Week One in Review

I’m trying to make this at least a weekly update. If I have time I will get to it a little more often. I can’t believe that a week has already gone by since I left Baltimore. So here is a recap of the past week for everyone.

On Wednesday I felt great—just a little tired but otherwise good. On Thursday morning I woke up early throwing up. That continued through the day, until they took me to the doctor. I had some sort of gastro-intestinitis thing going on. So the doctor gave me a shot and some medicine and I started feeling better by that night. Praise God it didn’t get worse and the doctor is a local that the Arthur’s have known for years—since they were missionaries here, and he didn’t charge anything for seeing him.

By Friday, I was feeling better and able to eat a little and get some fluids down. We had our second day of orientation. (The first I missed because I was sick). Our first assignment was to go into town and take fifteen pictures holding the camera at our waist or in front of us without focusing it or looking through the lens. It was a fun project. We drove the van into town and spent about thirty minutes walking around taking random pictures.

When we arrived back in the classroom, we loaded our pictures onto the computer and talked about what we had captured and learned. I put some of the pictures I took on facebook, here is the link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=372030&id=833070175&l=009baa33ac Later on Friday we went to the mall and to see the movie “Invictus,” it was an excellent movie about Nelson Mandela and the Rugby World Cup and the uniting of South Africa. The people here say that it is a very accurate portrayal of what occurred in South Africa after Mandela became president. That was about all that happened on Friday. On Saturday we went to the mall for a few hours, and then came back to relax a little.

On Sunday we went to Heritage PH Church. It was a lot like churches in the US. Brother Joe Arthur, one of the leaders here with us spoke and shared some more missionary stories. I have enjoyed listening to all the missionary stories so far and I know that there will be a lot more over the next several weeks. After church we went to the Turner’s home for a brai (I have no idea how to spell that, basically it was a cookout). Ha ha, how many times have I been to a cookout in January! We had some good food there and enjoyed getting to know everyone and some more missionaries.

That has been the past week in review. Today we started our first day of classes with Dr. Dalton. It was a pretty easy day; we talked about cultures, and missions and the books we are reading. Then we got some more information on our field assignments. I’m excited about traveling around here in South Africa and then in February I will be going to Bangladesh for four weeks.

I’m going to try and update this a little more often if I have time to. It’s a lot more communication that I have ever had before when I left the country. Oh, I finished reading Francis Chan’s Forgotten God the other day, a great book about how we (Christians) have forgotten about the Holy Spirit. I recommend it, you may already know a lot of what he says, but it is a good reminder at least it was for me.

That’s all for now—Chrystal