Some of you may realise that today is the Global Day of Prayer, and it even reached Opuwo. All the churches united for the day, marched to the soccer stadium and held a service there. It was really good to be part of this whole event here in Namibia!
Yesterday morning, having been woken at about 7.00am by Timona (who was looking for sweets), we decided to take a bag full of shoes (that Helen's sister brought over) and some football shirts (that Andrea sent over) and give them out to the kids of the paediatric ward in the Hospital.
It very nearly descended into absolute chaos but we managed to give away shoes to most of the children and, to those for whom we didn't have shoes that were the correct size, football shirts. We also managed to give out woolly jumpers to some of the babies in the ward as well - they were very popular, since we are now heading into winter time here.
Found this guy crawling around on the chain-link fence outside the house. He is an Armoured Ground Cricket, with a body length of about 3".
There seem to be a lot of them around now that the rains are over and we seem to see a lot of them on the roads
Initially we thought they were spiders so Helen is relieved to see that they are only crickets!
Pieter, the Town Mayor works for Every Home for Christ, and they have been doing outreach programmes to some of the villages around Opuwo for some time now. He invited me to go out with the outreach team for a five day trip last week, so I headed out to the bush for a very interesting experience. The purpose of the trip was to assess how to do follow-up in about 30 villages so we spent five days driving from village to village, talking to the Elders and the Christians in the villages, trying to find out what their needs where and how these could be met.
There were a lot of interesting discussions, mainly revolving around: what meats can a Christian eat, and are there any restrictions?; and if a man with three or four wives becomes a Christian does he have to get rid of all his wives but one? We also heard lots of news about new Church plants and how they are growing.
It was also interesting in that we camped in dry river beds, ate lots of maize porridge, cooked bread over a camp fire and was given a goat by one of the village Chiefs which we were able to kill/butcher/eat over a couple of days.
We also some some amazing scenery, as well as wild ostrich, springbok, jackals and a leopard.
