together. I thought it was quite a fun picture.