I Have the Best Parents EVER!!!

Well, since I have come down with strep, I pretty much have had a rough week. We have been without water (minus about a 2 hour break from 5-7am today) for about 36 hours, power has been going on and off for the past 24 hours, and it has been well over 100 degrees every day. I missed work on Monady, was sent home early on Wednesday, and sent home early again today. I just want to be healthy again! I started the antibiotics today, so hopefully they'll kick in very soon.

When I got home from work today, I was feeling pretty blue and just wanted to go and lay at Sarah's house and be mothered...then in walks Brad, with a care package from home!! It's amazing how quickly that changed my mood. I was jumping up and down, squealing, and was cheering for everything that I pulled out of the package. Brad said that it was as fun to watch me go through the package as it is to watch a kid open presents on Christmas morning.

Now Dietra is making me chicken noodle soup :) I love my roommate. She takes such great care of me. Two of the students stopped by the house a couple of minutes ago the "Get Well Soon" balloons :) How sweet is that??

Ok, funny kids story of the day...I wish I could take my video camera to class and just follow one of the boys, Suhail, around. This kid cracks me up. He's rarely uses walking to get from A to B. He dances. For real- he makes up raps and dances around every where he goes, usually trying to throw some ninja moves in while he's at it. He hugs me multiple times a day, but they're always followed by him head-butting my hips. He is one of the funniest kids I have ever come across. I don't have any great quote today, but I hope the image of Suhail is enough to make you smile.

I hope you are all doing well, and I just ask for continued prayer for health. It is taking its toll.

It's a good day (despite no water and still being sick)!

Dumelang!

That's right, peeps. I'm learning Setswana. Get used to it. In fact, I am about to head off to my second class in just a few minutes. Since the internet is working at the moment, I thought I'd let you know how today went.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was the substitute teacher for the Standard 2s today. It was a great morning. They are learning multitplication and division, reading comprehension, cursive handwriting, and French (I did not try to teach French, don't worry). Miss Jenny left some assignments for them to work on, so I figured it would be a fairly quiet day. Nope :) They sure kept me busy! We had fun, though. I taught them how to play Thumbs Up, 7-Up (or is it Heads Up, 7-Up?), which they loved. It was cute; they were literally jumping up and down with excitement and couldn't stop grinning. One of the kids said to me, "Miss Ashley, I wish you were our teacher every day!" I'm sure they would say that to pretty much anyone, but it still made me feel good.

Now I am hanging out back at the house, resting up a bit. Then off to Setswana class, then a quick dinner, then church tonight.

Oh, I decided that I am now going to post my favorite quote from the kids each day. Today's winner is Prince (ADORABLE boy in Standard 1). "Miss Ashley, did you brush your teeth this morning?" "Yes, of course. Did you?" "Nope!!" (as he runs away smiling). what???

Hope ya'll have a great day!

Updates. Don't Know How Else to Title This :)

Howdy folks!

It's been an interesting couple of days here at the ranch. I was feeling a bit better on Tuesday, so I went back to work. As I was getting ready for work, I heard this weird clicking sound and looked around and realized that our power cord had started on fire! What?? I was glad that we were still there to deal with it, since it was under Dietra's bed. Odd way to start the day.

It was fun to see my kids again; they were so well behaved! I think I only saw one kid cry the entire time I was there (usually we get a good 6 or 7 criers per day). Our afternoon plans were cancelled, so we had the rest of the day off.

One of the interns, Brad, had left the day before with Pastor Jerry (LBOM founder) and a couple of other pastors from LBOM to go visit some of our branch churches throughout Botswana and Namibia; they were supposed to be gone through Thursday. We found out Tuesday afternoon that they had been involved in a very serious car accident; they had been broadsided by a dump truck filled with sand and the driver never even stepped on the brakes. There could have been (and probably should have been) some incredibly serious injuries; miraculousy, there weren't any outside of soreness. They were flown back to Maun last night, and are doing well.

