The Angry American and Hello Kitty

This has been, by far, the strangest week we have had in Africa so far (and that is saying a lot).

Our 4th of July was completely different than usual this year (not terribly shocking, huh?). Saturday morning, we celebrated by blasting “The Angry American” (by far our favorite patriotic song) in our flat. We celebrated with an afternoon braai at the 8-week-team’s house. As this is not America, no one celebrates the 4th of July here, and nobody even knows it’s a holiday. It emphasized to us that the U.S.A. is not the center of the world, like we often seem to think it is. However, I have never been prouder to be an American.


Homemade decorations elevated our patriotism.


The “Hello Kitty“ in the title of this post does not refer to the animated Japanese pop-culture icon, but rather to our new teammate! Kitty arrived with a 4-week team this weekend, and we couldn’t be happier to have her! She will be here for 6 months, and is the only other person scheduled so far to be in Rehoboth after August. We are so grateful for her willingness to serve, and are excited to get to know her.

Wednesday turned out to be an extremely stressful exciting day. As Josh and I were walking to the youth center in the morning, we realized there was a police officer standing on every corner of a particular road. We asked one what was going on, and he said the president was visiting. That explained an enormous SWAPO rally that had taken place in front of our house the night before. While we were meeting with the 4-week team about some youth center stuff, we sat outside, cameras poised (the youth center is along this road). Two hours after his scheduled arrival, we were able to take some pictures of the motorcade. It wasn’t much, but this is Rehoboth, and we’ll take any excitement we can get.



The motorcade, complete with a dozen or so squad cars

The President's actual vehicle.

Within an hour, we found out we needed to move; this was completely unexpected, and we had no notice, but Africa just works differently. Glory to God, we had a different place to stay within 2 hours! It will work well for us, and we are just excited we have somewhere to live.

Since we were dealing with all of this, we weren’t able to lead the youth program as usual, but the 10 people from the temporary summer teams were there, and they did a great job. This bodes well for when we are in Arandis.

For the next 2 weeks, we will be staying in Arandis, where we will be doing some work for Hope’s Promise. We are not certain of the details yet, but we know that I will be doing some sort of counseling, and Josh will be doing some maintenance and repairs, and possibly some work in the schools. It will be an adventure, something that has come up only recently. We are looking forward to seeing how we get to serve, but also a little apprehensive because we aren’t sure of what we will be doing. Please be praying that we will be able to glorify God in whatever we are asked to do!