In other news...

I still love it here, but relationships are getting more complicated and I feel my foreignness more and more. I'm so thankful Robin is here. Otherwise I might be getting lonely. I love my job, but am very tired at the end of each day. I often want to be alone and quiet, but I live in a duplex of flats with about 13 to 15 people staying here and it is almost never quiet. If I lay down for a nap I will likely be woken up by blaring music. Just recently I’ve started to have a sense of rhythm here. I think it’s helped that I’ve started saying “no” to more events and excursions and have been taking more time to do art and little projects on my own.

I feel completely off with the seasons however. It’s strange to see Christmas decorations in the department stores when it’s simultaneously getting hotter every day. I had to do something to celebrate Halloween. Its one of my favorite holidays precisely because it is completely meaningless to me outside of the silly traditions we’ve built around it. So I bought candy and made caramel apples. Robin made cider. I also bought little gem squashes and butternut squashes for people to paint and carve. Many of the other volunteers came over and we invited a few local friends as well. It was fun and relaxed. There was no drinking and no drama. I was in bed by 10:30pm. But I went to sleep a little closer to believing that the following day would be November.

In other news, I’ve started to learn to play the marimbas! They’re African style xylophones and are super fun to play. The students in the marimba class are all really great guys. They’re definitely among our most dedicated students and perform at pretty much any show we put on. Most of the students stay on the streets or in shelters. But they continue to play their hearts out on the marimbas day after day and even volunteer to clean the school once a week. The star player is my age, also stays in a shelter and is the most talented and dedicated student. We recently threw him a surprise birthday party- first birthday party he’s ever had. Lately I’ve been jamming with them when the instructor’s not around. I taught them a melody from a duet my mom and I used to play called, “Pink Elephant.” It was fun to hear them spice it up with their African jazz flare. My friend Mandla also showed me how to play the base line for “you are my sunshine, my only sunshine...” as well as “La Bamba” and some music from the Buena Vista Social Club. I like playing with these guys because they’re so good that they make me feel like I’m part of creating something beautiful, even though I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Robin and I are reading through Isaiah and it's like I've never read it before. It seems like a newspaper at times, how close it hits home. I sometimes feel like Isaiah was writing with Pretoria in mind. I've been learning a lot of God's justice and how it's an integral part of his love. God used to seem so mean to me in books like Isaiah. But now I see it as Him advocating for the powerless, pursuing justice in situations of oppression. Robin has made me aware that God is unrelenting in how He strips our pride away. So much of the book is about God taking away what people take pride in. And I'm now seeing that as love as well. God wants us to know and rely on Him, because that is all that really works. Isaiah is also helping me pray for the city.