Change of Time

Delani and I are back from our vacation and we are settling into life...well, we would if we had a place to settle. This post is about our homelessness and what we are doing about it. We live in a lovely little apartment that is heavy on the little. It is located in what was a Catholic mission a few miles from town.

This is Delani in our living room-kitchen-dining room-study. Notice the amazing chocolate chip cookies that kept disappearing as I worked on our newsletter.

So, where does the homelessness come in? Well, we have to be out by the end of this month, namely Saturday and here is our Master bedroom where we are going.



We had the privilege of having my sister, Jenny and her husband, Robert, stay with us for a week after we came back from our honeymoon. We went and did some great stuff like eating at "The Cabin."





Including a great idea for a stove I'm going to use on the house involving wheel drums and scrap steel.



And better yet, the Farmhouse breakfast.



Then it was on to the house under a gorgeous, cold winter sky.



Ironically, for a post about the house, I have no photo of the outside of the house. Jen and Robert came to lend us a hand. Maybe I should give a little back story. I was originally going to try and build a small house on the farm, Fraaiuitzicht, where I am now living that would be available to HIM for ten years and then pass to the family...thus helping both of us. It seemed that wasn't God's plan and then, another house they have on their farm about 2 kilometers away, became available. It just needed a little work. So, we are refinishing floors covered for fifty years with carpet and we are painting walls. There are no cupboards or stove in the kitchen. Along with this come all the fun surprises that come with working in an old house.







Robert needed a little break.



Taking up the carpet is turning out to be quite a difficult work.



In addition, I have found that there is some serious rot in part of the floor. So, we have our work literally cut out for us.



Fortunately, since my sister and her husband went home, we have other friends coming like, Steve Geise.

We will keep you posted. If you want to help with this project, shoot me an email and I will try and fill you in better on what it is all about. It is actually a mission project and probably just a two year stop over for Delani and I. Keep us in your prayers. Any work we do must be done after we get out of school and drive the thirty minutes or more. This takes it's toll since nothing is close by here.

Stay tuned.

Christ and the fishes...but not the time you're thinking of

There are definite rewards to teaching English as a second language in books that were never meant for that. I get to laugh quite a bit. Today I burst out laughing in one of my students faces (unintentionally of course).

As a Christian school, we pride ourselves on having the Bible at the base of everything we learn and know. We try to promote Bible knowledge, but sometimes when evaluation comes, I’m afraid we are found terribly wanting.

My student was a bit confused about what Anno Domini meant He had to use AD in a sentence because he was learning acronyms. All that he knew was that AD was supposed to be the same as “after Christ” for a reason he couldn’t understand.

This was his sentence:

“AD was born God created light.”

Naturally I was a bit confused seeing that even substituting “After Christ” for AD didn’t make any sense, I wasn’t sure what he was trying to communicate.

Me
“Okay, so you were just trying to use “after Christ” in the sentence, but what are you trying to say here.”

Him
“After Christ is born God created light.”

Me
“But light was created before Christ was born. Christ was born much later. Light was at Creation.”

Him
“Oh, he was born with the water and the fishes.”

Me
Laughing

Me
“No, he was born much later as a man, but he always existed.”

Needless to say, we didn’t really get anywhere. I dread the day I need to explain the Trinity. He can’t understand how Christ always was and yet was born thousands of years after the world was created…but then again, neither can I.

Not in the wind, but in the still, small Voice...

This may be a rather tedious post, particularly following a protracted period of silence, but I do hope you enjoy it anyway.

Well, today was different. I suppose you could say it happened in the early morning hours, sometime just before 4 a.m.

I dreamed last night that I was invited to be something like a clown at a child’s birthday party only I would be swimming with the little tykes donned with foam pool noodles. I would be donned with the pool noodles that is. First though, the lady of the house took one look at the mole on my ankle (which I don’t actually have) and sent me with one of her daughters to another room in the house where she picked up a small device (similar to those electric shock devices that they use to relax muscles) with which she more or less “zapped” my ankle and voila, the mole was gone.

It should have stopped there, but suddenly I found myself outside the house with my good friend, S.W. and someone else. We were watching his bull and suddenly realized the neighbor’s bull was on the other side of a very small, insignificant gate and was not happy with this intruder. S.W. saw the danger as we all did and we made it into the house just before things got crazy with the bulls chasing each other around the house and destroying everything in their path. I was peeking from just behind a curtain at what was going on outside (less the bulls see me and decide to come after me instead of each other) when a Holstein cow saw me and began laughing at my cowardice. She went so far as to berate me in an all too familiar tone on my lack of bravado.

That was the beginning of the day.

It was a beautiful morning, but from early on it was an uncomfortable shade of hot with humidity thrown in as an extra duvet. I knew the tin church where we worship from about 11 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m. would be far from comfortable and to be honest I was not looking forward to it.

No one seemed very thrilled to be in service and even the leader, though he continually berated us for not being into the service, seemed equally reticent to give everything.

Somewhere during the service, it became obvious that we might receive some rain, a welcome sight in this drought. You can imagine the consequences of heavy rain on corrugated tin, you can’t hear anything the preacher is saying, but no one dares pray against rain these days. Somewhere during the service a small girl threw up on the floor and the rain began to fall.

