Home Away From Home, Away From Home

Sawubona! (Zulu for "hello" or "greetings") Since our last blog post much has happened. We have been very busy and blogging over the past few months has not managed to get done. We left Togo in June for a visit home to North Carolina. It was very nice to be home and reconnect with our family and friends there! Many positive things happened that I feel would not have had we not taken the time and spent the money to visit home. I think for us personally, visiting home every year is very important, if not absolutely necessary, even though it is financially very painful. Other long term families on the ship have found the same to be true for them. We stayed with Jenny's parents and got lots done and had lots of fun camping with family, eating our favorite foods, and visiting with lots of friends. Bethany got some face time with her cat Smokey too. Joey got to spend some time with his old Boy Scout troop and he and I went to the National Jamboree in Virginia with the troop. David spent a lot of time driving the golf car around his grandparent's yard. Among other things Jenny spent a week in Atlanta for Mercy Ships attending a hospital standards and policies seminar. I spent time staining the storage building that we have our household goods stored in among other things on my long list of things to do. We home schooled our kids for the month of August as school at Mercy Ships Academy started at the beginning of August. We also had a lot of speaking engagements and fundraising meetings during August. It was such a difficult month that Jenny and I have decided to avoid homeschooling completely in the future if at all possible. We would like to leave that to those who have the talents and passion required to teach children well. We don't seem to possess them. We were very glad, though, at the end of our visit home that we had decided to make the trip, despite the great cost and the time away from our jobs on the ship. We returned to Africa at the end of August and met the ship in Durban, South Africa. The Africa Mercy will be in Durban in shipyard until late January having generators and air conditioning units, among other things, replaced. (The ship at the moment is in dry dock and the work is moving forward full force. There presently is a scurry of activity on the ship. It is quite something to witness. I have some photos of the work being done, but I will have to wait to post them to my blog until I have delivered them to Mercy Ships.) We arrived at the ship on September 2nd, moving day! All of the families and non-technical (non-deck and engineering) long-term crew were moving off the ship to live at Appelsbosch College between Wartburg and Tongaat in KwaZulu Natal province, 90 minutes drive northwest of Durban. So we moved with them immediately upon arrival at the ship. Thankfully we had had a day and a couple of nights to rest in a hotel in Durban before meeting the ship. It was still quite stressful packing our cabin in a couple of hours and preparing for the move as soon as we arrived. We had missed all the pre-move briefings that the other crew had gotten during the sail from Togo. All of our personal things that we would need and all of the departmental equipment and supplies, computers, etc., etc. that we would need to live and do all the administrative tasks slated for this time at Appelsbosch were loaded onto trucks and we piled into ship vehicles and buses and convoyed out to Appelsbosch, through the hills and past round Zulu houses. We arrived on moving day at Appelsbosch in a cold drizzle and unloaded and unloaded! We all slept well that night! We have been living at Appelsbosch (our home away from our ship home, away from our home in North Carolina) now for nearly a month. Our family lives in the 4-story building below.There have been many challenges here as the college has been little used over the past four years and many of the systems here have needed work. The staff helping us here are doing a great job. We have people working security for us and running a small tuck shop for us and working to keep the water running despite the current shortage. We rarely have both hot and cold water and sometimes none at all, but there is hope that that will improve with increased rainfall. It has been unusually dry this month. We had lots of trouble with internet access initially and phones didn't come for about 3 weeks, but things are running pretty well at the moment. We have a gym at Appelsbosch with badminton, a trampoline (albeit a bit hazardous), pool tables, and basketball goals. The kids also have lots of trees to climb in and plenty of space to run and scooter and play. I think it has been a little of a transition for the ship kids who haven't had such space and freedom for so long. We have already had two broken arms; one from a skateboarding accident and the other from falling out of a tree. The latter was a bit scary as there was a significant concussion as well. The kids have found lots of little brown chameleons to play with and cool bugs like praying mantises. Bethany named the mantises inhabiting our dorm "Manny" and "Paul". We are sometimes awakened very early in the morning by the very loud cattle just outside our dorm. I often laugh at how vocal they can be. The walls of our dorm rooms are a bit bland in institutional grey, but we have managed to make things pretty homey. The mattresses are not high quality so Jenny and I each have our own crater to sleep in (you can probably see that in the photo below), but it really isn't too uncomfortable.Bethany had a birthday party about 3 weeks ago and the girls had a big time. They bobbed for apples, drew angels and added the wings blindfolded, played musical chairs and ate cupcakes. Jenny has been busy working on policy and procedure writing for the hospital. I worked in the galley mostly cutting up vegetables and meats (and sometimes my fingers!) for the first few weeks we were here, but I'm pretty heavily engaged with doing photography for the P.R. department now. I've been to the ship several times to take pictures and to Pietermaritzburg to cover one of Mercy Ships' programs there, a mental health training class attended by pastors and church leaders from all over the KwaZulu-Natal province. They were learning about working with children on the day I visited.We also had a wedding here a couple of weeks ago. Two of our fellow Mercy Ships crew members decided to get married here, so everyone pitched in and we had a wedding. He is from northern England and she is a fellow North Carolinian. It was a beautiful day and a lovely wedding. I photographed the event, but had a corrupted flash card and lost all the photos (a photographer's nightmare!). Fortunately, after downloading some recovery software, I was able to recover all the photos! Thank the Lord for that! Our family has also been privileged to see lots of other beautiful things like the Southern Cross in the night sky and the Drakensberg Mountains. We had a long weekend this past weekend so we visited the Champagne Valley in the Central Drakensberg (home of the Drakensberg Boys Choir). It was very nice to get away and just be a family for a few days. We stayed in farm cottage owned by a very nice couple with a son-in-law from Dallas. There were lots of nice birds on the farm, including fluffy chickens and even a weaver bird or two.We saw birds of prey at Falcon Ridge, learned about honey bees and ate honey cheesecake at a place called Scrumpy Jack, went zip lining on a small zip line course (David loved that!) and went on a one hour horse ride. None of the kids had ever ridden horses before. Bethany has since decided that she wants to work at some horse stables and own her own horse (oh boy, here we go!) We also did some riding around to look at the scenery (the adults enjoyed that, but the kids grumbled about being in the car.)We had a lovely family weekend in the "Berg", but traveling around carries a little stress with it in that security is a definite concern here. We don't travel at night if it can be avoided. Against the backdrop of apartheid and with the recent increase in racial tensions, we feel a bit vulnerable here. Whites are in the minority here making up only a little over 10% of the population as I understand it, and the indigenous people (Zulu primarily) here seem much cooler toward us and less willing to enter into conversation than what we generally experienced in West Africa. I'm a bit uneasy about that, but mostly just saddened by it. Considering the racial climate, it is easier to understand how people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela might have been shaped by their experiences here. It is nice to be able to easily communicate though, but there are so many cultural issues that we don't yet understand. South Africa is a real mind bender of a place! I am finding it continually difficult to wrap my head around the economic disparity that I see here. It is not uncommon to drive into a city and see very nice houses right next door to corrugated tin and mud shacks with no water or electricity. Often its that juxtaposition that is overwhelming to me. Poverty is so prevalent in West Africa and you see economic disparity there, but it just doesn't seem as deep, maybe, or as widespread. I hope to become more educated about all of this as our time here wears on.

John