if you look around you will see lizards everywhere

i never thought i would say this but transitioning back to starbucks is going to be rough. they have the BEST coffee i have ever had in my life here. it is now august 26th. that's weird. i left on my little adventure on may 29th so it has now been almost exactly 3 months since i left the US. recently i have been having a lot of time to reflect or maybe i have been making time to reflect. probably because it is the halfway point. the biggest question that remains in my mind is "how do you go home from something like this and be normal?" to that, i do not have the answer. honestly, i don't even have a guess. it's not about the material poverty that being in africa lends itself to. many people may assume that returning to the US will be challenging on that level. in the past that is what has been hard. this time is different though. the way of life here is just different. the truth is that wearing long skirts, being on 'african time' and being a part of the minority just feels normal now. several weeks ago i stopped having the euphoric "I'M IN AFRICA" thoughts and began thinking about going to class and grabbing some coffee at my favorite coffee shop with some friends. looking around and being the only white person is even starting to feel normal. life in the US seems like such a foreign concept right now. i'm sure after a few weeks of returning i will start loving the quick service and constant, fast internet but for now i am almost enjoying the exceptionally slow-paced lifestyle. i'm starting to feel more motswana than texan and though there still are cultural differences and challenges to be faced i am enjoying the transition. obviously, there are things that i miss and am afraid to miss out on. SFA (my university) starts classes tomorrow. as much as i love being here, i love my school. i miss the tall trees and green grass. being here in the middle of a desert provides practically no greenery. i miss the simplicity of a starbucks on campus and hanging out with shelby wasting hours on facebook when we are suppossed to be studying. i miss heather. my favorite barista at starbucks who knows what to make for me as soon as she sees my face. i miss my family. i even miss chloe's non-stop talking. i miss driving alone from east texas to central texas through back country roads, blasting the music and singing along. i miss spanish. i even miss spanish class and constantly being in spanish mode. with all of that said, i wouldn't change where i am right now. i feel right. this sounds cheesy but i am happy with the way the Lord made me and the person i am turning into. i love the passions that He has given me and the places he has taken and still will take me. i am so grateful that he chose me to be passionate about languages and gave me the oppurtunity to be here. i love the way that life here feels so comfortable. i feel like the passions the Lord has created me with align so perfectly with what He has planned for my life. i think it is so cool that He does this. maybe this is boring but it is simply a compilation of my most recent thoughts. i have been hanging out naledi kids a lot and i love them with all my heart. things are good. thank you so much to those of you that have been praying for me and haven't forgotten about me. i said to the Lord, “Thou art my Lord; I have no good besides Thee” psalm 16:2.

i wish there were things in this that weren't true

i could lie and tell you that everything has been smooth. i could lie and tell you that i have loved every minute. i could lie and tell you that i have seen each day as a blessing. unforunately, those things aren't true. it's been an exceptionally rough few weeks. anyone that knows me knows how much i am in love with this continent but i began to feel that maybe that love was more so conditional for a few days there. like the only way i could love this place was if it painted the children i love as the victims they so often are and in an even sicker way painted me as the hero. not that i would ever say that or even think that i thought that. i guess i just realized that that is something i had hoped for in my subconcious. when i got robbed a week ago for the first time, i was the victim and that isn't the picture that i had so perfectly painted for myself. while in the scheme of things having your dorm room broken into is nothing compared to what many children on this continent face daily, it was a new kind of challenging pain for me. when i realized that i was thousands of miles from home with no laptop and no phone therefore no way to contact home or anyone in the US, i felt the most alone i have ever felt in my entire life. the few days following the robbery, i was angry. it felt like with each day following there was some sort of catastrophic event within the day to come in and steal my joy. i felt like i didn't deserve to be dealing with this. so, i grew angrier. i didn't want to talk to anyone unless they wanted to hear me complain. i honestly wanted to get on the first plane out of gaborone and head back to my hometown (keep in mind i have left out a lot of detail on everything that happened) i never thought i would feel that way in africa. that's when i started realizing this flaw within myself. though i knew africa was dangerous, i expected that the bad things wouldn't happen to me. i was untouchable. i had pictured life here to look about like a mission trip to africa and while mission trips are great, day to day life looks very different. instead of being the hero for a week, i'm just a regular living, breathing 20 year old girl trying to make her way through college just like all of the locals. as much as it hurts to realize a flaw within yourself the up side is that if you let it, change follows and you grow. God pulled me out of the angry place i lived in for the past week and has been showing me again why i love this place. He has shown me what needs to change and is now teaching me how to fall back in love with everyone and everything around me. i spent the day with kids in old naledi and realized that the whole past week of struggles was worth it to get to spend time with them. i could have packed it up and headed home but then i would have left without getting to spend today with those kids. i would have left with bitterness and with anger towards this country and its people. that would have been wrong. i have met tons of wonderful people and unfortunately a small group of theives could have so easily tainted my whole image of the batswana people. i am so grateful for the way the Lord chooses to do what He does. even though the hard times can be seemingly unbearable there is a reason and a lesson that is far more valuable than anything material. i am learning so much about life here in a way i didn't necessarily expect and i am happy to be getting a feel for what living here actually looks like. my God sustains His people and He is doing so much more than that. my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. psalm 73:26

