paige in lesotho: names, vacation, and college!

I am back! And I am sorry for the lack of blogging. BUT, I promise to make it up to you with a nice blog post today with some pretty rad pictures. :)

Since I usually write my blog posts in chronological order, I will start by telling you about last week Friday. I GOT MY SESOTHO NAME! Pretty exciting stuff. The Beautiful Gate staff always gives the long term volunteers a Sotho name that fits their personality. My house mother had been telling me for a while that she was thinking of one for me. I patiently waited for 6 months for her to tell me my Sotho name. Finally, that week after the Azusa Pacific team left and they all got Sotho names after being here for 3 weeks I decided to ask my house mom if she had come up with one yet. On Friday night when I asked her about she laughed out loud and put her hand to her face. She says, "Oh Ausi Paige! Did I forget to tell you? You are Ausi Ntabeleng!" We had a good laugh over the fact that she forgot to tell me my own name. Ntabeleng means "we are happy" in Sesotho. I couldn't be happier with it and I am glad that when she thought of me she thought of happiness. Feel free to call me Ausi Ntabeleng if you can figure out how to pronounce it :) haha

VAY-CAY BABY! Saturday morning the Geurink family, Kristen (the other long term volunteer), Kim (our friend that is a missionary with MAF), and I left for a little vacation. I will admit I feel guilty for being away for Beautiful Gate for more than a couple days since that is the reason I am here. I have learned though that sometimes you need a break, and you need time to step back from the work you are doing to reflect, spend some time in prayer, and give the Lord an opportunity to speak to you. The travelling didn't start out too well for me when I got sick about 10 minutes into a 10 hour car ride. Nice. I was really close to just asking them to drop me off on the side of the road so I could catch a ride in a taxi back to Beautiful Gate. Thankfully, I stuck it out and words could not describe how thrilled I was to jump in my bed when we got to our hotel in Port Elizabeth (that's like on the South Eastern coast of South Africa). While everyone went out for dinner that night, I took advantage of the free Wifi and watched all of Holland Christian's Spanish lipdubs. Shout-out to everyone in those videos! They were pretty rad and they brought me a lot of joy on a night that I was not doing too well. After that I skyped home for a few minutes. I love that I can always count on my family to give me a few words of encouragement They are great. After spending some time in the word that night I hit the hay early. We spent the next day at the beautiful beach and the day after that at Addo Elephant park where we saw LOTS of elephants. See pictures below :) We then drove West to Knysna where we stayed for the rest of the week. While we were there, we did rad things like hold snakes, walk with elephants, swim with seals, and thrift store shop. Yes, that is right THRIFT STORES!! If you know me, you know thrifting is a hobby of mine and I must say that I have missed it. I loved having an afternoon to myself to walk around town and do a little shopping without having to worry about it being unsafe. I met so many cool people in the stores downtown too! The elephant experience was amazing. I was shocked at how well trained these huge creatures were. We got to walk with them, feed them, and brush them. It was one of those once in a lifetime experiences. Swimming with the seals was also like that. We got all suited up in our wet suits goggles, and flippers and took a small boat out in the ocean to where the seals were. There were hundreds of them! We were told not to put our hand out and touch them but to just stay still and then they would often come to us and touch their nose to our goggles. The craziest part was thinking, "these are wild animals, not trained seals that you find at sea world!" On the boat ride back to shore we stopped a little ways away from shore and our guide turned to us and said in her Afrikaans accent, "Okay now you are going to want to hold on really tight because we will pick up speed quite a bit and when we get on shore there will be a sudden stop and then the boat will tip to one side and then you can get out." At first we laughed a bit because we didn't think she was serious, but when she sat down and the boat started zooming right towards shore we were wondering what we got ourselves into. The whole time I was thinking, "I can't even imagine people getting their boats ashore this way in Michigan!" In the end we made it on shore safely and that will be a boat ride I will never forget. All in all, it was a pretty sweet vacation and it was so nice to have some time alone with the Lord too. I am very much looking forward to seeing my kids again tomorrow and getting back into the swing of things. CRAZY to think I have less than 2 months left! Looking forward to seeing everyone again but I am going to miss this place.

Soooooo guess who got accepted to the one college she applied to? THIS GIRL! I came home from vacation to find an e-mail from my dad with my acceptance letter attached. I got accepted to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago which is where both of my older siblings currently attend. I was kind of shocked I got in, honestly. Moody is such an amazing school that is kind of hard to get into. I am so honored they want me to come to their school! It is also strange now having a plan for my life. For the past year I knew the Lord wanted me in Africa for a time and that was the extent of my life plans. It was fun thinking about all the possibilities and opportunities out there I could be a part of. Now that I know I am passionate about missions, I am excited to study and prepare myself to hopefully go into the mission field. My room mate was so sweet and made brownies to celebrate, and her and Bryan and Anita all gave me advice and told me stories about their college experiences. It was a really good way to end my week off.

NOW FOR THE PICTURES:

I think they are out of order, but oh well.