Today I woke up feeling much worse than yesterday, but I went to work anyway. Poor kids. My voice is almost completely gone, and it seemed to really freak out the little boys. The girls were really sweet, though. Lots of hugs, kisses, and back rubs :)

They sent me home early today. Tomorrow I am supposed to teach the Standard 2 (like 2nd graders) while their teacher is at a conference. Should be fun! Just hoping I am feeling a whole lot better by then- or at least have a working voice.

Oh, I also cut my foot today. Sarah calls it my initiation to Botswana.

I hope you're all doing well! Love!

Sick, but on the mend

Well the bug that has been going around the intern house finally caught me, and I was stuck in bed all day.

I am feeling better now for the most part, so I am very eager to get back to the school tomorrow. I miss my kids!! Josiah (who helps the PE teacher and works with all the students in the school) told me that my kids were asking him about me and they prayed for me to feel better :) A couple of other people told me that my kids were asking about me and saying that they missed me...I can't wait to see them!

That is all. Love!

Oh, and go Vikes and Twins. I kind of wish I was in MN to enjoy our sports teams

Namibia Trip and Back to Reality!

Hi everyone! Well, it is Sunday night and all of us interns are pretty much crashed. We had a FANTASTIC mini-break to Namibia this week. Usually they reserve this trip for the end of the internship, but this past week was a holiday week for Botswana (their Independence Day), so the timing worked better to do the trip now. Side note: whenever I say Namibia, I think of that stupid Activia commercial and hear Namibia to the tune of Activiiaaa!!. There. I hope I ruined it for you too :)

We set off at 4:30am Wednesday morning in the Corolla (5 of us with pillows, cameras, duffel bags, etc.). It's a 13 hour drive to Swakopmund, which is a cute little German colonial town on the coast of Namibia. We LOVE Swakopmund. It really has the best of everything- the ocean, green grass, sand dunes, mountains, and the desert. So cool. So beautiful. We pulled into our hostel around 7pm, went to dinner at 9pm, then went to sleep immediately.

Thursday morning we went quad biking (4 wheeling) in the dunes. Now THAT was fun! We spent two hours driving up and down the dunes- it felt like a roller coaster. It was so gorgeous, too. The dunes looked like paintings; almost too gorgeous to be real. Ok, now I have a story that is a little bit long, but pretty awesome. Please be patient with it.

While we were in town that morning, exchanging $$, Sarah was busy texting her husband, who was back home. About 30 minutes before we left to go quad biking, Kevin sent a text saying "I just got a word from the Lord that you guys need to pray for protection. Especially Ashley, and she is going to have to speak it out for herself." As soon as she read it to us I thought "oh crap." So we said a group prayer for safety, then I prayed for extra protection and wisdom in any situation that comes my way (I thought this was God's way of telling me not to go sky diving.) Well, about an hour or so into the quad biking, we had an "incident." Before we started out, the guide went over some hand motions and safety tips. He also had us drive in a single file- the order was: the guide (Jonny), Josiah, Sarah, me, Dietra, and Brad. Poor Brad. We made the best driver stay in the back. We had been driving for about an hour, when I saw Jonny stop, motion to Josiah to come along side him stay there while he went over the dune. Josiah thought he just was telling him to slow down, so he followed Jonny over the dune. I thought that was a little strange. but Sarah followed Josiah. As she went over the dune, I saw her back wheels were up in the air, and I hesitated because that just didn't look right at all. All of a sudden, my bike stopped. I couldn't get it to move forward at all, so Brad helped me reverse it. After we got it out of that spot, the bike refused to go back into forward gear. We were wondering why they hadn't come back to check on us, so we walked to the top of the dune and realized that they basically went off a cliff. Jonny had seen some quad bikers down there earlier and was going to check on them. We definitely weren't supposed to follow. Josiah and Sarah each had become airborne on their way down, and Josiah almost flew over the front of his bike on the way down; his chest hit the throttle as he was going forward, and that's what prevented him from flying off. Sarah said thought that this was it- her time had come. Yet, they ended up ok. After we saw that drop off and we knew not to go over it, my bike started working again. Answer to prayer? I think so!! Also, one other cool part of the story...one of the kids out here (Mason, who is 12 yrs old and the son of the directors of LBOM) told me on Tuesday that he was going to be praying really hard for me when I go quad biking, because he had a feeling I was going to fall off my quad bike (and to all my friends back home, no, he does not know how accident prone I was back in the states). So I just want to thank everyone back home for their prayers; we really believe that prayer works and we saw it in action while quad biking.

