Back to our African Home

It has been far too long since I have written much on our family blog. Our family was able to be in the USA for the past six months visiting with family/friends and sharing in churches about our ministry/lives in Swaziland. This blog would be too long to share all that we were able to experience while we were in the USA but we were blessed by many special times.

Our family left the USA on September 26 to return to Swaziland, our African home, for another term of service. The month of September marked our family's 7th year anniversary of serving as missionaries in Swaziland. Africa is home to our kids and Lacie, especially, could not wait to get back to her home, school and friends. When the plane landed in Johannesburg, Lacie turned to me and said, "Yes, we are finally home again!"

Upon landing in Johannesburg, we were blessed to have dinner waiting for us by some of our missionary friends and colleagues with our mission company. We spent the night at our Baptist guest house, re-united with our mission truck, loaded up all our luggage and headed for Swaziland the next day. We needed to purchase new SIM cards for South Africa for our cell phones since we travel into South Africa often. Little did we realize that to purchase new SIM cards required to be registered in the computer system now and it turned out to be quite interesting. The first store was offline, the second store was out of SIM cards to purchase, and the third store had the SIM cards but ended up going offline while they were in the process of registering our new numbers. So, I was sent back to the second store to officially register the new numbers. You would think that we would be able to begin using our cell phones immediately but no. I was then told it could take up to FOUR hours for the registration to be completed. Luckily, it took only about two hours so I was able to send a few text messages as we drove onwards to Swaziland. We arrived at the border and all of us needed to use the bathroom. However, not possible as the border was "temporarily" out of water but the border crossing was quite easy. Praise the Lord!

We returned to a cold day in Swaziland and scrambling to find winter clothes for all of us again. Remember, we just left sunny and warm South Florida so our bodies were in shock a bit! We pulled into our driveway and immediately was greeted by Al and Belinda Jordan, the wonderful volunteers and former missionaries with our mission family that lived in our house while we were in the USA. They had dinner ready for us and even a fire going in our living room. Yeah! :) So blessed and thankful for such a warm greeting. Lacie was beyond excited and really wanted to return to school the next morning. I thought it would be impossible with jet lag but she was up and ready to go. She was greeted by her class with much enthusiasm and she is thrilled to be back at school again. May she always be that excited to go to school! :)

Our team leaders, Wayne and Barbara Myers, came over to Mbabane yesterday to say hello to our family and good-bye to the Jordan's. It was a nice visit for everyone and yes, we were actually awake for it all! :) We visited a new Pick 'n Pay (grocery store) that just opened last week and it is nice...but so are the prices. It seems like everything has gone up in price since we left several months ago. Whew! We got home to find out that our phone line was out so no time to share with folks that we were safely back in Swaziland. Less than 24 hours back and no phone means no internet. Praise the Lord the phone company actually came today to fix it!

Ahhhh....such is life in Africa and although there will be MANY more adventures yet to come, we are thankful that God is going before us and guiding us with HIS mighty hand!