Sunday, February 19, 2012

South Africa 2012 - Day Ten

Day 10 - His People, Blue Peter and the Beach

One thing I have found is that it is seldom that one cannot find a church to go to. On this Sunday at the end of the first week for the English contingent we joined Dad at his church, His People, in downtown Cape Town. After a time of worship I went to run the kids Sunday school.

You are never quite sure what you are going to find when you are visiting a church. There were only about 20 kids ranging in age from 4 to 12 and throughout the time with them they were all very well behaved (which I later found out was not normal). It seems as though the three standard responses of “God”, “Jesus”, or “the Bible” to every question works in South Africa too. The only real issue I had was with one of the Sunday School teachers decided to give one of the children a cracker and a drink. Almost instantaneously the kids just got up in the middle of one of my object lessons and crowded around the teacher. Now this was the teacher I had locked in thumbcuffs and so he may have just been retaliating.

One of the issues you have when you have 21 people traveling as one group is trying to coordinate leaving somewhere and communicating what is happening next. For some reason no-one seems to let me know and so I just follow. Today after church the cars went in 2 different so I just had to decide who to follow. Eventually we all met back up and headed to a restaurant called Blue Peter for lunch. The meal was served in African time (slowly) but was good. Then we had another problem of the “21-people-in-a-group” syndrome. For some reason the
restaurants cannot separate orders into families and so when the bill comes we are left to go item by item through the bill. This only took 30 mins to do and it was only that short because I just agreed to pay what ever was left. But finally we were done at the Blue Peter (where all I could hear was “Down Shep” - for those who grew up in England back in the 70’s). With the restaurant on the beach the kids were ding to go down onto the beach. However to me the beach was too crowded and didn’t look clean. Max, Matt, Hunter and Rory decided to go boogie boarding. You know this is a questionable decision when they tell you that a wet suit is highly recommended. Hunter said that you got used to ice cold water once your feet and hands had gone completely numb as long as your head didn’t go under. If it did then it felt like your head was going to explode. For me I could not understand spending time at this beach when 2 days earlier I had spent an hour walking down a pristine beach with no-one on it. Anyway most people stayed while a few of us left for a warm swimming pool.

Tonight was a quiet night in, eating leftovers and resting up for potentially one of the highlights of the vacation, an overnight Safari.

Luke 18:16 - “But Jesus called them to him, saying, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God”

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