"Blessed are the flexible, for they shall never be bent out of shape."
We've been practicing flexibility here in South Africa as timelines change due to surprises and delays with the many projects that have been taking place on the Africa Mercy during this shipyard phase. There have been and will be many contingency plans in place so that we will be as prepared as possible to sail away to Sierra Leone and begin our 2011 field service when all the work is completed.
One of the highlights of the past month has been the presence of a very flexible Mercy Team. About 15 people from all over the world (including Margie from Hamptonville, NC:) answered a plea for help and came to work alongside the crew of the M/V Africa Mercy as we tackled the huge task of cleaning the vessel. Five months in shipyard can result in a pretty dirty ship! Deck 3, where the hospital is, happens to be a high traffic zone and needed a lot of scrubbing up! The Team came in and blessed us with their great attitudes and willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done. They joined the Appelsbosch cleaning team that began travelling daily to the ship (a total of 4 hours riding per day!) on 4 January. The last trip was this past Friday, 28th January, for a total of 19 work days times 3 or 4 shuttles full of people each day. It was exhausting, but very rewarding to be a part of the clean-up crew. I did some figuring and discovered that from the 4th to the 27th, I travelled a total of 64 hours to help and direct the efforts of the team. Whew!!
Below are photos of the stripping and waxing of the hospital, courtesy of our Swedish OR nurse, Anneli Persson.
We love being a part of this team that proves that "many hands make light work" as every one has pitched in to help one another! And hats off to all those who lived on board and worked tirelessly, hours on end in the hot temperatures to keep us as close to schedule as possible! What a team!!! We were able to be reunited and all returned to live on the ship on Saturday, 29th January. How happy are we? Very! And although there is still some work to be done to get us on the open ocean and headed to Sierra Leone, we're almost there. We hope to be on our way next week.
With flexibility,
Jenny
We then made positive images by scanning the negatives into the computer and inverting the tones in photoshop. The students got some really amazing photos with the pinhole cameras they had made! We also did classes on some history and basics of photography, depth of field, ISO, white balance, and basic artificial and studio lighting. The P.E. teacher has been working with the Academy kids on doing some gymnastics and they did a nice demonstration for everyone here in early December. 
The last week of school just before Christmas break, the teachers and kids put together a Christmas play and many of us invited friends from the surrounding communities to come and watch the play with us. It was really fun! Bethany was Mary in the play, David was a wise man, and Joey was one of the angels. 
They also did signing to a song under black light. They all wore white gloves so their hands showed up really well. It was really cool!
All of the Academy kids (and teachers!) did such a nice job with the play! 
John
We spent an evening at a local farm house that some friends of ours were house sitting. We had a cook out (braai) and the kids played with the animals.
In mid November, just before the rats arrived, Jenny flew to Texas, along with several other management folks from here for a management conference at the Mercy Ships International Operations Center (IOC) near Tyler. Lots of good things happened during the conference and it was a great opportunity for staff at the IOC and crew on the ship to meet and foster relationships. She was there for a couple of weeks and had the opportunity to work in a two day layover in North Carolina on the way back. It was really great because she was able to spend most of Thanksgiving day with her family there before crossing the great pond again for Appelsbosch. In the midst of all of this, too, Jenny found out that she will be promoted to Operating Room Manager for our time in Sierra Leone. I'm confident she can do it, but we know it will be hard on her (and our family because most all of her energy will be poured into the O.R.).
We saw animals and had breakfast at the Hippo Haunt restaurant. The breakfast was incredible and the location fantastic. We watched a bright red male weaver bird wooing his mate,
saw a two foot long lizard, watched other birds and turtles and catfish all while we had breakfast there. No hippos, but that was okay; it was still a very memorable breakfast! We visited the Ngwenya Glass company and, contemplated how much we had enjoyed our 24 hours in Swaziland and continued on across the border to the north and back into South Africa. We spent three days in Kruger National Park and saw all of the big 5 except lions - elephants, water buffalo, hippos, and even a leopard. The leopard was particularly wonderful because they are more rare to see and I had been praying pretty hard that we would cross paths with one. 
One appeared in the road and we got to watch probably for a full minute as the leopard made its way up a river bed to the right of our car. We also saw a small creature that had quickly risen to the top of the kids' (and therefore our own) must see list - a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung across the road. 
We saw spotted hyenas with young which really pleased Bethany - the hyena is her favorite African animal. 
We stayed in rondavels (round houses with thatched rooves) at Kruger and ate dinner one night at the old rail station at Skukuza rest camp that is now a restaurant. We went on a sunset game drive and almost got charged by an enormous male elephant in musth! The driver knew what to do and after the elephant retreated I looked back at Bethany who had been thoroughly terrified by the event. All of the color had drained from her face. She wasn't the only one, though, that was nervous about the encounter. After that Bethany was adamant about staying a comfortable distance from the elephants. We encountered another huge male in musth walking down the middle of the road stopping all the traffic in both directions. We really wanted to pass, but simply were not interested in challenging the elephant for the right to use the road. No one else on the road was either. 
The elephant kept pushing us back until we came up with a plan. We backed up a quarter mile or so to the turn off to a watering hole beside the road figuring the elephant might be thirsty and stop off for a drink. We positioned our car for a quick escape in case he didn't turn in and waited. Soon he came lumbering (do-de-do) down the road and turned in to the watering hole. Success! Then we went down the road we wanted to and that was a good thing because it was further down that same road where the leopard had appeared. We had great adventures during our three days at Kruger. I never thought we would ever have the opportunity to go on a real African safari together as as a family. That was a great blessing! 
