The Holidays

Week 8- The Holidays- Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

 Pictures to come!

Baby Dedications

On the 23^rd I was able to go to another set of baby dedications at Berea Baptist Church. I went with two of the other volunteers, Cassie and Renita. There were 5 babies from baby house 3 that were being dedicated. We were picked up and then went to get the babies from baby house 3. These are not the babies that I usually work with and it was actually my first time meeting them and seeing baby house 3. Renita has worked at baby house 3 a few times but not in the last month. It took a little time but the babies did warm up to us strangers after a little while. Once the dedications were done we walked over to baby house 2, which is right behind the church. Cassie and the other aunties gave the babies bottles and let Renita and I go back and sit through the rest of the church service. We went back to the baby house to help load the back in the car after church just as one of the local new stations was finishing an interview at the baby house. We were not interviewed but we could be on the news here tonight! You just never know what kind of surprises are going to come here!

Christmas Eve

We all had the day off so we slept in! Then I did a little cooking and cleaning. After lunch we all went and lied out by the pool for a while. It was so much fun to be able to say that we hung out by the pool on Christmas Eve. Then we showered and got dressed up a little more than shorts and t-shirts to go over to Candy and Brady’s house for a Christmas Eve party. Candy and Brady are missionaries from the States that have been here for just over a year. They have 4 kids between the ages of 13 and 6. We had pizza and Christmas goodies. We sat around and chatted for a while and then we were able to use some of their Internet to Skpye home. We finished the evening by watching Merry Madagascar. It was a great day spent in really good company.

Christmas Day

Here is a play by play of Christmas day because I know that some of you are waiting for it! I worked for the day and it was great to be able to spend the day with the babies, the volunteers and the aunties. We got the babies up in the morning and dressed them in new clothes. They were not Christmas clothes but they were clothes donated to the baby house by a company and all of the babies matched. They looked very cute all dressed up. The morning went on like normal with bottles, play time and cereal followed by their morning nap. After their nap and our teatime we got busy. We were delivered a turkey in the morning along with vegetables and potatoes. The turkey was already cooked and we just had to make the rest of the food. The aunties started the vegetables, zucchini, butternut squash, and potatoes roasting in the oven. They also started cooking some rice on the stovetop. We gave the babies their bottles. Once the babies had finished their bottles and the cooking was underway we got busy with a Christmas day photo shoot with the babies. First we got a few pictures with all of the babies in the baby house. We brought the toddlers upstairs and go the big babies and toddlers all lined up. Then we brought the small babies over and took a few pictures. After the pictures we took the small babies back to their room and took the toddlers back downstairs but the photo shoot was far from over. Everyone has ‘their’ babies. In whatever areas you work you become more attached to some of the babies and they become your babies. Everyone knows whose babies are whose. Because we have our babies we took a few ‘family photos’ with them. The Christmas tree is right near the fireplace so it was the perfect setting for some family pictures. Each of the volunteers had a turn with their babies and I played photographer with my new camera for the photo shoots It was so much fun and we got some very cute pictures. I also have my family picture with baby A, baby T, baby P, and baby L. I love it. Once the photo shoot was over it was time to feed the babies baby food. After lunchtime for the babies it was naptime for them and lunchtime for us. We had a great meal with all the vegetables, rice and turkey and complete with sparkling apple cider. Yes even me the picky eater found that zucchini and butternut squash are pretty good! We then had dessert of canned peaches with custard and homemade whipped cream, German cookies and a cake that was brought over in the morning. It was a great meal filled with excellent conversation about Christmas traditions. After lunch was cleaned up it was time to finish the day with the babies by giving them their bottles and playing for a little bit before bed. Once we were done with work we went back to Renita’s flat for the rest of the evening. We were planning to jump in the pool before we left to say that we went swimming on Christmas but it was storming and had gotten much colder out so we had to skip that part of the day. We had a dinner of junk food including cake, cookies and gummy bears. We then read the Christmas story in German and in English before watching a Christmas movie together, painting nails and drinking hot chocolate with candy canes. It was a different Christmas than I have ever experienced but it was a great day.  It was a Christmas that I will never forget.

The babies

This past week was my last week in big babies for at least the next month. In January I start working with the toddlers. I thought I would share a few more of the funny or sweet stories from the big babies recently.

-       Baby is A is a little girl around the age of 8 months. She is small is size but huge in personality! She is a happy baby and loves to play. We have recently started calling her the bully of the group and have had to talk to her about this. She is always crawling over to someone, she then crawls on top of the baby to pin her/him down and then proceedes to take the helpless baby’s toy away. He does this all day long. The baby next to her can have the toy that she wants but she will first find the place where the most babies are hanging out and go crawl all over them before she tackles the baby with the toy that she wants. When she crawls over all the babies she is not silent and sneaky about it either, she lets out her baby A roar. It is soooo funny. It is so hard to get made at her for being mean to the other kids because she is just so darn cute! She has the biggest most beautiful eyes and the most precious smile. Hopefully she will start to grow out of this phase but for now we will just keep pulling her off from other kids and talk about being nice instead of being a bully.

-       Most of the toys that the babies play with are plastic because they are the easiest to keep clean. We doe have some wooden toys and a few stuffed animals that are washed at least once a week. One of the toys that we found recently was at the bottom of a basket that we don’t use much. It was a little baby doll. It was just sitting on the floor the other day and baby T was crawling around. He came across this doll and just looked at it. He then would touch it but quickly pull his hand away and yell after he did. This continued for a long time and finally he just started to cry. We had to take the doll away from him. Not sure if he was just scared of it or thought it was another baby that had something wrong or what but it was funny. Baby T is not the only one to have a funny interaction with the doll. Baby Z started to cry the other day and we could figure out what was wrong. She had toys in front of her including the doll but was just not happy. Finally we picked her up and moved her. She was fine. Late on she started to cry again and we saw that she was looking at the doll. We brought it over to her and asked her if that is what she wanted and she started to cry harder. She is terrified of this doll. Needless to say the doll has been put back away for right now.

