Back from Mpumulanga

6/11/06
This is Lincoln. We just got back from our trip to Mpumulanga. It is a beautiful province about 5 hours directly east of us. It actually kind of reminded me of home because they have a lot of hills, mountains, trees, and forests. The mountains aren’t nearly as big as the rockies, but they are still pretty. We had gone out to build a church structure on Tuesday, but we needed about 12 men to help and the person in charge of getting help from the local church wasn’t able to get any help, so we weren’t able to put that structure up. We will have to do it another time. So we had the week to spend sight seeing around the Province. It was kind of nice except that Jenny was really sick with morning sickness the whole time. We did get to go to Kruger Park, but apparently all the animals were hiding from us. We saw a ton of Impala, 1 monkey, 2 turtles, some water buck, 2 herds of zebra, and 2 giraffe. We still haven’t seen elephant, or lions in the wild yet. I’m really wanting to see elephant. Maybe next time. On Saturday I helped put up a church structure. There was a team from Oklahoma City that was here to build churches, so I just helped them. It was a lot of fun. We put up a steel frame building with a tin roof in one day. The local church will finish the rest of the construction, by finishing the walls with brick. The church we built is to help a new church plant in a village that doesn’t have any churches. The pastor is a 27 year old man fresh out of bible college. His name is Petros. He’s a great guy. I spent much of my week around him and he really has a heart for the people of his village. All the kids from the village came out to watch us build and they helped whenever they could. Having a group of white people in a village like that draws a lot of attention. I had to drive through the village quite a bit during the week and everywhere I went people just stared because white people never go into their village.