12. Bottle Rockets and Cactus Jam

They say that there's a fine line between genius and insanity. As I stood in our kitchen wearing welding gloves and peeling cactus fruit to make jam, I found myself wondering just which side of that line I was on. There's probably a reason you don't see much cactus jam in the shops. Personally I think this is because the world just isn't ready for it. Remember that Einstein's theories were initially rejected for being just too far out and wacky, and look where HE ended up. Yes, dear reader, one day you'll be in Spar buying your newspaper and jar of Stonier's Cactus Conserve, and you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

Or maybe not. Sometimes it's good to do things simply because no one else is doing them, because they are far out, because they're cool, and because it's the school holidays, you've had the kids full time for three days, four hours, and seven minutes and you have completely run out of ideas.

The boys had almost three weeks off, and not only did we survive, we actually managed to have a good time as well. Claire, naturally, because she's SuperMum, spent weeks on the Internet looking at craft ideas for kids (Ed: No SuperMum here AT ALL, just an acute awareness that I would go mad without some form of entertainment that didn't involve iPad or DVDs). So during those two weeks we made hovercrafts out of old CDs, super strength bubble mixture, birthday cards for all and sundry, hand-and-foot print pictures, balloon whizzers, bottle rockets, a mini Mike Wachowski (Monsters Inc.), and we started a tree house.

The eponymous bottle rockets were the best. You take a 1L plastic drinks bottle, drill a hole in the lid to accept a valve cut off an old inner tube, then decorate it with fins, nose cone, whatever you think will make it fly further. Daniel gave his a superman cape, mine had spiral fins to make it spin and a long nose cone for stability. The other kids we had round did their own variations. To make them fly you fill the bottle a third full of water, put on the lid (now at the base), and attach a foot pump. At about 30psi the rocket shoots off leaving the valve in the foot pump. We were getting over 30 metres high with ours and we had competitions for furthest, highest, most attractive, and best crash. Just about the best fun you can have with 300ml of water in my opinion. http://tinyurl.com/dylumcc



We've been getting to know some of the other parents from school and we managed a couple of playdates over the holidays. Daniel has one particular friend, Ari, who has just come to South Africa from Greece with his parents who have re-immigrated due to the economic crisis in Europe. He and Daniel get on well despite the language barrier. His parents are pretty cool too - they run the local petrol station...we are still waiting for a discount. Another of the parents is a pastor of a local Afrikaans church and we had a good day at their place in town, which, amongst other things, has a super fast (for Africa) uncapped internet connection. That's not the main reason for developing a relationship but it sure is handy - especially when the iPad wants to do 65 major updates.

I really loved having the kids around - taking them swimming, building the tree house, having fun - and I'm missing them now they are back at school. They were ready to go back though, Daniel wanted to see his friends, and the house was starting to feel small. It was good to have some quality family time and to be reminded that we are here as a family, by design not by default: it's not Claire and I with the kids in tow, it's Family Stonier and we each have our place of value. None of us could do it without the others. God knew what he was on about when he got us here.




The last two weeks also saw us becoming fully fledged staff members. Our three months of training finished and we graduated to the team full time. Our pay went up by 300% (300% of zero is zero), and we can now use the binding machine. Exciting times. Our roles are rapidly falling into place now we have some space. My concern was that I would just be the maintenance guy because I know how to rewire a kettle, restart the borehole, and build a wardrobe, but that hasn't happened. I'm doing those things (I enjoy doing them, for one thing), but we're being given strategic ministry things to do as well: I'm working with one of the guys on recruiting people for the training, and Claire and I are revamping and helping to run an upcoming 6-week program which aims to mix short term mission training and practice with some training in the core J-Life leadership material...it's aimed at young adults from overseas and South Africa. Claire is working on some of the J-Life training documentation to harmonise style and format, and is developing some additional material. In between all this I am continuing with the build I have mentioned before.

It's quiet here on site with only the staff around, but it's also nice to be masters of our own clock: we can eat as a family early enough to get the kids to bed on time - the extra sleep is helping with their mood, and we can do our work pretty much to our own schedule which is nice.



I'm having a concerted push to get the building work finished this month, so myself and another guy, Meshek, are working together from around half eight in the morning until five at night. Meshek is great at rendering and knocking holes in walls, and is teaching me builder's Zulu. It's coming along nicely (the build, not the Zulu).









Being English, I am part of a culture that knows how to pack a lot into a small space, so we used the wasted area above the stairs to add some built-in wardrobes. It's worked well as you can see in the pictures.




So we're settling in here, which is both good and bad: we love the community, and feel very affirmed in our place here...but of course here is temporary and we will soon be moving to Zambia. I'm looking forward to a new challenge there, but leaving the community in South Africa will be tough. More and more as we integrate into J-Life, we find that its theology and understanding of Christianity matches our own: beautifully simple, inclusive, relational and, well, not that religious. What that means exactly will be the subject of the next blog.

For now here's a picture of a sunrise last week that I took from just behind our house.