Oodi and Relaxing

It is difficult to find the time to blog, or to remember to blog. It is so easy to get caught up in what is going on here, and because we keep so busy there isn’t much time to blog. But today we are having a relaxing – lazy Sunday. We tried to go to the open Baptist church in Old Naledi. This is the church that Champ – the coordinator or the Tlamelo project – and all the kids from the Tlamelo project attend. However, we got a late start and couldn’t find a taxi that knew how to get us there, and we didn’t know where it was. So we will try next week.
The past two days have been very busy. Friday (after going to Mokolodi on Thursday) we tried to attend another service opportunity appointment at a local women’s shelter - but our appointment contact was not there. So we then caught a combi to head to the combi station to then head to the Tlamelo project to work for the day. However the combi didn’t take us to the combi station that we were familiar with. Turns out the combi station is much much larger than we thought and we were just on the other side of the station – also the bus stop side. So we figured how to cross this bridge and find ourselves where we needed to be. In case I haven’t described it yet they combi station is like streets and parking lots of combis lined up to go to different places. Very little organization and very confusing.
Soon we made it to Old Naledi – and then bought some fat cakes, which are deliciously fried dough – and then went to help cook for Tlamelo. The cooks there gave us sacks of meat to be chopped up. Real quick I got comfortable chopping and touching this raw meat. No biggie!

Another great day at Tlamelo – we helped serve all the food, wash their hands, played with all the little kids, and helped clean up. I have fallen in love with a little girl – Charity. She is so sweet and loves to be held. She doesn’t smile all the time, but when she does she lights up the world. And her big brown eyes are gorgeous.

Friday night was black out night – when the Gaborone region power is shut off for a couple hours to conserve energy. It was shut of from 6pm – 9pm. Afterwards we made chicken parmesan and spaghetti! YUM!
Saturday we woke up early and went out to a little town / village – Oodi. Here we went to Oodi Weavers. This is a little shop where these women spin the wool, dye it and then weave it into beautiful artwork on table mats, table runners, and wall hanging artwork. All the work is done from the weaver's mind, no patterns. I am having a hanging piece of it custom made for me of a scene in Africa with elephants! We go back to get it in 2 weeks! Later in the night we went out to Bull’n Bush for dinner. It was a very neat restaurant. We ate outside (with space heaters) and if felt like we were in a resort area. It was very nice and relaxing. I had pizza and then chocolate cake!!! They also had little fire pits that we hung out at while we waited for our taxi.

Today we are just relaxing and then we are going to catch a movie later!
Things are going good. I can’t believe that tomorrow we will have been gone 2 weeks. It has been flying by. The kids that we work with are so amazing.

We can already tell that they are going to be hard to leave. I am still missing you all! I hope everything is going well. I am thinking of family, friends, and Chad often.