our God is a cool guy

welcome to my room located in the las vegas dorm complex! i have been here for exactly one week as of today and have tried my best with very limited packing space to make my room feel like me, hence the harry potter fleece blanket. although it has been a week, i still don't have a roommate which has gotten pretty lonely. hopefully that will change soon enough. i have decent internet thanks to my fantastic 2,000 foot long ethernet cable which has been great for keeping in contact with everyone. today was the first day of classes and even though what i am about to say sounds ridiculous, let me first explain. the way that they number the buildings on this campus is not exactly logical or in any particular obvious order therefore, you may have building 239 and then building 247 directly next to it with building 240 being a 5 minute walk in the complete opposite direction. with that in mind, it took me 40 minutes to find my 50 minute biology class today. i was a little bit frustrated to say the least. but hey, i found it, right? now i know for next time. biology was my only class today so i was done with classes at 10 AM today. tomorrow i have lots and lots of linguistics classes all day long which, for those of you that know me, makes me a very happy camper. surprisingly to me, there are tons of international students here from all over the world.  i have new friends from finland, norway, sweden, canada, germany and many other countries. it has been a cool experience because not only am i learning about tswana culture but i am learning new things about places all over the world.

there are an overwhelming majority of americans here including a group of students with campus crusade for Christ who were here for a month and left this morning. these people were so precious and i am really sad that they left today. i remember back in march when i was still at SFA (my home university in the states) i was sitting at starbucks reading this massive book by world gospel outreach when a girl named autumn approached me and started talking to me about the book. i soon learned that she was a part of campus crusade for Christ at SFA and had been apart of one of their summer projects (mission trips) to africa. she invited me to attend some of the campus crusade meetings and look into some of the trips that campus crusade offered. for the last few weeks of school i attended campus crusade and although i was already going to zambia i looked at camous crusades summer projects. i noticed one going to gaborone, botswana from july 1st to august 1st and wondered if i would ever run into them. sure enough i did. furthermore, several posts ago i mentioned a slum/compound area in gaborone called "old naledi" that i felt the Lord really putting on my heart. after talking with these students with the campus crusade trip i found out that they had spent 2 of their 4 weeks working specifically in old naledi with the kids there. they introduced me to the man named matata that they worked with who runs a ministry in old naledi. matata was born and raised there and has an excellent understanding on the problems that transpire in this compound specifically. all of this brings me to my point that our God is a cool guy. if i wouldn't have met autumn back in march who knows if i would have been looking to meet the people working for campus crusade here in gaborone. if i wasn't so creepy about africa and didn't google "worst compounds in gaborone" 3,000 times i wouldn't have known about old naledi. if i wouldn't have met the campus crusade students who knows if i would have ever met matata. everything happens for a reason and He is behind it all. that is why i love my God.