Why I feel the need to blog right now instead of going to be is beyond me. I guess I feel a little bit obligated to report about my weekend here since I am always telling the people (well, you readers out there) that I dread the weekend. (Man, that's so sad, but definitely true to the bone).
I did manage to find some good this weekend, which is awesome since lately it seems I spend my entire weekend hating life. Yet, this weekend was still an emotional roller coaster in the sense that one moment I was perfectly fine while the next I definitely wanted to find a way to get away from BCI and maybe South Africa in general (but I can't be too sure since I am not always sure what is BCI and what is South African culture).
Here's basically what happened this weekend. The good and the bad and the ugly.
The Mission's Meeting:
Since I somehow ended up as a part of the mission's team here, I have to attend a lot of meetings. Hooray. So on Friday night Kyle and I found ourselves sitting in the closed bed of a truck, heading to a meeting in Pinetown, which is about 45 minutes away from Pietermaritzburg. We got completely lost and were rather car sick from the fumes and the hills by the time we got to the meeting. Also, we missed supper and for some reason they wouldn't let us eat while the meeting was going on (even though it was mostly watching Dvds). I still don't understand why since it was a carry in/pot luck type of thing. However, the good side of this story was that it was rather interesting – for the most part (until the end when they started talking about 2010 and handing out sports related tracks. Yippy). For the most part, it wasn't bad. It would've been great if they would've let us eaten dinner. Also, this thing went on forever. The PMB group actually left before it was over and still didn't back into town until 10:30.
Weekend noise:
I've discovered that sleeping on the weekends is kind of a joke. We also get woken up by the neighbors playing ridiculously loud African music or by some type of BCI event going on. This Saturday morning it was both. This weekend, BCI hosted a men's breakfast and a women's high tea. Since we females didn't have to go to anything on Saturday until tea time, we took the obvious route of trying to sleep in. It was basically worthless. At 7:30 LOUD MUSIC started coming from the men's breakfast tent. Oh my goodness I wanted to strange something with that happened – or happens as I should say. I try and take a nap on Sundays too. I am not sure why I do that since it never ever works out the way I plan. Noise, noise everywhere. Peace and quiet is hard to come by here.
The High Tea:
The tea time was ok. Actually Gabby, Connie, and I ended up at a table with only two other girls. And ironically we drank our own tea we brought from the manse and ate the things that we brought with us. So, that was a little disappointing. But the nearby tables felt a little sorry for us so gave us some of their yummy food. It was amazing. That's a good part about living on the church's property. People like to give us their leftover food after events. It's amazing – sometimes really random (like after the Kids camp we got like a 4 gallon thing of this nasty juice which everyone hates except for Tim), but it's still nice nevertheless. Okay, so I guess that I should explain that this tea wasn't just a tea. No, BCI likes all their events to be exactly like church services. So Pastor Nina spoke during the tea and then there was an alter call. And this time, Pastor Nina deliberately called Gabby, Connie and myself up to the front to pray for us. It was a little nerve racking since I am not sure if they expected us to get "slain in the spirit" (which didn't happen) or not. So it's a little bit awkward. Actually, what Pastor Nina prayed over me has stuck in my mind all weekend. I don't even remember exactly what she said but it kept bringing back to the comment Darrell left on a previous blog. That this year isn't necessarily about anything specific, but maybe it's all about this process of becoming. Something to think about at least…
Clean up crew:
As we anticipated, we RJers had to tear down everything – basically by ourselves. After we hauled all the chairs back into the church, we started setting them up only to find out (close to when we were about finished) that the chairs with the brown legs belonged in the sanctuary while the chairs with the grey legs were to go in the children's church. Okay these chairs are the same type of chairs. The only thing different is the color of the legs and you can barely tell. Oh man, we were all so pissed off at that point and completely exhausted. I could've thrown a chair at someone.
All day Church:
Since we got recruited into doing this ridiculous skit for the love meal last week, we had to perform it for the entire church. This meant going to all three services. Oh. My. Gosh. To make things even more long and drawn out, we had to go to the leader's meeting, which was another 2 hours of church relatedness today. (Actually the meeting wasn't all bad since I brought my notebook and worked on my novella the whole time. Ha. Ha). I am very ready for break though. But then I realize that that won't happen until July 2010. Actually, the best part of church today happened during the second service. The 10:00 service is the Zulu service and so in addition to the same songs sung at the 8:00 service, some Zulu ones are incorporated as well. Being very North America, it is very challenging to sing these songs. However, today one of the Zulu songs was the chorus to "We praise Thee O God." (The chorus is the part that goes "Halleluiah, thine the glory, etc.) The melody was a little bit different (so much in fact that it wasn't until the second time around that I noticed what song we were singing) but it was awesome. Worshiping together today in Zulu and in English was absolutely beautiful. I am not sure even how to describe it, besides the obvious: that God was in that place and moment in time.
Suppertime:
I've mentioned before that suppertime is probably some of my favorite times here. So much in fact that I feel like when I get back and people ask me what I did in Africa, I'll say "ate food." Awesome. This weekend has been true to this statement. After Saturday's long day of events and clean up and today's busy church schedule, we found ourselves crashing in our house with heaping helpings of pizza (Saturday) or baked mac and cheese (tonight) accompanied with exhaustion and general sense of relief that the day is over and done. Alleluia
Well, I managed to write a book. Thanks to all you champs who made it this far. Next time, I'll try to keep it short.
Ha. Okay.
Ha. short? ok.
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