Despite All of Which, I'm Still Having a Good Time

Let me tell you what we're scheduled to do next week. We're dismantling and moving a little church in the township, starting a kid’s basketball program, going to Khayelitsha (the big scary township were everyone gets murdered), doing stuff with a local Bible School, and pouring the floor at the job site. Thing is, we've been doing most of these things "next week" almost since we got here. Generally we get to one or two of them each week.

How's the church coming, you say? Well, the church will have a big sanctuary in the middle and rooms around three sides. Above the side rooms will be a balcony for additional seating. In order to put in the concrete floor we need to dig trenches where the interior walls will be and then cover the ground with sand to even it out. The trench along the right side was originally dug by a backhoe (which mysteriously disappeared after the first week), the back side was dug by the Save Africa team with pickaxes and shovels, and the left side is not yet dug. After we dug the back trench the church people took a look around and said they thought the sanctuary was looking awful small. They hummed and hawed and decided to move them in a meter and a half. So Save Africa shoveled off the layer of sand where the new wall would be, dug new trenches on the side and back, filled in the old trench with the dirt, and sanded the top. Then the church people came back and said the side rooms are pretty small now (really, they are), and then the contractor came and said there's no way it'll work with the walls like this ("Everyone thinks they're a fucking engineer!") and we'll have to move them back out again. He says we're not allowed to dig anything until he talks some sense into the church people.

That's Africa. It's more funny than frustrating, really, but it means that we're low on work at the moment. So you guys can pray that we'll find good things to do. At the moment we're doing some sightseeing and renovations for the family we're staying with. Things are lovely.

On another note, I can't believe the Oilers are in the finals for the first time in sixteen years and I'm not in Edmonton. If you're having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this tragedy, it may help you to know that my greatest regret in life is not being old enough to remember the dynasty in the 80s. If we win the Cup again and I'm not around to see it, I may not be able to come home.

Finally, our African internet connection (which currently will not allow me to use gmail, windows live mail, or most pages at nhl.com, among other things) has recently become finicky about loading blogger.com. So if we disappear from the blogsphere for weeks on end, know that there is at least some chance that it's all the fault of our African dial-up internet (or "Satan", as I like to call it), although it's also possible that we've just become lazy.