MARCH… ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER… ok… I got carried away with the month

 HEY EVERYONE!!!

I am excited to be writing to you again!!! How are you all doing? I have been doing pretty good lately… I think I am now noticing myself to get a little more tired every day, but a good kind of tired… it lets me know that I am working hard for Christ, which is probably a good feeling for a missionary to be getting…hehe. I was talking to Leah Rush the other day about how crazy it is to think we are missionaries even though we feel quite normal… except for the whole EXTREEM God stuff and our work aspects. Though it is weird, I do feel quite blessed and thank God every chance I get for allowing and giving me/us these wonderful opportunities to serve Christ and show our love back to Him through our work.

So today I decided to take the day off, “we get 5 days to take off this whole semester… this is my first day off since the beginning of this trip since I didn’t take any days off last semester,” and get some work caught up on, like writing this blog and communicating with my lovely family back home. Yesterday was the first day I was able to get on Facebook and my email in a long time, and after spending almost four hours talking to family and going through emails, I still had more work to do. So it will be nice to get some family work done. In this time of not being on the internet, God has so blessed me in my relationship with my team-mates, wonderful new church family at LIghtHouse, the Youth Group kids and my ministries that I work in between, “for more information about these, keep scrolling down until my last blog, it will tell you there…” He has also blessed me in my feelings towards myself. I think I have told you that for a while, I was going through a pretty bad depression within myself wondering where I belonged and not finding my place here. All that is gone now, and I feel so healed of all that. God is truly the healer… isn’t He?

Oh… Thank you all so much for praying for the Taxi Strike, it did end that Friday, so this month, we have been able to get to ministry all right! So…. Thank you again.

I have been writing letters to people and I feel like a lot of these things I am about to say I have a least written four times, so please forgive me if I fall asleep to my own writing and start jumbling up letters here… I am sure you will have much entertainment in what I am about to say, even if you haven’t heard already. And if you have heard…. Just wait for the sleep marks… and the rest of you should get a kick from me.

So I was able to spend the night in the Walmer Township, “this is the township that Doreen’s Orphanage is at,” twice. The first time our whole team went into the township to this church that wanted to host and have “some fun” with foreigners… so they took us in. The stories are pretty crazy, and I am sure you want, most of my other team-mates have probably already posted stories on their blogs…. One of the stories was when Kevin got to sleep in a twin bed with his big host dad!!!! HAHAHA…. We all got a hoot out of that story!!!

Matthew and I got put together to go to our hosts house. He is about a year or two older than us and he had all his friends over. We walked about a half hour to his house with his friends, then walked to the grocery store, which was another half hour away, and got a bunch a junk food, “AND THESE AMAZING LAYS CHIPS WHICH ARE CALLED BALSOMICK VINIGAR AND ONION CHIPS WHERE ARE FANTASTICK!!!!” and walked back to our hosts house. Then we ate the junk food and his friends left by then because it was getting late.

 Then we had dinner with his family, and soon after, I went to bed because I was pretty tired, and Matthew was soon to follow. Our wonderful host gave us his queen bed and He slept on the floor. I have to say that Matthew Hussey is a blanket thief…. But that is ok, because I am too. We got up, went to another three hour sit down church service, “ok… well we did do the stand up, sit down , stand up, sit down thing which was once referred to as what a man in Jeffreys Bay calls, Christian Aerobics,” and came home. It was a great experience to be able to talk with all the guys. I was truly blessed by this experience!

So one of the other things I have been doija;lsdkfja;sd f asd;fas……..*snore snore*l;aksjd;flaksd fla;sd*snore snore some more*;asldf a;lsd;aeir ……… just kidding….

                The second time I spent the night in the township was when I stayed at the orphanage with Doreen. I had such a great time there. The kids were so excited for me to be spending the night that they wouldn’t even believe me until I didn’t get on the bus that should have got on to go home. Doreen had me start a Braii, “the South African Version of a barbeque,” and she made one of the most wonderful potato salads I have ever tasted to go along with lamb, chicken, three bean salas and much more. It was a very good treat to have for diner. We had a braii because one of the other students from Switzerland was going back home. It was very tasty.

                When it was time for bed, I took over for Doreen to give her a break and got the kids ready for bed. I slept in the boys room that night, after telling Doreen to go to bed early, “she goes to bed at 12AM sometimes and has to get up every day at 4:30AM, she is often very tired and stressed because of it all,” and that she had to stay in her room until 8AM, and I would lock her door if I had to, to keep her in bed. Luckily, I didn’t have to do that because she slept in until 11AM that morning!!!

                When I got into the bedroom, the boys were all arguing on who was going to sleep in bed with me, finally I allowed Voyo to sleep in bed with me. It was pretty hot and we were all sweating, so I asked if I could open the windows and Voyo said, “No don’t open the window, the bad people will come and put snakes in our room if you do that.” Obviously they were allowing their imagination to get carried away with them, so I waited until they were all asleep and opened the windows. I was half asleep the whole night, so any movement in the room I kept my eye on. Then, I saw a hand reaching into the room and, “being scared for my life,” tried to act brave and figure out how to break this man’s arm without getting stabbed. Then I looked at the shadow on the wall to see the outline of the man’s face… only to find it was just the cat going in and out of the bedroom!!! So all that worrying was really for nothing, *Andrew rolls his eyes in embarrisement.*

                Later on that morning Voyo woke me up poking me and saying, “Who is that?” I said, “It’s me… Andrew.” Then he said back, “Oh Andrew…. I forgot it was you…” Then he started talking to me a little, “this was all about 4AM,” then he finally said, “Andrew, I need to go to the bathroom.” So I told him to just go then and he said back, “No, I don’t want to.” So I waited in silence for two minutes and asked him back, “Do you want me to go with you?” Then he said, “Yes please, I just don’t want the bad cat to come and bite me!!!” I laughed to myself inside because of this.

                Needless to say, I got up an hour later, “for those of you that are not good at math, an hour later is about 5AM…” and started getting everyone ready for school again by waking them up and making them cold cereal with…”this is what Doreen told me to do… I was not being cruel and unusual to them,” heat up some milk and make a concoction of half milk and half water to give to them… “EW hugh!!!” I fed them and they went off to school at about 7AM, and I went back to bed and slept for two hours. Later on that day, I told Doreen about my experiences with sleeping with the boys and she said, “Those boys are such scardy cats… they are even worse than the girls!!!” It is true….

                Another thing I have been keeping myself busy with is the drama. I think I told you about how Leah, Matthew and I have been working on a drama called Everything by LifeHouse, well, this last Saturday and Sunday, the students were able to perform it!!! We bathed it in prayer and it had such a HUGE effect on the Youth and the Church. I am still working on film editing it at the moment, so be a little patient with me… it will be up soon. You are probably not the only ones that want to see it, I think that the Church will want to put a link to it so the LifeHouse. By the way, their website is http://www.lighthouseministries.co.za/ if you ever want to check it out! You can listen to some of the sermons, or just check it out. I have to say I have really found a Church Family here in South Africa… I have felt so at home here at this Church, and I will really miss my South African Church Family….

                But getting back on to topic… I was so impressed with all of the students involved. We also did it with live music. I don’t think my camera did the show any justice, but at least you get to see some of the fruit that has been coming from this.

Well… I think yet again, I have written you all a book!!!! So I will let you go for now.

I love you all and miss you!

I will talk to you all later!!!