Mr. President

We just wanted to announce to everyone that we met the future President of the United States of America today here in South Africa! What an honor!! His name is Axolile and he attends Masiphumelele Daycare...make sure you remember that name because in 40 years he just may be Mr. President! :)

Happy Easter

THE LORD IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED!! We just enjoyed a lovely Easter! We got up super early for a sunrise service at St. James Beach, which was beyond breathtaking. What a way to start an amazing day of celebration! Then after our normal church service, we had lunch at our friend Melanie's home with all the other volunteers. We enjoyed such a wonderful feast! After having lots of fun and time for fellowship, Kenny and I finished the day off with a long afternoon nap. Gotta love Sundays. Happy Easter to all our friends and family!

TIA goes to camp

This past week we learned that the Lord is still trying to teach us patience. I'm sure that the quest for true patience will never be completely reached, but after spending 10 months in Africa and dealing with "Africa time" we thought for sure that we had learned all that God wanted to teach us about being patient. Turns out we were wrong! This last Monday we went to camp with the 6th and 7th graders for three days and TIA (This Is Africa) came along. :) First off, let me explain TIA. Whenever things go a bit differently here than they might go back home, we volunteers always say "TIA, This Is Africa". The program is starting hours late...no worries, "TIA". We aren't prepared for what we have to do today...no big deal, "TIA". No one told so-and-so to be here...oh well we'll call them now, "TIA". Get it? Well, the morning of camp we were all told to be ready to go at 8 am. The buses would be picking up the first group of children at that time and then they'd be by to pick up our children in Masi around 8:15. TWO HOURS later, the bus finally arrives to pick us up for the three hour bus ride we have ahead of us. We then drive to our final stop, a community called Capricorn, to pick up the remainder of the children. We get there and load up so we now have 100 children in two buses. Finally, we're off to camp! Then the worst thing possible happens...the drivers turn off the buses. Oh no, now what!? Turns out that these drivers hadn't been paid and they refused to drive a single kilometer further without 10,000 rand cash! Why they decided to wait until we got ALL the children on the bus before telling us this information is still beyond me. Now, it's not that Living Hope didn't have the money. In fact, we had already paid it in full. But, the company that we rented the buses from didn't have enough buses that morning and contracted these two buses to do the job for them (which is why they were two hours late in the first place)...so, we had to track down the people from the ORIGINAL bus company to get the money to these guys. We were all sent on a wild goose chase to get ahold of this money! THREE AND A HALF HOURS later we have finally have the money and we're off, FIVE HOURS later than originally planned...Wow, This Is Africa. Another thing that some of the volunteers say is TINA (This Is Not America), and unfortunately TINA came along that day as well. None of this would have happened at home. We would never ever have been stuck in a place like this with drivers who refused to drive, especially with 100 kids already in the bus. Oh the joys of being in Africa...and constantly learning what it means to be patient!

Long Overdue...

Wow, we haven't blogged in such a long time! Sorry about that. :) Kenny's parents visited us for the first half of March and here are some pictures to highlight our time with them. The say a picture is worth a thousand words...so here's 14,000!

The best surprise that they brought us was our favorite...Diet Coke!!

The penguins at Simon's Town. We went and saw them twice!


Praise the Lord that I was not for dinner that morning!

Kenny took this picture...amazing.

Our staff before going out to dinner together.

Kenny's parents with two of our preschoolers.

The kids LOVE to be flipped by Kenny. They all line up to be next!

Some of our mamas with the posters that Kenny's parents brought for them.

Our preschool team: Nandy and Natalie

Same hat...different size head!

Us with our beloved Table Mountain, from Robben Island.

Check out the teeth on this guy!

The original Kneezle's at our favorite beach, called Fish Hoek.

The Cape Argus bicycle race. Lance Armstrong is the 6th guy in red and gray, with yellow on his helmet. They all went by so fast that we could hardly see him at the time, but it's still super cool that we were there!

Mentos and Diet Coke

We wrote about this in our February newsletter, so for those of you who are interested here's the video from our Mentos and Diet Coke experiment. We were trying to illustrate that on our own we cannot do great things with great love (we are the bottle of coke), but when the Holy Spirit (mentos) comes into our lives, his power can fill us to overflowing! The kids loved the illustration, especially the sip of soda that they got afterward...notice them rushing to get the bottle at the end. Definitely the highlight of last week!

The Hippo Song

One of my FAVORITE songs from teaching back home is called "The Hippo Song", and Kenny and I have started to introduce it to some of our kids at the creches. It has been a huge hit so far, especially with this preschool, called Kiddie's Corner. The funny thing is that before singing this many of them didn't even know what a Hippo was (I naively assumed kids in Africa would know all about Safari animals). Now they know, and I love that maybe just maybe this song will stay here even after we leave!

The words go like this (in case you can't understand the cuties in the video):

A HIP

A HIP

A HIPPOPOTAMUS

GOT ON

GOT ON

GOT ON UPON A BUS

AND ALLLLL THE PEOPLE SAID

"HEY, YOU'RE SQUISHING ME!"

Are You Kidding?

Last night... or i guess this morning we watched the Super Bowl live from 1am-5am with our American volunteer friends. GO SAINTS!

After being up all night Carla and I had our normal Monday morning routine that revolves around Living Hope's pre-school ministry. To our surprise our normal venue was booked for an entrepreneurship training so we had to make do using the outside of our facility. As school after school came, we informed the creches that our program would have to be altered due to the unfortunate circumstances, but nonetheless we still had a great time visiting with the children and providing them with a morning snack. Unfortunately, to add to the events of the morning the toilet was locked and no one had a key. You can probably guess what happened next? One little girl had to pee, and when she found that the toilet was locked she began to pee outside! As you all know kids love to play follow the leader, so.... the next thing we knew 30+ children are peeing everywhere! I can honestly say that I have never seen anything like that before! All we could do was laugh and ask each other "Are you kidding?". Despite how delerious we were from from staying up all night it is always an absolute joy to be with these children and be a small part of their lives!