APU Blogs - Audrey

Time for a Break!

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:23:00 PDT

Spring break is finally here! Years past, spring break has been later in the semester, so it’s a nice change this year to have it kind of early.

The past few weeks have consisted of birthday parties, work, reading, and writing- lots and lots of writing. I am almost completely finished with my 25 page senior thesis and it feels so good!

Writing this paper has challenged me and how I live my life. It has made me reevaluate my daily actions and what I value: how to treat strangers, friends, peers, family members, the oppressed, marginalized and socially outcast.

How would God treat these people, love these people?

Whether a person believes in God or not, I believe God lives within each living person. How should I treat God?

“[Find] God in people. You can’t ignore people when God is looking out their eyes at you.”
-Homan & Pratt, Radical Hospitality

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Tomorrow morning I am heading up to San Francisco and Berkeley with my roommate for a few days. I have been to San Francisco once when I was 11 years old, so I am so excited to go and hang out there! Plus tomorrow is St. Patrick’s day so I bet there will be a bunch of fun things to do and see there.

Whether it’s this week or in weeks to come, I hope you have a great spring break!!

Busy APU Life

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:30:00 PST

Wow!! Getting back into life at APU has been a crazy, crazy time. I knew it was hectic and busy here, but I now have a whole new understanding of it! Being in South Africa, a place where they don't even have clocks in most rooms, made me care a lot less about time, schedules and hurrying. It's actually been somewhat stressful being back in a place that runs in such a way and functions on speed and punctuality.

home sweet home

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 12:24:00 PST

I am currently living out the dream I've been having for the past two months: sitting on the couch in my living room bundled in blankets while it's cold outside, watching a football game on TV (the Seahawks of course), with a fire crackling in the fireplace. It is AMAZING!!!!!

Well, after a lonnnnnnnng and tiring journey home, I'm finally here! I arrived in Seattle after four flights and I really could go a few years without ever stepping onto another plane. Wow.

Already I miss everyone from South Africa and the amazing people I became friends with while I was there. It's so weird not being around them!

Yesterday I celebrated my 21st birthday! It was a great day and I got to spend the day with people I love and have missed very much. I enjoyed a great morning with my parents, a fun afternoon with my best friend, and an incredible night with my brother and some of my closest friends. I couldn't have asked for a better day to come home to.

Tomorrow is my brother's birthday so tonight we're having a joint birthday party with our aunts, uncles cousins, parents and grandparents. It should be a fun night!

God keeps showing me his love through all the amazing people he has put in my life. I feel so blessed and incredibly fortunate to have the family and friends that I do and I can't imagine my life without them!

Now I will enjoy a nice homemade chicken soft taco-YUM.

Community

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 05:44:00 PST

Every single person in this group has grown up in a different community, a different area, a different culture, a different economic status, a different class, a different family structure, a different faith background, a different relationship with Jesus; a different world…their own. Where we all have had different lives up until this point, we have joined together to embark on a common journey of geographic similarity, but we have each gone down separate paths of spiritual journeys and practical application. Though we all may be seeing and hearing the same situations, we’re interpreting them differently and processing and applying them in entirely different ways.

Creative Expressions Night

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:14:00 PDT

Last night was Creative Expressions Night, which has been in the works for a couple of weeks now. We (community coordinators) announced it to everyone, and pretty quickly people started forming groups to perform and coming up with routines and pieces to share with the group. I was surprised actually. I really wasn’t sure what kind of group we had here-the kind that would say “this is lame” and be too embarrassed to do anything, or the kind that would throw those thoughts aside and put themselves out there on stage. Well our group loves to perform and we had a great night!

feels like home

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 07:00:00 PDT

So a little catch up with what’s been going on here the past few weeks…

1.) Classes are in full swing, we’re actually in the midst of “midterms” for our current classes. I love art; we’ve been learning some art history from all over the world as well as specific South African stuff. Last week we hiked up the Drakensburg Mountains to see 2000+ year old rock art, painted by the San people. It was such an unbelievable experience. The hike was really physically challenging for most of us and was 3 hours round trip.

