Preparation for departure

Hello! ...without wasting any time, here is a quick recap of my life recently:

I have spent this past year studying lots of fun things (English major, Spanish minor) at the University of Guelph. It was a very different style of life to the previous years adventures, but there were many awesome adventures nonetheless. One thing I realized fairly early on was my frustration with the University "bubble" I found myself in. I was able to get connected to a great community in Guelph in the Willow Road area. I was given the opportunity to have a great group of friends ages 18-23 this year, but Willow Road Primary School and the Shelldale Centre (local community centre in the Willow Road area) introduced me to a community of friends ages 1-13 (but mostly grades 1-5) as well as some awesome parents and older volunteers. I was challenged, learned a lot, and it made my year 5000 times as amazing as it otherwise would have been. I can't wait to go back there in the fall. The program I have been a part of at Willow Road Primary School is called the "Run and Read" program, which is all over Ontario and it is organized by KidsFest Canada. It's pretty awesome. You should check it out. 

I also met a whole bunch of friends at Guelph that are really awesome. They are people that want to live in intentional community with each other, people that want to live selfless lives, and people that make me laugh a lot. I have enjoyed spending time with such awesome people, and I look forward to next year. Props to the Home Street Home and the future inhabitants of 6 Mutual St. - I hope some of you are reading this. 

Now that you have some idea of what I've been up to recently, I am excited to tell you that this Tuesday I will be returning to Honduras! I will be going back to Cofradia to reconnect with students and families there, and to help out at the school - teaching etc. I am very excited about the opportunity to go back and I can't wait to catch up with 30 fantastic grade 4 students that I have missed hanging out with this year. I will also hopefully get the chance to visit a camp run by Scripture Union as well. It is a camp for many of the poorest kids/families in central Honduras, and I am very excited to see it and connect with the Vissers family who run the camp. 

Preparations are underway; departure is very soon. Feel free to check back here for updates from Cofradia over the next month. I will be back at the end of May. See you then.

peace.

Home.

"When we travel with the eyes and ears of the God who sent us, we will see wonderful sights, hear wonderful sounds, meet wonderful people...and be happy to return home."
- Henri Nouwen

It's been an incredible year. So many relationships have been formed, and connections made around the world, and I feel so blessed to have experienced and seen so much. My life has been changed, and I have learned more than I ever could have expected. This trip blew away any expectations that I ever could have had.

I would like to take this time to thank Remy for being such a solid friend and companion. To be able to share such amazing experiences with such a friend was a blessing.

To everyone that has been reading this blog, you have encouraged me. Thanks. If you want to talk about travels and the world over a good cup of tea, I'm down for it.

"I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."
-Donald Miller

Peace.
-Tim Martin

Nearing the Finish Line

Packages are smaller, the metro is more efficient (and existent), streets have cobblestone, buildings are OLD, croissants are fresh, and now it's Dutch, not Afrikaans (or Zulu, ixiKosa, Lugandan, Swahili, Nepali, Spanish etc.) that is spoken. Hello Amsterdam! We've almost arrived at the finish line, but we are delaying our sprint towards it by making a 6 hour layover turn into 4 days. We arrived on Monday morning, and I still haven't recovered from the culture shock. My first reaction was: "I miss Africa".

After our arrival, Anna-Marie (one of Remy's father's friends who lives in central Amsterdam) spotted Remy's curly locks and brought us to her house. We immediately got right to work...if you can call madly touring a beautiful European city "work". It's hard to get used to the style of a European city, and it's people, after spending quite a chunk of time in Africa and Asia, and I'm bracing myself for being home as we speak. It's going to be a strange feeling to have complete familiarity.

Gosh! Before I get too wrapped up in news from the Netherlands...We had a great final week/weekend in South Africa. We finished up our painting project in the Crossroads township, said goodbye to our American friends, and had a fun final weekend. I went surfing (for a second time - we had gone with David when we stayed with them) at Muzenberg beach again, and I really feel I could get into the whole surfing thing. Very fun. I also got to watch another great rugby match (another thing I've taken a liking to whilst in S.A.) with David and be a part of Sarah Gammon's 18th birthday, which was a very good time as well. Remy decided to jump out of a plane on our last day (skydiving), which was (I would imagine) a different way to spend an afternoon: falling 9000 feet before a parachute saves your life. After reluctant goodbyes to Cape Town, South Africa, the Gammon's, the giraffe's, and the Miller family, we hopped on the plane.

