We arrived safely in South Africa Sunday evening, March 30 after a long but uneventful 17 hour flight. We breezed through immigration in about 10 minutes, our bags were among the first up the conveyor belt, we picked up our rental car and were off the airport in under 45 minutes. Sometimes it takes 2 hours or more, so we were really lucky. We stayed with friends in Johannesburg on Sunday night and drove to Mafikeng on Monday. We stopped on our way to visit with a Jen Lisowski from Hopewell United Methodist Church in our old hometown of Downingtown who has been serving about an hour outside of Johannesburg since January. Jen has been making advance preparations for two teams from Hopewell that will be arriving in May. You can check out Jen’s blog here.

It has been unusually rainy for this time of year with downpours each of the first three days we have been here. The South African government has implemented a “load shedding” program similar to “rolling blackouts” in the States due to lack of capacity in the country’s electrical grid. We have scheduled outages every Tuesday and Saturday evening from 6 PM to 10 PM. At least now we are aware of the scheduled outages… our first week we were not and were caught unaware and unprepared.

Last weekend we had business to conduct in the city of Rustenburg, about two hours away. We made the trip on Sunday and arranged to visit with Jarod Ely, Susan’s second cousin once removed (quite a bit of research went into that!) who is in Africa for about six weeks making repairs to a Bible College in Rustenburg with a week-long side trip to Mozambique to assist with repairs to a diesel boat motor. Check Jarod’s blog here.

It is a real blessing to see young adults like Jen and Jarod dedicate their time, efforts and finances to make a diffrence in the lives of people here in South Africa.

We have come particularly close to a young woman here about the same age as our daughter whom affectionately calls us her American ‘parents’. She was very sick when we left in November and we feared she may not be here when we returned. We were surprised and relieved to find her much healthier than when we left her, which is an answer to prayer.