Life & Teachings of Jesus is also really amazing. I feel like I’m encountering Jesus in an entirely new way. It could be that I’m reading the Gospels now from a changed heart and mindset than I had the last time I read them. It’s really cool and I am being transformed every second just by the new things (which are actually not new at all…) that I am learning from God about how to live a life of service and genuine love for all people-especially the ones who seem the hardest to love and least accessible. Living a life following Jesus has never seemed this real and tangible. It makes me wonder how many other people are living as I have been, completely oblivious to what Jesus really came to earth for, what he really cared about, and deep his love really is. Maybe I was just way more ignorant than the rest of the population, but I am grateful for God’s mercy and patience in my slow and gradual learning process, which I’m sure, is never ending.

2.) There is a “swimming hole” on campus, which is almost entirely natural. It has been filled with mud and muck (a couple of tons, according to staff here), not really fitting for a swimming area. Once we got a clear, warm day last week, most of the guys in our group went down and started shoveling and shaping the area. It’s looking really good, I can’t wait to use it! It smelled pretty bad down there, as mud sometimes does. But it’s so worth it!

3.) The Christmas spirit is creeping upon us here…yes it is the 15th of October. But the weather is dark and gloomy for the most part, the rain keeps us indoors, and frankly I think that listening to Christmas music is a coping mechanism we’re all using to combat the homesickness we’ve all not really realized yet. Also that Christmas time is the time we’ll be home again, so we’re starting it now. South Africans don’t celebrate Halloween or Thanksgiving (oddly, some Americans don’t understand the latter), but we are going to anyways.

4.) For the first 6 weeks or so, most of our group spent our downtime watching seasons 2 and 3 of The Office. Now we’ve all finished and are really jealous of all of you at home who are watching season 4. We’ve all watched each others’ movies that we brought, and the movie selection here is, well, different. This campus is a little bit of a drive from any mall or outside stuff to do, so we’re trying to get creative for entertainment, and it’s very fun. Pranks are quickly unfolding as amusement…

Another fun thing: Eric wrote a play, held auditions this weekend, and is now in the process of producing it. Everyone is pretty stoked about it, it should be great! My role: hair and make-up.

This weekend we all went to Durban (big beach town) and had lunch, watched some surfing, and then I went to a Sharks vs. Lions rugby game with a group while the other group went shopping at the markets I think. There was this insanely fanatic lady in front of us rooting for the Sharks, and her husband was a Lions fan, rubbing it in her face that they were winning. She was livid, and he was definitely going to be in the dog-house for awhile. That was a great show.

So that’s it for now, I’m off to go learn to speak some more Zulu!

Hambani Kahle! (I think that’s Zulu for goodbye…)

TIA

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 06:13:00 PDT

Today I woke up to one of the most beautiful days we’ve had here yet. The sun was out, the clouds were few, and the heat was intense! It was one of those moments when I wonder why I ever complain about anything. Everything good about my life came to the forefront of my mind and none of my worries managed to find their way into my thoughts.

Before lunch, this euphoria continued. I’d spent the morning in the Cougars’ Den (yes, we have a Den in South Africa) finishing a paper, admiring the sun on the rushing waterfall from inside the glass doors, glad I wasn’t out scorching in the heat. Thirty minutes before lunch a few of us went out to the grassy hill in front of the dining hall and sat in the sun. We watched some of our classmates playing Frisbee…yes, we said it too-“wow, what a typical college student scene.”

But hey, that’s what we are, so that’s what we do.

We had a beautiful lunch and came back to the Den to do more work. I made some coffee (we recently purchased a coffee maker to have drip coffee in the den, since they only serve instant coffee as a norm in South Africa, along with tea….and basically we are just spoiled and miss filtered coffee) for the group down here and we all got back to work.