Which brings us to the last few days. To keep it brief, our time here has involved Museums (such as the Van Gogh Museum, Anne Frank's House, and the Rijks Museum...amazing), biking around the city on a rented bike, eating a dinner in complete darkness with blind waiters serving us, sweet live jazz, photography (Amsterdam is quite a beautiful old city), and eating some nice Dutch food...etc. Tomorrow Mac Bargout is meeting us here, and we fly home with him on friday.

Next I will enter Canada, familiarize myself with friends and family (and North America), try to take a breath, and conclude all that I have experienced in one magnificient (that's the dream) final blog entry. See you soon Canada.

Themba Care and Crossroads (Babies and Paint)

My clothes have been covered in Drool...and paint. On Monday we were taken from the Gammon's house to Themba Care, a hospice for babies with AIDS located in a township near central Cape Town. It was heavy stuff, but an awesome experience. We were shown our "office" for the next few hours: a room with some couches, high chairs, floor mats, and a sea of babies. We spent 3 or 4 hours just trying to entertain the babies, and being entertained ourselves. It was sad to see what we saw, but it was a place filled with so much hope and so much love, and some really beautiful children. The year Themba Care started (2002), they had a death rate of 70% with their children, and last year they were down to 2%. There is no medical explanation for this, as they have new babies coming in a lot, and they are all given the proper ARV's and medical attention for their disease. I believe it is a miracle, and simply a matter of the children being shown the gift of hope and love. An amazing place. The babies are all very underdeveloped (babies several months old were the size of newborns), and some show signs of being malnourished and struggling with various sicknesses. Highlights were just wathcing the babies as they broke into massive smiles, or crawled up behind me and began trying to climb my back. Remy was trapped at one point when a larger child fell asleep as she sprawled across his lap. It was a lot of fun, but we were tired!

After leaving Themba Care we went with some of Pete's friends to a different township, called Crossroads, where we started our official project for the week. We met with a short term missions group of University students from the States, and we were shown a community training centre in the township. Our project for the week has been cleaning and painting the community centre, inside and out. It's been a really fun experience there as well, and a few people from the township have even come in to meet us and help out with some painting as well. Very cool.

It's been fun getting to know the American group and we've been able to work well together and quite efficiently. They've welcomed us two "Canucks" into their community and we've enjoyed our time with them a lot. We're back at Pete and Katie's house chilling out in Somerset West, and getting ready to say goodbye WAY too soon. I can't believe we leave South Africa this Sunday.

Hope everyone reading is still entertained and doing well.

South Africa, here we go...

Dear Reader,
If you get the chance, please travel to Cape Town one day. It's beautiful.

-Timothy

People had given us some really great reviews of Cape Town, and it really is everything it's cracked up to be. I'm getting ahead of myself; please excuse me for taking so long to write this, I've been distracted by my surroudings recently. We arrived on May 1st, after some complications getting into the country (long-ish story), and we met our friend Pete (Miller) at the airport. It was the Pete Miller that we met at OPC last summer, the one with flowing blond locks of hair like that of a Swedish diety, and the one who invited us to stay at his house in South Africa should we ever be in the neighbourhood. Well here we were, in the neighbourhood, being warmly welcomed by Pete (with his flowing locks sadly chopped off), Katie (his wife, and fellow leader at OPC), and Hannah Miller (a VERY new addition - just 8 weeks old!). The Miller family welcomed us in, introduced us to Somerset West (their stunning town about 50 km east of Cape Town), and showed us the way things go in South Africa: Mountain biking, Ocean views, and of course, a "Braai" on our first night. A Braai is like a souped up barbeque where you normally eat this amazing sausage roll called "Boerwors" (pronounced something like "boorvorsh", sort of).

First impressions: "Do people here realize how incredible this place is?"

For our first few days we hung out with the Miller family, saw Kurstenbosch (largest botanical Gardens in Africa?...possibly the world?), hiked Table Mountain, Mountain biked near Stallenbosch (beautiful, if you were wondering), saw vineyards, and played Ultimate Frisbee! Pete has friends on the South African national team, so this was GOOD Ulti...and I was shocked at how rusty I was at first. Yikes.

