thursday-saturday

i promised to post more if it was possible, and this is the first time i have had internet access since last post, so i'm at least taking a step in the right direction. thursday was a really good day. we went back to zenzelee (the care center in the township of finetown) in the morning and spent time playing with the kids there until it was time to help prepare lunch. i was a part of helping to prepare the meal for the kids, which was a traditional meal that looked pretty good. i'm not a fan of mealy-meal, but the main dish was made of that mixed with kidney beans with some seasoning. i was mixing and stirring most of the time and the head chef told me that i would have to go home and cook for my mother because now i was so experienced. the hilarious part was that he thought that Lorie King was my mom because she was in there cooking too. we had a good laugh about that one later.
from zenzelee, we went to Uniting Reformed Church where we already had a relationship with the head pastor. Brian and i had the chance to meet the new youth pastor and it was a great meeting. we were really on the same page with most of our ideas and he has a real heart to reach the young people in the community. we mainly spent time getting to know each other during this time and we will be heading back for a meeting next thursday to do some planning and brainstorming together. while we were out at zenzelee, the education team from Central had their plans for the day fall through, so they weren't able to visit a school. because of this, they voted to spend friday in a school rather than making the drive with me down to my meeting 5 hours away with the regional youth director. since it didn't make much sense for me to get up and drive so long if i was only going by myself, i called and rescheduled this meeting for the next time we have a team around and i promised i wouldn't cancel next time. in retrospect, it was a good idea to spend friday sleeping in a bit and catching up on rest instead of getting up at 5 a.m. because we spend most every sunday making connections and working on building relationships and doing work, friday and saturday are our days off - i still usually wind up doing some planning and writing on those days, but not all day. so, my friday was a lot less packed then i thought it would be and i spent some time studying - i'm working on going through the book of John right now - and then Jason, Molly, and i watched the kids at night so that Brian, Lorie, Mike, and Carol could go out to a nice dinner with the team. I'm posting this at 11 on saturday and tonight the plan is to go catch a rugby game, so i'll let you know how that goes.