We spent a day traveling up to the Blyde River Canyon area. We visited the Pinnacle (a cool rock formation) where David found a toad in the bushes.
We visited God's Window (a lovely view from the escarpment), Wonderview (another nice overlook), Burke's Luck Potholes (interesting rock cavities made by the river and waterfalls), The Three Rondavels (a beautiful view of the Canyon area with three rock formations that look like the typical round houses of the area), 
and Lisbon Falls. Nearly every spot had its own government toll and its own craft market stalls so everyone was taking the opportunity to make some money from the tourists. It was a long day, but we took in some amazing scenery! We were sad to leave the area less than 48 hours after we arrived, but we had to. We traveled to the Royal Country Inn in Dundee and slept in the nicest bed we had since we left our home in North Carolina. The following day we visited the historic battlefields of Isandlwana 
and Rorke's Drift 
and learned about those fateful days in January 1879 when the Zulu warriors wiped out a regiment (some 1,300 plus British soldiers) at Isandlwana. The following night, a small contingency of of 100 or so British soldiers held off the Zulu advance (about 4,000 strong) at the small outpost of Rorke's Drift a few kilometers away. Amazing history! The 1964 film "Zulu" with Michael Caine hardly does it justice in my opinion. Joey really enjoyed the battlefields. He's been really into military stuff these days. We had traveled for a week dodging hundreds of potholes over 2200 miles of South African and Swazi roadways and counting our blessings every step of the way. We had a great time getting away and being a family. 
We also got close to some lions in the lion enclosure that you drive into, but thankfully not close enough to lose a car bumper, which had happened to someone when our friends had gone to Lion Park. 
After visiting the lions we dipped candles at a candle shop in a nice town called Nottingham Road north of Pietermaritzburg. 
Then we headed out for 6 days in the northern Drakensberg mountains. We stayed at a place called the Tower of Pizza that originally was a tower, I think a silo, converted into a pizzeria and is now a much bigger restaurant and B&B. Our friend Miriam joined us for those six days. It was fun having her along. The three girls stayed in one rondavel and the boys and I stayed in another. We ate pizza almost every day, much to the boys' delight!! Imagine, a little slice of Italy in the South Africa mountains! Joey, Miriam, and I went on some really nice hikes. The best one was the Sentinel Peak hike, a hike up to the top of the escarpment, around Sentinel peak, 
up some really scary chain ladders, 
across the plateau and to the edge of the sheer drop at the top of the "Amphitheater" where Thukela Falls (the second or forth highest falls in the world depending on which criteria you use) plunges into the gorge below. 
Good grief what an incredible view - one of the best I have ever seen!! The three of us really enjoyed that hike despite the fact that we were past the point of exhaustion by the time we got home. It was a long hike and we had driven more than three hours round trip to the trail head. It began to storm violently up there as we were driving home, so we were really thankful that we were down and had had such nice weather for our hike. We felt bad for the guys we had seen preparing to overnight up there earlier in the day. The following day we all went on a short hike (which was all Joey, Miriam, and I could muster) to some San Bushman paintings and to the cascades in the Royal Natal National Park. The paintings were worn but interesting. The cascades were really nice; nice and cold too! 
We had a blast there swimming and splashing and exploring. The next day we all hiked up the gorge to see Thukela Falls and the Amphitheater from below - not as impressive as from above, but still pretty cool. At the end of the day, despite my fatigue, I took David and Bethany fishing at the pond a few hundred yards above our lodging and we were able to catch a bass and almost caught a second one. The kids loved that and Bethany talked to and petted the fish most of the way down the hill. As the kids were to sad to eat the fish themselves, we gave it to one of the Zulu guys who worked in the kitchen and he was absolutely thrilled. He cooked and ate it almost immediately and thanked us over and over! Fishing was a definite highlight for Bethany and David. None of us wanted to leave when it was time to come back to Appelsbosch on New Years Day! Before the drive home on New Years Day we went to Falcon Ridge so Miriam could see the first class bird of prey show they have there. We really enjoyed seeing it a second time. 
Then we went to the Didima Rock Art Center and learned more about the Bushman painting in the Drakensberg. David and Bethany were most impressed by the life size statues of Eland antelope that they have there. They loved pretending they were real and clowning around on them. 
We were really sad when our time away was over, but we had had such a grand opportunity to spend time exploring northeastern South Africa that we couldn't be too sad.
I was later named "The Great White Rat Hunter" by a colleague of ours after he had seen the photo. Later the same night, another rat found a trap and took the bait. I had buried three rats by morning. After that, there were one or two rat sightings and one or two other folks setting traps. I haven't heard of any more sightings of rats in the building in a couple of months. Perhaps they decided that the hope of finding food in our building was not worth the risk and have moved on.
There was also at least one small suitcase packed, perhaps shared, between the two stuffed animals and they were off on vacation just before Christmas with the Rolland family to points North of here. Well Theo, unknown to us, apparently fell out of the car at a petrol station in Swaziland. By the time we realized he was missing that night, we were far away and Theo was clearly on his own. There was much sadness at his loss, yet we hope he has fared well in his new country. Since then, a small rhino (pictured below) has taken up residence in Theo's old place. 
Such is life, I suppose; things change. I can't help wondering if Theo's disappearance had something to do with the way I had treated his rodent kind. Anyway, the rats are gone, three into eternity, some unknown number to greener pastures near Appelsbosch, and one wandering around Swaziland perhaps in the care of another loving child. Farewell beloved Theo. 