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

I have gathered that the New Year is a really big deal in South Africa. Everyone does something for the New Year and is excited to celebrate for at least a week in advance. For New Year’s Eve we all had the day off from work but we did not do much during the day. We did have plans for the night though. We went to a missionary family’s house for a party. It ended up being two missionary families and a few more young adults along with the 6 of us from Door of Hope. We had pizza and other goodies for the night. It is also one of the family’s traditions to make music videos. There are groups that get together and pick a song and put together a little routine to the song. Then they are preformed for the video camera. Once all the videos are made then everyone sits down and watches them all. The six of us made our video to Baby by Justin Bieber. The video turned out really funny. I would not be surprised if it ends up on facebook. We stayed until midnight and prayed in the New Year together. It was a really neat experience. We ended up getting to bed around 1am and had to be to work the next morning at 7am. I ended up getting about 5 hours of sleep. I started off 2013 working my first day in toddlers or the starfish program. So on five hours of sleep I went and cared for 8 toddlers for 11 hours. It turned out to be a really good day and I think that I will enjoy this month with them. They are a funny bunch of kids and I will have some great stories from them. It is fun to have kids that will respond with words. One of the little girls, X, always come up to you and says auntie and reaches up to you to be picked up. It is the sweetest thing and melts my heart and I just have to pick her up every time. There are a few kids that will also come up to you whining mama. It is heartbreaking when you hear it. You just have to give them a little extra loving when you hear it.

A Second Home

I was not sure when I got here that South Africa would ever feel like home but the feeling is starting. I have grown to love the babies, the aunties and the volunteers. The volunteers have become friends and even more than that they have become my South African family. We will forever share a special bond of serving here at Door of Hope together and I love that. No one will understand this part of our lives like each other. I am looking forward to the nest 4 months that I have left in this beautiful country!

Odds and Ends

-       Candice has arrived! She is a volunteer that will be here for the nest year and she is from Australia. It is fun to have another accent in the house. I am excited to get to know her and say that I have a friend in Australia now too!

-       It is HOT here. The past few days have been really warm. The babies and we are sweating up a storm. It has to be close to between 85 and 90 degrees I would have to guess.

-       Renita leaves on January 2. She is the volunteer from Germany. This will be the first really emotional goodbye for me. It will be hard to see her go. She has been here for six months. I have loved getting to know her and she will be missed around here very much.

-       I believe that the day after Christmas is a bigger holiday here than Christmas Eve is. We went to The Glen on the day after Christmas to get dinner and Internet for a little while. By 6pm when we got there everything was closed already except for Mugg and Bean and a few other restaurants. After dinner we walked around for a little while and found Santa’s chair so we took a few pictures in that before we went home for the night. It is crazy how much fun an ‘unexpected’ trip to The Glen is!

-       I am really missing the 24 hour Meijer just a stone’s throw away from home. The grocery stores close usually between 6 and 7pm here. It is tricky to always have transportation to get to one and be picked up before 7 pm unless it is a day off from work. I will be so thankful for my own vehicle and ability to get around when I get home. Such a little thing that I took for granted before I left.

-       The Cape Town countdown is on! 2 weeks from today we fly out for almost a week of vacation bliss! Cassie, Nicole, Katy and I are very excited for a little time away and to continue to explore South Africa. I can’t wait to a big body of water again and experience dreams come true when we go to Boulder Beach or as it has become known to me as penguin beach.

-       We have been passing our time here in the flat by reading People magazine…from 2010. We are catching up on the gossip from about 2 years ago. It is really comical to read these.

-       We got a package from Talitha. She was a volunteer that was here for about a month when I first got here. She is from the Netherlands. It was so fun to get a Christmas gift of goodies from the Netherlands.

-       On Sunday when I was working we were commenting that we were seeing a lot of white butterflies all day long. It was not long after that that thousands of butterflies appeared in the sky. They were everywhere. It looked like it was snowing there were so many butterflies. We have heard that this will happen again with the yellow butterflies.

I have recently read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 entitled A Time for Everything. This is what it reads in the NIV,

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.”

This is the wording that the Message uses,

“There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth:

A right time for birth and another for death,

A right time to plant and another to reap,

A right time to kill and another to heal,

A right time to destroy and another to construct,

A right time to cry and another to laugh,

A right tome to lament and another to cheer,

A tight time to make love and another to abstain,

A right time to embrace and another to part,

A right time to search and another to count your losses,

A right time to hold on and another to let go,

A right time to rip and another to mend,

A right time to shut up and another to speak up,

A right time to love and another to hate,

A right time to wage war and another to make peace.”

I have bolded the phrases in each passage that have especially stood out to me the past few days. It is interesting to see where the phrases line up and where they don’t. While reading this I started to continue it and write a few phrases that apply to my life right now.

a time to be in South Africa and a time to be in the States,

a time to work and a time to be off,

a time to be employed and a time to volunteer,

a time to be together and a time to be apart,

a time to have adventure and a time to rest,

a time for people to come and a time for them to leave,

I could have kept going and I plan to while writing in my journal daily. These verses and this exercise really helped me to see the importance for every moment that we are given. There really is a time for everything.

Happy New Year to you all! I pray that this year is filled with blessing for each of you. It has already started that way for me and I am excited to see what God has in store for 2013 because I have to believe it is much better than I can even begin to imagine!

Emily

P.S. I am blown away every time I get on the blog and see how many times it has been viewed. We have passed 1500 views already! Just a friendly reminder that I love to read the comments when they are posted, so don’t be shy!