Here are some pictures finally : )

The soccer team we prayed for on our prayer walk through the community- they were the Tigers...hence the claws

Picking avocados off the tree on base- was quite the adventure : )

No more bricks!!

My buddy from Church : )

Right before we decided to back up and let the elephant cross the road...

Just a lion chillin in Kruger Park

The view from our base : )

The house that we are staying in-the area to the left of the door is where our room is

I haven't been very good at putting up pictures because of the internet here...sorry. Some of my group and leaders have been able to put up some on their blogs so I will post the links on mine off to the side so that if you want to look at some pictures you can : ) Have a great day!

January 25, 2010

Yesterday was a day of community- and it was a really great day J We went to Church in the morning at a Church that some of our group members from here go to. I sat in a row expecting some of my group to follow, but before I knew it some of the children from the Church came and sat down filling the row I was in. So I spent the Church service singing and dancing with the kids next to me J Then last night we started a new weekly event of Sunday community dinners. It is our one night that everyone living on the base and even those working with the base come for dinner. We also are able to invite people from the community to come eat with us. We played games and worshipped with music and just spent time together. It was really an amazing time. We have been focusing on letting it soak in that God is in everything- not just the activities that we deem “religious.” So our leaders emphasized that playing silly games with each other is spending time with God with each other too. Then we spent the rest of the night in the pavilion playing card games, board games, playing music and singing, and talking with each other in the candlelight (we lost electricity because of a storm). It was a pretty sweet night J

Then today we officially started DTS! We had our first real class and it is going to be a great week J This week is about worldviews and how we can work with different cultures while having such a different mindset from our own perspectives. Our speaker this week is going to be really great. Then as were heading out to do our first community outreach at the orphan centers….we had our first encounter with the South African rainy season. We ended up driving for 10 minutes in a torrential downpour with massive thunder and lightning and the turning around and coming back to the base. So the afternoon was spent reading and resting with once again no electricity haha.

January 27, 2010

It has been a good first week of official DTS so far. We started with a lot of electricity- less nights and thunderstorms but because of that we spent a lot of bonding time too watching movies on laptops and playing cards in the dark J Our classes this week have been really awesome, and thought provoking. We have been talking a lot about having a Biblical worldview, and what that means. We keep looking at a picture that we have called the “fruit tree” which basically shows that the actions and consequences in our lives all come from the beliefs and values that we hold. So if we want to change our own actions or even a society around us, we must first look to the beliefs and values. The three main worldviews that we have been looking at have been the Secular, Animistic, and Biblical. Through them we have been going through how each would interpret issues like truth and reality and also daily regular activities. Last night and this morning, we spent a lot of time talking about truth and how it is known through God. Since it is known through God, we have been talking about how important it is that we have a correct vision of who God is. As A.W. Tozer said, “The most important thing about a person is what they think when they think about God.” It has been a extremely interesting week, with the most hitting me being how to bring both the physical and spiritual together, without over emphasizing each. But really what that has come to mean to me is seeing the very important truth that God is in everything, so that means that this world is 100% both physical and spiritual at the same time.

Besides that, the week has been pretty chill- a lot of moving bricks…yay J and spending more time with everyone. Basically, we have been living the African way haha. Last night a bunch of us got to eat mangos with simply our bare hands which was quite an adventure that ended up with a lot of flossing afterwards.

So I have to keep a journal for my internship credits so I am just going to be putting my entries from that on here. I cant post every day though so I will just be posting from a bunch of days all at once from now on. Hope things are going well!

January 19, 2010

We classified today as the BEST day every! Haha We are just having orientation week this week, which is really great though. This morning we had some lectures and one of our lectures was really great. Our speaker asked us to name three things: two things that we want to happen in these 5 months and a dream of ours that we have. It really made us all open up to each other and bring down our walls a little bit. We also decorated journals that the base gave us to

In the past couple of days we have also gotten some cultural lessons. My new friend Pinkie, from South Africa, plucked a litchi (a fruit that almost tastes like a grape but it has a hard shell around it) off a tree on base with me and I got to try one with her. Our South African students have also been teaching us some songs that they sing at Church. We learned them in both languages. We learned the song about “flowing” like eagles. J I also got to help make the paper bead necklaces that they make over here and I brought back from Uganda!! I didn’t really do much, but I got to watch at least. Then today we also went to the mall closest to here and were able to shop for some things. A lot of us got some food from the Pick N Pay grocery store- mostly the girls got chocolate and juice haha Then we spent the night trying to sleep while Pinkie stood on a chair demanding all of our attention and Lizzie (my new friend from Switzerland)kept turning on and off the lights to check for bugs and then continued to enter the bathroom clapping to ward off the spiders J

