Ben went into town on Monday for a big Global Fund meeting and got a great lead on a car. He stopped by the mechanic who Cabrini uses for a lot of their vehicles and he had two for sale. We are working with the mechanic to get a few issues taken care of and then possibly purchasing it. It is Suzuki SVU (similar to a Rav 4 but with full 4 wheel drive). We should find something out this coming week.
On Friday Ben went to Nelspruit, South Africa to drop off the sisters vehicle at the airport. In the meantime he was able to check out one of the malls. He said that if you didn’t know any better you would think you were in the US. It will make a great little getaway town if we need a feel for the US. He was also able to find some Gold Mountain sauce which we use in our Asian cooking. We have developed quite the spice/condiment rack since arriving! For the most part we have been able to find everything we needed/wanted.
This week seems to be the week of creatures! It rained most of the evening and night on Friday and Saturday brought forth a whole new world of creatures! It started with a (very brief) walk that Mikayla and I took after her nap. While walking bugs of all sorts were crawling over our feet and flying around us. Needless to say we turned around quickly and headed home! Then Saturday evening while Mikayla was taking a shower our house was swarmed by flying termites. By far the craziest thing we have seen yet! Thousands of these flying termites were flying around the house and 20-30 found their way inside the house. Sunday morning we woke up to find a porch full of their wings (which ironically look like helicopter seeds from the states). A lot gross and a little cool I guess!
Flying termites – Ben posted a video on Facebook if you want to really see how crazy they were!
We also found these guys in our front yard.
Not sure what this guy is…any guesses?
Giant African Land Snail – Steve we thought you would like these!
And we finally got a picture of one of my favorite birds this week. Needless to say it was a week filled with new creatures!
Of course the big rain on Friday meant we were without electricity for 14 hours or so! We have gotten pretty used to going without electricity, but 14 hours was a pretty long time. We were lucky in that everything in the fridge an freezer made it through the power outage okay.
One of the most exciting things to happen this week was we discovered that we now have 3G at home. I am not sure what all the means, but it does mean we have faster Internet which means we can do things like call people from our computers and occasionally video chat. It is still really expensive and the faster the Internet it is, the more you spend to be online. We were able to make a few phone calls to friends this past week. We haven’t done so previously because it is so expensive to call from our cell phones (around $1 for thirty seconds to a minute). It was nice to be able to call folks without having to wait for them to call us!
On Saturday evening our friends John David and Brittany continued our tradition of having our annual Halloween Party. We were sad to miss/host this year, but glad the tradition continued! Because we now have 3G we decided it would be fun to wake up during the party to "see" everyone. So we woke up at 3am and after a couple of failed attempts we were able to video chat with our friends. It was so great to "see" everyone and take part in the festivities a little. Our costumes were a little lame (on account of us waking up in the middle of the night), but we dressed up as a couple of sleepy heads! Mikayla even woke up to see her friends, although I am not sure how much she remembers!
We went for a brief walk one evening and it turned dark so Mikayla had to wear her "torch".
Tags: Africa, animals, friends, Halloween, weeks happenings