Camp, Canadian Thanksgiving, Corruption, Crutches, and another C word to complete the alliteration

Today is a beautiful day. It’s sunny and windy, which is a great combination. Today I went to church with Nokuzola. It was awesome. Since I’ve been here, I haven’t really found a church I’ve connected with. I would even say I’m an irregular church attender. My favourite church is staying up at the farm, walking and talking and resting with and in the Lord and his creations. This church was nice and I think I’ll go back sometime. The people just radiated with joy. The music was awesome – Zola sings every Sunday and if you haven’t heard me speak of her voice yet, whew. She has the most beautiful voice. It gives me shivers every time she opens her mouth.

I like banana trees. If it is ever possible for me to grow them at home, I will. I love the way the wind flows through the slits in the large leaves. It sort of makes me think of tinsel just now. I don’t know why. Plus bananas ripened on the tree… pretty much can’t get any better than that.

I’ve been meaning to write about the Forward camp. The purpose of it was to allow the students to rest, reflect, and just exist in God’s presence. The theme was “New Wineskins” so we everything we talked about led towards the act of shedding the old, healing, and putting on the new. We had many sessions and they were powerful. The most powerful was when we hiked down the valley into a very green and luscious spot deep in the trees. Everyone went around sharing their struggles. It was a time everyone needed. We all shared and one of the students just broke. She talked about how she has cracks all over her body and shared about the hard things she deals with everyday. She wonders what it means to live. The beautiful part about it was as soon as she finished speaking, all the other students came and surrounded her and just prayed for her. We prayed for a very long time, sharing in her pain. And this is what it means to carry each other’s burdens, to actually have compassion and feel their pain. My heart hurt so much for her. But it’s how it has to happen. We all hurt, but God put us in a body together to lift each other up and that’s where the healing comes from.

Other lighter events. We stayed at the camp for 4 days and 3 nights. There was a bottom camp and up the mountain more a top camp. We wanted to stay at the bottom camp for a night and then the top camp for two nights, but we had a killer storm the first night (and it continued to storm randomly for the rest of the weekend) so the mucky road only let us stay at the top for the last night. The storm was unreal, with lightning, thunder, and hail the size of golf balls. Sleeping was sort of tough because of this squeaking in the roof that went on all night. All weekend we were trying to decide if it was rats or bats. And after hearing a story before bed that rats have an anesthetic in their saliva and they spit on your toes so that your toes numb and then they nibble them…. Sleeping wasn’t easy. Not to mention waking up and having mouse (or rat? I recognized it as mouse… but I’ve never seen rat) poo not only on my bed but IN my sleeping bag. Cooking was a challenge. The challenge wasn’t cooking everything over a fire. That was easy. The challenge was starting a fire and cooking in between (or during) storms. OH! And we swung on vines! During the first hike into the valley, we found many vines. There was one we found great for swinging. We had to be careful because it was a little slippery from the damp and humid forest. I started on a rock and jumped onto the vine. As soon as the vine lost all its momentum the first direction and before the vine came back, I slipped right off. It was hilarious but avoiding the tree was fortunate. I almost pulled a George of the Jungle.
What else happened…
Oh three of the guy students got baptized in the river. That was sweet. Mduduzi, Mxolisi, and Thapelo. We were all going to swim after, but yet again, a storm came.
One of the days, we were all sitting around the fire journaling when we heard some crazy noises from the bush. It was a bit of a frightening animal noise. The students all recognized it as baboons. We thought nothing of it and continued until it came closer and closer. Now, baboons are not your nice friendly monkey friend that sits on your shoulder and plays a music box. These things are vicious. When we went to Kruger Park with the students, we all had to research an animal prior. I researched baboons and those dominant males are freaky freaky freaky. So we were feeling frightened. Darryl, Lacey and Callan decided to get weapons and find the baboons. Darryl chose a large log, Callan chose an axe and Lacey… she chose a frying pan. They saw the baboons but the baboons ran away.
The top camp was quite nice. It was a little cottage that reminded me of Snow White. That night, the students had a little African dance party. It was sweet. They sang traditional songs and danced in the traditional way. Us whites tried to join in and some of us succeeded, but most of us did not. They have rhythm that is foreign to us foreigners. But it was a blast. We then went to bed. Oh, did I mention our sleeping arrangements? We slept on bunks and that was nice but the top camp did not have doors on the building. Apparently they had been stolen. It was no big deal because we were so far from civilization. Or does that make it worse? I knew ahead of time there were no doors but the way I pictured it, I thought it was no big deal. When I saw how small the rooms were and how freaky having no door made it, then it was a big deal. And then add the fact that the students the whole time wouldn’t stop talking about ghosts. Especially this specific ghost that creepily says “Buya” and wants your head. I had to use the toilet in the middle of the night but I was far too scared. I held it and held it and held it and then finally I heard some people getting up. It ended up being 6 or 7 of us going. Apparently, everyone had to go but was too scared until Zola got the courage to go and we all tagged along.
The next day we went on a biiiiiiiiig hike. The hike took us down the valley and then up a big mountain. At the top of the mountain we had communion, which consisted of shortbread cookies and milky juice boxes. It was probably the most beautiful communion I’ve ever had. That’s got to tell you about the versatility of symbolism. So that was the camp. It ruled. I’m posting pictures soon, hopefully tomorrow so stay tuned.

