South Africa 2011-2012

I had hoped my next post would be much sooner than this, but my computer got rolled over by the vegetable truck hours after my parents' departure for home (a very sad story) and is still being repaired, and it hasn't always been easy to get to a computer.

My Mom was here in South Africa for twelve days (March 1st-13th), and my Dad, four and a half days (March 9th-13th). We had a really great time together and had many chances to talk, which was good since we had a lot to catch up on! I got to show them just about everything about my life here. At least one of my parents got to see almost everything I do here: my mom got to go out collecting vegetables with me one day, she sold vegetables with me a few different times, and went to both the Monday and the Wednesday night home groups I go to every week. She also went to a Jesus Culture concert with me, which was memorable and a lot of fun. It probably wasn't something that would've occurred to either of us to want to do on our own, but the group we went with made it a blast. My parents both got to go to church with me one Sunday (my first Sunday singing with the worship team, incidentally enough). The three of us also got to do some fun touristy things like ride the zipline at Lake Eland (the longest zipline in Africa) and see some amazing animals at Pure Venom Reptile Farm.

While they were here they stayed with one of my co-workers at SDC, which gave them many opportunities to talk to him about the project: how SDC got to be where it is now, and where it's going. Along with that, we talked about ways that I could continue to be useful there. At this point I'm thinking that it doesn't make sense to start somewhere completely new for the next six months; I'm very needed here and there are marketing things I could do for the Co-Op that no one has had much time for yet, but which would really help us start to make money (something that hasn't happened much yet). I'm going to be working on starting a weekly vegetable bag system where customers can pick up a set amount of produce every week, starting active facebook and Twitter pages for the organization, and finding new volunteers who come specifically to work with SDC, among other things. I'm happy this is looking like the most feasible path at this point; I would have been willing to help start a new project somewhere else, but the friends I've made here and the way the work here is going made it a fairly easy decision.