A Wonderful Weekend - By John

Yippee, my parents arrived safe and sound last Wednesday, bringing with them suitcase loads of goodies. A big, big thank you to all our friends and family who sent books, gifts and food articles. Now we have reading material for a long time, chocolate chips for a longer time (over 6 kilos!), and many happy feelings knowing we have been remembered, which last longest of all.

The biggest surprise was that my Dad brought a kilo of Cracklings, a kind of Menno breakfast comfort food made as a byproduct of lard rendering. If you know French food, it’s really like duck confit, but made with tiny pieces of pork instead of duck, kind of (that makes it sound very refined, eh?) Anyway, if you like it, you like it a lot, and I do. I never suspected that my parents would shlep Cracklings half way around the world. Yum yum, I’m willing to bet that I’m the only person in South Africa with Cracklings in the fridge.

This weekend we went “up north” to explore the northern part of Mpumalanga province.

We visited Blyde River Canyon (“third largest on earth”). Here is a snap of "the Three Rondevals", which are rock formations which apparently look like Swazi houses of traditional design.

We stayed overnight at the foot of the canyon in a nice place called “Aventura Swadini” which was very nice and in a spectacular seeting. You cans see from the pictures that the resort is surounded by these huge tall cliffs and mountains.

Sunday we visitied the “Cheetah Project”, which breeds Cheetahs for return to the wild.

The radio antenna is half way up, here are a few snaps.

Here is Vusi (of lawnmower fame) pointing up at the tower. The other Vusi (Sambo Vusi, the tractor driver) is standing next to him. The other guy works for Peter, who is putting up the tower.

This picture shows the radio tower (the silvery thing) being positioned on the water tower. This week we will hoist it up to its full height and weld everything into place.

Birthday Week - By John

Saturday was my first birthday in Africa, and it was a great day. It actually started on Friday. We had sixty teachers at the center, learning about how to be better teachers. They came from all over the rural areas, and many have little or no training, their main qualification being literacy and availability. A program at the school our girls go to called Penreach, endevours to give them greater skills, and by so doing benefit all of the learners they teach. In any case, I was called into the patio area where they were having lunch, and was rewarded with a cake and the whole bunch of them singing Happy Birthday in SiSwati.


Click here to download a short video clip (sorry Daryl, windows only).

On my actual birthday, I got up early and went for a nice long run, and when I came back breakfast was waiting for me. We also went out for dinner at a local Mozambican/Portugese restaurant, which was yummy, and the girls dressed up in their special "Dad" T-shirts Also, I got a bunch of nice happy birthday emails, thank you to all of you who remembered.

More Tech Talk
This week we are going to pick up a radio tower, which is the start of our major internet connectivity upgrade project. It just so happened that a couple of weeks ago we were touring a group from Mozambique around, and stopped at the airport (it has a thatched roof and is very interesting architecturally). By complete coincidence, we bumped into a couple from Mercy Air, a missionary aviation outfit just down the road from us. By another complete coincidence, we started talking about what they were up to and what we were doing, and they mentioned that they had an old radio tower that they didn’t want. Amazing, just the thing we were looking for, what a coincidence! Upon reflection, I believe it wasn’t a coincidence at all. God may move in mysterious ways, but in this case it was not so mysterious but pretty much in-your-face. So, this week we will go down to Mercy Air, disassemble the antenna, and start re-building it on top of our water tower. All this will allow us a line-of-sight wireless connection to Nelspruit, and from there into the internet. We are pretty excited about this gift. Stay tuned for pictures, pray for us not to fall off the antenna as we take it down and put it up again.

Short Snappers

• I encourage you to check out Ben and Holly’s blog (Click Here). Ben and Holly are a couple who are working in Northern Uganda with MCC, whom we went to orientation with. I feel Ben and Holly are doing amazing work, and to read their blog is moving. Toothpicks vs Dragons, what a great analogy. We are thankful for people like Ben and Holly who are really on the front lines and confronting human suffering that we cannot even imagine.
• Good news on the Lawnmower front. A local engineering firm/machine shop made a new drive shaft for us (for only about $60, from scratch, in one day!), and now the lawnmower works great! Vusi is a happy man, he gives me a thumbs up everytime he sees me.
• This week we’ve heard that Chuck may have to go to Canada on short notice because of family health issues. Please pray for the Stephens' as they deal with this issue.
• We have put in our visa applications for renewal, we are hoping that we get everything approved in the proper way, and for three years. The Visa regulations, particularly for volunteers like us, are very confusing. We showed our visa to the Visa Office in Nelspruit, and they told us that we would have to go back to the US to re-apply! MCC has hired an Immigration Consultant on our behalf, so we hope he can pull the right strings and get everything done right. For us it’s a case of waiting and praying. You pray too, please.
• Finally, my parents are arriving on Wednesday, and we are very excited to see them. They now have a nice bed to sleep in, courtesy of Flo from our Bible Study group,and we have a bunch of things lined up to do with them. This is going to be a real treat for us!
  