On Friday we had the option to do whatever we wanted. The guys decided to lay low and just hang around town; Dietra went deep sea fishing; I went sky diving!!! Now THAT is the experience of a lifetime. I have always wanted to do this, and when I found out that it was an option on this vacation I couldn't pass it up. Someone from the company picked me up around 10am, picked up the other guy skydiving (a sweet German kid named Bastion), then off we went! We drove out about 20 minutes to the desert, and pretty quickly took off. My knees were a little weak when we saw the plane. It was so small!!!! Bastion and I looked at each other and just started laughing. The flight up was very cool. We were overlooking the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. We flew to a height of 10,000 feet, then Dries (my tandem jumper) and I took off. It was AMAZING. The free fall lasted about 30 seconds, but you don't feel like you're falling at all. It just feels like you're floating over the Earth. It was so cool. The entire jump probably lasted about 5 minutes. I got to steer the parachute for a little while- that was fun :) I was so giddy during the entire event that I could barely contain myself. I'm telling you- if you ever have a chance to go sky diving, do it!

When I met up with Sarah and the guys, we headed over to the ocean to enjoy the view. I was standing on some rocks to take pictures and got blindsided by a wave- my pants were soaked from the knees down. Ended up walking around town barefoot for the next 3 hours. Lovely. Yep, I caught a cold. The rest of the time in Swakopmund was spent shopping, eating, and drinking white chocolate mochas. I nearly did a cartwheel when I found a cafe that new what those were. It's not easy to find treats like that in Africa!

We took off Saturday morning at 5am and drove through the day, making it back to our place just after 7pm. I stayed up pretty late trying to upload my sky diving video, but we kept losing internet connection, and so the upload never quite worked right. I am still working on that and am very excited to have that up for you to see :)

Yes, back to reality. Reality is pretty darn good here in Africa :) The only pitfalls are that water, power, and internet tend to stop working quite a bit. The water was off all day yesterday and didn't start working again until midnight; internet has been on and off since Tuesday. I have become a pro at flushing a toilet when there is no running water. Oh, the things you learn!

Today was great. I am really beginning to love Sundays here. I started out the day by laying in bed, almost in tears because I was so tired and felt so sick. I forced myself out of bed and went to church. It was tough for me today; I felt so out of it, could hardly understand the preacher (they always have someone up there translating into Setwswana, and today I kept expecting him to translate the sermon into English); the pastor was talking so fast I could hardly understand anything! I participated in the prayer line this week for the first time; they invite people up for prayer halfway through the service every week, and there are always dozens of people lining up to be prayed for. I am partnering up with another lady from the church to be prayer partners. I am really excited about this; I talked to her husband after church, and he is in charge of discipleship and the prayer line. He had been praying for her to become more involved with both things, and now that I am there to work with her, she is ready to do it. He couldn't stop grinning. It was really cute :)

After church, we broke up into small groups to work with the people who are in the discipleship classes. I partnered with Abigail and I actually led the training today for a man who just became a Christian a week ago. Talk about rewarding!! I LOVE working with this ministry. Even though it means we wont get home until sometime between 1:00-2:00, it is something I can really get excited about.

Now we just got back from dinner with Kevin and Sarah. I am ready for bed and for the week ahead! It should be a great week- back to a "normal" week for me. I can't wait to see my kids again :) I missed them!

I am still working on getting the sky diving video up; pictures from the trip will also be posted shortly. I hope you're all doing well! Keep praying for us. We see how well it works!

UPDATE: Pics are up!