A look at the restaurant after the fire

To start us off I'll go ahead and talk about our recent fire. On what started out as an average night of hanging out at my house turned into a bit of a disaster when I got a call to grab the fire extinguisher in my house and head down to our restaurant building because it was in fire! Fire is a very scaring thing around here. Most of our buildings here are made out of wood and thatch roofs so the fires can get almost unstoppable in just a matter of minutes.

By the time I got down to the restaurant there were already a bunch of people doing whatever they could to help put the fire out. There were times I was on the roof with buckets of water and times I was inside trying to fight with fire extinguishers. As we all fought the fire for the next 6 hours there were some very tense times. Some times the fire seemed to be under control and other times we weren't sure if we would ever put it out.

When the fire department showed up the only good think they actually did was bring their water truck. It's a long story, but lets just say that all of the Harrismith fire fighters are afraid of heights. Like I said, thankfully they brought their fire truck. After hours and hours of fighting the fire we eventually did get it out thanks to the heroics from Josh and resident visitor who managed to repel from the top to attack the fire from a better angle.

All in all it took all the staff, visiting mission team, and other nearby farmers about 6 hours to put out the fire. We were blessed that no one was hurt and only part of the roof was destroyed and not the entire building.

It's sad to say but Summer officially ended in South Africa last week as the temperature plummeted down to -2 degrees on our property. Now maybe some people do ok in the cold, but this Florida boy wasn't ready for something like this. To make the cold even tougher to deal with none of the homes here on the base have central heating and the only thing we have to try and keep us warm are little fan heaters that really have no effect when it's this cold. On the coldest night I'm pretty confident it was about 40 degrees inside my house. I actually had a 2 liter bottle of Coke freeze inside the refrigerator. I also had water pipes bust and ice on my floor when I woke up, so needless to say there were some things I wasn't quite prepared for. Who knew Africa was so cold.

Another mother nature element we often have to deal with here is the wind. For some reason the way our property is surrounded by mountains the wind will blow awful hard sometime. Case in point, just the other day a rather large tree almost came crashing down on the building my office is in. The wind simply snapped this huge tree in half. Luckily, it fell on some other trees so it didn't fall to the ground until we pulled it down away from the building.

Last week we put on a luncheon for the men of Qwa-Qwa and over 100 men showed up. Jerry Lackey from Love Botswana Outreach Mission shared a powerful message that challenged the men to have eyes to see what God sees. That they wouldn't see the challenges that lie ahead, but the victories that he has in store for us. Along with pastors and church leaders I was excited to see some of the young men that we'd seen at our Youth Camps last year. They were all blessed with a free meal that I have to say was rather tasty.

Even though I haven't been in the villages teaching any of our discipleship classes this year it was excited to hear from the other staff and interns how great classes went. At the beginning of the year we added to 2 classes making it a total of 6 different classes being taught each week. I think it comes out to about 200 students in total a week that are being schooled in the Gospel on a number of different topics. Graduation parties are being held this week where graduates will be getting certificates and having parties where they can invite family and friends to be a part of. This term over 50 students missed less than two classes and will graduate from classes.

Dave Ditges
A missionary with Thrive Africa