January 20, 2010

Things are starting to pick up a little more every day. We have had worship every morning for this week, but one of our staff, who has been leading worship, has been trying to show us different ways to think of worship. Today we simply sat around and first told stories about things Christ did in the Gospels starting with “I remember when…” Then we started the same way but told stories about our own lives and ways that Christ has acted. We also got assigned our work duties for the next three months. I was assigned to grounds keeping along with three others from our team. We spent the first two hours today picking up bricks and wheeling them into a ditch nearby. It was so much fun….not really J haha but I know it will be something to learn from since we will be doing our work duties every day for the next three months. We’ve had a lot of sickness going around and we actually just had to take Lizzie to the hospital, so we are praying that she will get better but also that it doesn’t continue to spread.

Oh…and today we played extreme musical chairs which meant that two people lost each round and had to do a certain contest to win a spot back in the game. After some extreme battling…the final two ended up being my friend Lennon and I. The death match was a drink milking contest. Even though I was given a carton of cold 2% mil and Lennon was given warm heavy cream, he drank the entire carton and I lost to the extreme L

January 21, 2010

Today we went to the communities for the first time J I will once again say that South Africa has to be one of the most amazingly beautiful countries ever. But we visited two of the orphan’s community centers that we will be working with. We played with the kids and…they are just super adorable J

January 22, 2010

Friday FUN day! Today was once again the BEST day ever. We spent the day driving through Kruger National Park, which is larger than the entire country of Israel. We saw zebras, a ton of elephants, lions, giraffe, wild dogs, crocodiles, baboons, other monkeys, gazelle, warthogs, hippos, and probably a lot of other animals that I cant remember haha. To see lions is a extremely rare thing and we saw a pair of a male and a female twice….and they were literally 5 feet from our car. The one pair was sitting right on the side of the road as we were driving by. It was insane! Then we went to a fantastic swimming pool and spent the afternoon there. We are all pretty much about to fall over from being so tired because we had to leave at 5 AM to see animals. But it was pretty much a fabulous day J

I'm here!

Well I am finally am finally at the YWAM base! Everything with traveling and all went really smoothly- nothing wrong at all. Things went even better than I had planned because when I got to the area where I was waiting for my shuttle to take me up to Kruger Park, at the point when I really was tired of being by myself there was a girl from my DTS waiting for the same shuttle! She wasn’t supposed to be on it but things ended up that way and we were both pretty happy to meet each other.

So then after four more hours of traveling…we finally made it to our base! Everything here is so beautiful! The landscape is just gorgeous. It is really mountainous so you can just see huge mountains all around. Where we are staying is not quite right in town which makes it nice because we sort of have our area to ourselves. All the girls live in a room with bunk beds and we have one bathroom. There are a lot of little buildings on the land where the staff lives. Our team is made up of 15 people, and we have people from America, Switzerland, Canada, and Africa (10 girls and 5 boys). We are all pretty much in our twenties. There is also another team here now from Orlando. There are a DTS too but they did their lecture phase in Orlando, and then came here for their outreach. There are 40 of them so it is a little crazy but fun J

We just got back now from a barbecue at one of the staff leaders houses. We went with just our DTS group so it was nice to just be with just our groups and get to know each other more. It was also nice to have a little taste of home watching Kung Fu Panda haha

We got sort of a schedule to start off with. This week we have orientation so we really are just learning a lot about what we will be doing. Basically, on Monday-Thursday we will be in lectures and then community outreach every afternoon besides Tuesday. Then Friday is kind of different each week, but usually we will be doing something more fun or sometimes even tourist things. Every Saturday we will do community outreach and every Sunday we have off all day. Then after our three months of lecture are done we will be traveling to another country or two for outreach. I had thought we were going to stay around here but we will definitely be leaving the country. We don’t actually know where yet though haha

So we will be pretty busy once everything starts up. But now everything is very chill and we have done a lot of sleeping and just getting to know each other. Theres really not too much more to tell but I will be sending out more updates later!

I love you guys and I miss you all already