Busy!!

One thing I had not anticipated with our choosing to live onsite, was how much we would be involved with all of the teams that come to Beautiful Gate to volunteer. Since we are staying in half a house with a shared kitchen, most of the teams stay in the room off the kitchen and on the other side of our house. It has been an enormous blessing to build new relationships but it also keeps us very busy. We had a youth group from Jo-burg, SA come from Sunday at 12pm to Thursday at 10am. There were 20 students ages 14-22 and 2 leaders. Laury and I prepared all the meals for them which kept us very busy in the kitchen and the pay-off for me was that they kept my kids busy by playing games with them, reading to them, or just talking to them. My kids were very happy and were all smiles with that much attention! What another unexpected blessing of being onsite.
The team worked on many projects, and then spent a fair amount of time playing with the BG kids as well as having some pretty huge soccer games with the kids outside the fence. The language barrier did not interfere at all as the games they played with the younger kids were full of motions and funny sounds. There was face painting, games of Simon says, duck duck goose, and of course chase and tackle the big guys ;)
Unfortunately for the team and Laury, a stomach bug went around and I think 8 out of the 28 of us here got the stomach flu. Thankfully my family was spared but Laury was sick for 24 hours so I learned what it is like to cook for a large group by myself (I might never let her go back to California). They made it safely back to Jo-burg yesterday afternoon and my family is still doing well. I think it is harder for my kids to go from that much attention back to just mommy, but they have one more week till a team from our home church arrives and then we are going to have friends from home so that will be a blessed time too. So sorry I did not post for about a week but I was very busy!
Anita