A few hours passed by and without our noticing, rain drops had started falling; no, pounding down. The drops were huge and rapid, so loud that I couldn’t hear myself reading in my head.

Then the thunder came.

When we have storms here, we have storms. The lightening is blinding and the thunder, deafening. It’s awesome. The sky literally sounds like it is cracking, splitting in two, and the lightening illuminates the darkest pockets of the bamboo forest.

So we’re now waiting here, in awe of the incredible change of the day’s weather, pondering our best option for exiting this place at the bottom of the hill, above the waterfall, as gallons and gallons of water come rushing down the stairs, blocking the only exit we have.

Knowing we have no other choice, we open the door and hesitate momentarily, but not long enough to fully contemplate the severity of the drenching we will endure once we step out. We know that in the 17 second it will take to sprint to the dining hall, our bodies will become saturated to the same extent as if we were to be submerged in a warm body of water.

Beautiful, hot, clear, dry morning.

Beautiful, hot, stormy, wet evening.

TIA…

this is africa

Starting Over Again

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:30:00 PDT

This past week has been a blur! Wednesday morning we were up and ready to leave Cornerstone at 4:30am…! A few people just stayed up all night, (since we got to bed around 1:30am after meetings and such, preparing to leave) but I was not one of them-I will take as much sleep as I can get! Everyone pretty much slept on the bus until we stopped for a break. We stopped a few places on our 3-day bus trip to see the sights, eat, stretch, and sleep, but mostly we were just driving!

We stopped for one day in Gonubie where we visited Catch Projects. It is an organization started by a woman who was simply touched by the presence of a few small black children who had walked to her white church to attend Sunday service. Every week more and more children came and this woman felt the call to start a place for children to go, closer to where they live, for them to learn, play and have a safe, loving environment to go to. She now has over 500 children in her program, a great staff, and a large group of “Peer Educators,” who are teens that help at the center who are also from the area. My little description can really not do this group justice, so I really hope you look it up and read more about it, it truly is such an amazing ministry!

We arrived in Pietermaritzburg last night, where we went to African Enterprise, our main campus in South Africa. It is a Christian conference center for groups (Christian or not) to come on retreats, conferences, training; things like that. So for the whole time we’re here, there will be different groups in and out, so we should get to meet quite a lot of people.

We did some orientation stuff today, pretty basic stuff: watch out for the wild zebra and monkeys roaming the campus, beware of these five deadly snakes that hide behind rocks, don’t feed the baboons, be careful, the rocks near the waterfall are slippery, and be sure to get coffee at the Mugg & Bean. Completely standard.

So classes start tomorrow, ready for round two! I’ll be taking Life and Teachings of Jesus from Reg, our director. He is incredibly intelligent and passionate about the Gospels; I can not wait to take this class from him. I will also be taking Intro to Art. I am so very thrilled to get to take it here, to be in such a beautiful place and learn about the history of art here and explore different mediums and strategies that might be popular here.

I never cease to be in awe of this country and the many things I’ve learned from the people here. Even more so, the overwhelming presence of God I have experienced throughout my time here. He is so powerful and daily shows me how much more there is to the world and His Kingdom than I though the day before. This is my prayer for you all, is that you also can experience God in this way and have your eyes opened to something new and real, whether it is pleasant or not.

National Braai Day

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:46:00 PDT

Today is a Holiday, National Heritage Day, but more commonly known as National Braai Day. A Braai is like a BBQ. South Africans have a Braai as a celebration, for a gathering of family and friends, or a marking of an event. Tonight my host family is having a big Braai, which is really cool since it is our last night here with the family! I can’t believe it’s already time to leave, I don’t want to yet, it’s only been a week and I am falling in love with this family.

The Flag

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:43:00 PDT

Red - bloodshed
White - peace
Green - agriculture
Yellow - gold/minerals...mining
Black - black population
Blue - the beautiful blue sky