Maybe I should also write about Thanksgiving. We had an incredible Canadian Thanksgiving. All of the staff and volunteers came, so about 50 people were there. All the Canadians were responsible for bringing a traditional item, and others were just encouraged to bring anything. The only problem was that we couldn’t find a turkey anywhere, so we cooked 6 chickens. I can’t tell the difference between chicken and turkey anyway when it’s smothered and drowning in gravy. We made perogies, lazy man cabbage rolls, stuffing, pumpkin pie made out of squash and tasting the exact same, mashed potatoes, gravy, etc, etc. The works. The table was FULL of food but I can’t seem to waste my plate space on all the fancy frilly things. As much as I love new varieties of food, when it comes to Thanksgiving, there’s no time to fool around. We even shared how Thanksgiving came to be, but no one was really sure. We all had our own made up renditions of how it happened and put something together to educate the non-Thanksgiving celebrators on it. If we succeeded in truth or not, it doesn’t matter. Something about pilgrims and harvest and Natives and a ship. We give thanks and that’s good enough.

Another thing, I took three students to Limpopo Province to register for Social Work at two universities: University of Limpopo and University of Venda. We drove the whole way. I forget how many kilometers I put on, but it was a lot. The universities were interesting but the really eventful part was almost getting two speeding tickets in a row. The first one, the guy ahead of me paid off the cop so he allowed us to go too, and the second one just let us go, I’m not sure why. PTL?

Darryl got hit by a car. He was running in the middle of the road with his earphones on and got hit. He smoked the windshield and was thrown in front of the car onto the ground. I’ve never done so much nagging in my life to get him to go to the clinic and then finally after going and discovering he has a broken foot and getting a cast, more nagging to make sure he doesn’t walk on it. For some reason he just doesn’t understand that a doctor’s orders are for a reason. Good thing he’s got an expert on foot breaks to help him out.

They don’t celebrate Halloween here. It’s sad. And being in such a Christian community makes it hard to celebrate as well. Who says Halloween’s a pagan festival? It’s just some kids dressing up and eating candy. Sure Halloween ORIGINATED with evil and witches and death and other creepy things and kids like to dress up as vampires but surely God likes a little face paint once in a while. No? So, I didn’t dress up. Plus I figured the people in the community (especially the old Gogo’s) would think I was a real witch. The most disappointing part is that I think this was the first Halloween ever that I didn’t watch Ernest Scared Stupid.

And signing off.