First it was just a light rain and then gaining in confidence it produced the most deafening roar. Uncle Johan ceased preaching because no one could hear him anyway and we all began to sing. The lightening flickered in the darkened sky and the rain fell. Holes in the roof and broken windows made for musical chairs and sporadic seating arrangements.

The rain seemed to subside just a little and Uncle Johan began again. The rain was still falling, but I noticed that the direction seemed to have changed completely. This wasn’t really what I wanted to see since thunderstorms here have been known, though very rarely, to produce small tornadoes. When you are in a tin church held together with wire and a few nails, this is not a nice thought.

Fears justified. I can’t say it was a tornado, but a wind of some significance hit that little structure and made a terrible racket. When we looked outside, one of the neighbors had his roof suddenly sitting inside his house. It had picked up the roof entirely and deposited it inside the house. Considering the construction standards in the townships, this isn’t the biggest feat, but it was obvious the service was now at an end. Uncle Johan ended with an admonition to read over the text and next Sunday we would continue.

Next problem; with water running in the muddy streets, getting the van out of there would be interesting. S.W. and I took off our shoes, rolled up our pants and began to push. All of us walked barefoot up the muddy street until the van was in a safe place to take the weight and not sit in the mud and then we were off…well, nearly. We were a bit crowded so I ended up with a good-sized man on my lap for lack of any other spaces.

I understand that in the U.S. it was “Sanctity of Human Life” Sunday. I am sorry I missed that.

We came back and after a delicious lunch at about 3 p.m., we played some “finger board” and Bananagrams. Tomorrow is another day and 4:30 a.m. comes all too early.

Sleep well or rather when you read this, have a wonderful week. God bless.

Just about to hit the road...

Tomorrow, sometime before many of you will have even gone to bed today, I will be headed to Cape Town for Christmas. I would appreciate your prayers.

This won't be much of a post. Basically I wanted an excuse to try Blogger for iPod/iPhone. It's pretty cool.

But seriously, I would appreciate your prayers.

Merry Christmas!

The Great Trek...

Tucked into the mountains of the Camdeboo area of the Klein Karoo, like a jewel tucked safely away, is the town of Graaff-Reinet. Though perhaps a bit precariously placed below a large dam that was built with the help of mules and donkeys somewhere in the twenties, this placement gives it its jewel-like green quality in what is a semi-desert region not given to massive rainfalls.

A land with big mountains, empty spaces and wide skies. Something about it takes me back to the western United States, one of my great loves. It is all this and more. For the last year it has been the home to the beautiful Delani Smith. She is amazing. Incredibly intelligent and level-headed except in one regard, she agreed to marry me and move to where I work. So, my good friends S.W. and Jannes van der Merwe agreed to help me move her things. As soon as I left school that last Friday, we got into their Hilux pickup and embarked on a journey something akin to driving to Atlanta from Hobe Sound (time wise) with three guys over six foot in a pickup slightly larger than a Ford Ranger. It was a great time actually.

We arrived at Lootsberg Pass, at magic hour. I have driven through the pass at other times at sunset and have always been angry at myself later for not stopping for photos. This time I asked S.W. if he would stop. He did and you and I are glad that I did. It is breath-taking.

that night and just kind of visited and then Saturday it was bit of sightseeing. Neither S.W. nor Jannes had really been in the town and they enjoyed getting to see it. We went to some museums. The Reinet House, an impressive colonial Dutch style house, was the home of the Murrays for years. Dr. Andrew Murray's father was the Dutch Reformed Minister of the Graaff-Reinet parish and Andrew grew up in that house. It was pretty cool to walk those floors.

The back courtyard of the house.

There were a lot of interesting exhibits in the house. Things like clocks that were less than space conscious, recipes for medical cocktails, things to be thankful in dentistry technology, a giant boot, a gazelle skin slightly larger than a house cat (way to go, "mighty hunter") and a doll house made out of porcupine quills by someone who had way too much time in the 1800s.

One of the interesting things at the house was a Black Acorn grape vine planted by Charles Murray over a hundred years ago. It is the biggest vine in the world (according to the house) and it still produces fruit.

That evening, Jannes and SW and I went to the Valley of Desolation just outside of town. It is a place that, though on a smaller scale than things like the Grand Canyon, is no less captivating. The difference being it is far less crowded and supervised. It is quiet. You sit on the cliffs and hear nothing but the wind and the birds that come whistling through the canyon.

In the background of the second photo (above) is Graaff-Reinet.

This guy saw it in style.

Don't look down. This was a gap big enough to fall into and went down a good 100 feet before you hit your first rock.

Doing a little exploring, finding "faulty towers" that looked like they would crash on our heads, SW showing his immense strength and standing where we probably shouldn't have.

The panorama view is incredible.

Church on Sunday and then Monday was move time. We packed up the furniture and boxes and managed to fit almost everything in, much to the amazement of a skeptical Delani. First, we set off the alarm and no one knew the code, so I improvised.

On the road...

We stopped along the way to cruise around an English Blockhouse from the Anglo-Boer War. It used to protect the railroad there.

I think if you aren't proficient in English, perhaps you shouldn't name your business in English.

It was a great trip with good friends and God kept us safe all the way. I can't thank SW and Jannes and I enough for helping us out.