More Frogs! - by John

If you read the last post, you will know that we had some frogs in our house. This is not really so bad, compared to snakes, or scorpions, or water buffalo, but still, it's not something we are used to.

Today, we needed to to print out some documents on our new (not really, it's quite used) printer that we bought from church friends last week. For some reason, the printer kept jamming and wouldn't print out right at all. How dissapointing for us, we thought this should be a pretty reliable unit. Charlene called me at the office to ask me if I could take a look and see what was going on, so I came up to the house. After examining the outsides of the printer, I tried to print something and sure enough, the paper jammed. Hmmm, only one thing to do, take the back off the printer and find out whats going on. I clicked on the little plastic cover release thing, and the first thing I saw was a roll of paper, all scrunched up around the roller. "Better get rid of that" I thought. So I happily stuck my hand inside the printer, only to encounter something rather organic. YICKES! a frog had gotten into the printer somehow! Oh man, they didn't teach us anything about THIS in engineering school. I figured the frog must be dead, and one of its dead feet was caught under a roller, so I gingerly started to pull on it, when it decided that it wasn't dead at all ("I'm not dead yet!") and started jumping around the inside of the printer, under the paper tray, back out again, and with me groping around the printer trying to catch it. Eventually, it jumped out and into the kitchen, where Baby (the maid) got it outside with the help of a broom.

We tried printing again, and the first few pages were kind of slimy! I've heard of debugging a printer driver, but to send a frog in to do the job is kind of unexpected. I wonder if this is part of Hewlett Packards customer support service. Printer's working pretty good now, though.

Snapshots - by John

So, the blog entries are slowing down a little, and the people are complaining. At least, some of the people are. So, what have we done the last two weeks? Here’s a snapshot.

- A veritable plague of frogs. Seems that the conditions for frogs are just right, and we have seen hundreds of them, jumping around in our house. Well, maybe not hundreds, more like… three. Still, it’s unusual for us to see a frog jumping across the living room. Danica was startled to see this fellow on the toilet seat. Good thing the light was on when she went in and so she noticed it, otherwise things could have gotten squishy!

- The lawnmower is broken, again.This time the pulley isn’t staying on the drive shaft because the part that clamps the pulley onto the drive shaft isn’t the right size, or something like that.I think you must be getting very very tired of reading about this, but believe me, I’m getting more tired trying to keep the dumb thing running.Total running time last week: 10 minutes.Sheesh.

- We are in the Shwag business. If you don’t know what shwag is(or is it spelled schwag?), it's those corporate gifts, usually festooned with logos, that sales and marketing types like to give away in the misguided believe that a travel mug will somehow sway you to spend a whole-lot-o-bucks with their company. Anyway, this week Charlene is busy putting together a whole package of shwag, so that Chuck can give it to some Mozambiquean big-wigs at a special course in Maputo next week. We went down to the “Executive Gifts” store in Nelspruit to check out the selection, and found out that South African shwag is pretty much like North American shwag, and it is all made in China anyway. Of course, if MCC was putting together a shwag package, it would probably include fairly traded coffee, lentils, and the “More WithLess” cookbook.

- We visited a new nature reserve just outside of Barberton, about a half hour drive away. It is very undeveloped, including the roads. There was no map so we just kind of followed our noses down a main road, which quickly turned from concrete into gravel, and then into mud and stones. At one point we thought we were trying to drive up a steep hill on a road made of large rocks, and had to take two tries to make it, it was pretty exciting. We saw Zebras, Impalas and some monkeys way off in the distance. We also saw this guy, who is the most colorful grasshopper we have ever seen.

- How many Mozambiqueans does it take to plant a tree? If you do it the C4L way, as many as possible! I just learned about a C4L tradition, in that whenever there is a certain kind of course, they plant a tree. This year it is a Lime tree. One of the C4L Board Members comes out a gives everyone a special lesson in planting trees in arid conditions, and it’s quite interesting. Here’s a picture of the Learners themselves.

That’s it for now! Peace.