April Showers Bring May Flowers

May 1st, 2010

Well April showers bring May flowers, is the saying back home at this time of year. But I here in SA I haven’t heard the saying yet! Well the seasons have been changing, but not into Spring like back home but it’s now into Fall and very soon Winter. I have to admit I do miss the warm mornings from summer, but not the hot humid days and now it’s back to dressing into layers again. Mornings and evenings are nippy, but gradually the day warms up and layer by layer you are forced to peel off your layers, until evening when it becomes nippy again. I am unsure about the winter months and how cold it will get. Homes do not have central heat or furnaces nor are the house structures insulated, but some homes you may find fire places! I have been told that in some areas of SA, you can find snow during the winter. It almost seems wrong to say that it snows in Africa! My friend Juli, who teaches grade 3 at Gateway Christian School, has family who lives in Underberg and they experience snow there, but Juli has never seen the snow actually fall!

During the month of April I went to Port Elizabeth and Cape Town as you already have read, but I also had some other busy fun weekends too! A week after my return home (April 17th) was Project Gateway’s first Car Boot Sale. You might be wondering, what is a car boot sale? Well back home we have garage sales, but here they don’t have those but have car boot sales. Those wondering what a car boot is, well it’s what we call the car trunk back home! So we posted posters advertising this fundraiser event and people called and booked a spot in the car park; they came and set up tables of their goods for sale or arranged the boot of their car with their goods, hence what a true boot sale is! Selling goods from your car boot! We had all types of goods being sold, from a lawn mower to cupcakes, to homemade jewellery and clothes, to yummy Indian Samosas to used books, to Tupperware to everything and anything we had it! Since I work with the DMPR (Donor Marketing Public Relations) 2 days a week I helped in planning and creating some of the posters, as well as helped to calculate out the car boot stands and put together an information stand for Project Gateway. It was a great day and the weather co-operated beautifully!

Besides a Car boot sale that weekend Felicia and Andrew were spending some time at the Alty’s so between Friday night and Saturday afternoon and evening I spent time with them. Sunday that weekend, one of the guys from my NCF home group had our home group and I over to his home for a wonderful braai. It was a great weekend but I was tired by Sunday afternoon I and finally crashed for awhile before 6pm church. Monday the following day, which is my MCC day, where I am always busy writing up journal entries, reconciling bank statements against receipts and trying to get their MCC books into a working library. Andrew and Felicia reappeared back from the Kombi rank, a little bit later after I arrived to James & Joan’s for work. I soon learned that the Durban taxi’s and public transport were on strike and they couldn’t return back to their city! What else is new! Strikes seem to be a norm here with the municipalities’, if it’s not a garbage worker strike it’s something else!

My MCC library work consists of inputting the ISBN number off books into a computer program and if the computer program doesn’t know the dewy decimal number, then researching and deciding the book’s dewy decimal classification numbers myself. Next it’s inputting the dewy data into a computer program, printing off labels and labelling the books; this has taken me forever!! I am still not quite done, but slowly getting there. I have discovered some interesting books that maybe in the next short while before leaving I’ll get better chance of flipping through them.

Over the last long while at school, I’ve been helping Kerry in the Library with covering new books with plastic covering to protect and help to keep them nicer longer. When I’m not covering books, I’m going around with the attendance clip board, printing off soccer pictures for teachers, and typing up worship songs. But for the last little while for about an hour on Thursdays, I have been spending time in one of the grade R classes, reading to the children, singing songs, teaching them a game or just wandering around the classroom helping them with their work activities. I find the grade R learners really sweet, but sometimes find it challenging since their English isn’t very good yet and it’s sometimes challenging to communicate with them.

The following weekend (April 22-24) was also quite busy, but fun. I spent three nights in a row watching three different movies in three different theatres (Thursday – Skin, Friday –Date Night, and Saturday –Kick Ass). Friday I tagged along to uShaka Marine Water Park in Durban with the school (tones of fun sliding down the slides with the kids), stayed the night in Durban and so I ended up spending two fun half days with Felicia and Andrew, and then finally home again Saturday night after catching the movie Kiss Ass, with some friends from England & Belgium. Saturday after returning home I finally learned about my Grandma’s failing health, but I didn’t realize she was going that quickly until the Monday.

The last week of April while my family was planning and attending the funeral arrangements for my uGogo was very hard. I so wanted to be there, even though I told my family before I left home I would not be coming back if she passes. But you never realize how hard it is to be away when someone passes and you can’t be there. Your mind and spirit are home, but your body isn’t. I had wonderful support from my friends at work that I know it will be hard saying goodbye in a couple months since they have been here for me during the hard difficult times! I officially have eight more weeks of work left and eleven more weeks left here in South Africa, and twelve more weeks until I see my family!!

Signing off and Mach Gut….