After those first few days, we met up with old family friends of ours (the Gammon's), and we've now spent the last week at their house, which is right in Cape Town itself (so we could see more of the city via the Metro system). I hadn't seen The Gammon's for a few years, so it was crazy to reconnect here in Africa and see them again. This week Remy and I have seen Robben Island (where Mandela, and many others, were imprisoned), the Cape Town waterfront, downtown, and we've also been introduced to some awesome music (and been to two local shows!) thanks to Jessica Gammon, who is currently in second year at UCT (University of Cape Town). There is a lot to be done in Cape Town, and there is no way we will do it all. However, I did have the goal of seeing a Giraffe, and I'm pumped to say that it has been accomplished! Glorious. I signed up for a day trip Safari to a (relatively) small wildlife reserve just 3 hours outside of Cape Town, because I didn't have time to travel across the country to Kruger National Park or something...but it was breathtaking. All you could see stretching around in every direction were open plains and the Cape Fold Mountains rising up everywhere. I was actually fourtunate enough to see a lot of amazing wildlife on the Safari, and the highlight was definetly the two Giraffe's we saw hanging out together on a hillside.

Also, today I went down to the Cape Town waterfront where the "Tour D'Afrique" bike race was finishing. It is a bike race that takes place over 4 month's and stretches over 12,000 km from Cairo to Cape Town. I was there at the finish line to cheer on a teacher from Crescent School - Mr. (Jamie) Macrae! It was awesome. For you Crescent boys reading this: Mr. Macrae definitely had a solid cheering squad of students from the GAP (Get Ahead Project) School from Queenstown, South Africa (who Mr. Macrae has been raising money for by doing this bike race - about $40,000 at this point I was told!). It was awesome to be there for the finish of this amazing race, and it was crazy and unreal to meet up with a Crescent Teacher in the middle of Cape Town. I didn't see that one coming when I planned this trip.

So that has been South Africa so far. On Monday we're meeting back up with Pete to get involved with volunteering in some of the townships for our final week here. Pete is really involved in serving in some of the poor communities around the Cape, and we're hoping to help out for a few days with some AIDS patients, children and families in 2 of the townships around Cape Town. So the tourist stint is coming to an end.

Hopefully I'll be able to update soon about how the volunteering goes, and on May 18th we are off to Amsterdam, where we spend 4 days chilling (and meeting up with Remy's dad), before heading back to Canada all together. I can't believe all that we've experienced, and I'm bracing myself for a bit of culture shock in a couple of weeks. Time to try and process everything.

Peace.

Leaving the Pearl

Zanzibar was a good time. We ended up making friends with a group from a study abroad program, and it was awesome to have a new group to travel around with. They were from Canada/U.S. Three of them also happened to be taking the same bus to Moshi (where we flew back to Uganda from...the town beside kilimanjaro), so we had some good times hanging out. Also, 3 of the guys were on their college Ultimate teams, so we had some good frisbee talk, and we shared in missing that great game (none of us had the frisbee's we had brought with us to throw on the beach, sadly). They also helped us out a lot, and we might not have made it back without their help...from getting our bus tickets for us, to allowing us to stay at the same places (we had no idea where to go for our nights in Dar es Salaam and Moshi)...so that was really cool.

So we're now back in the Pearl of Africa. But we leave tomorrow for Cape Town. Isn't that wild? My hope is that I see a Giraffe before I leave this continent. That's the dream, because Giraffe's are the greatest animals. I read recently that they have the same amount of neck vertebrae as us, but that each one is 8 inches long! Isn't THAT wild!?

So today we have to say our goodbyes to everyone from KiBO, Abraham and Judith (and the twins: Edna and Maria), and this wonderful country. We both agreed that the people in Uganda are much more welcoming and friendly than those of Tanzania (I'm sure there are nice people in both countries...but that was our impression). I suppose we'll see if South Africa measures up to East Africa. Time has flown way too fast.

Werinkup Uganda.
Peace

Kalangala, Zanzibar - Island Chillin.

Last Thursday I said goodbye to all the amazing students and teachers of the two Kisugu schools. My time there was way too short, but I'm so thankful I made the connections I did. I managed to talk to them about potential pen pals type things between students from my grade 5 classes, and the grade 5's of Crescent. I told them I'd check with Crescent...so if anyone from Crescent is reading this: Is that cool? That sort of thing would be really valuable for the students on both sides of the world.

Friday morning we left with our friend Gerald (from the KiBO foundation) for Kalangala, which is a beautiful island on Lake Victoria. We took a ferry over the equator with some borrowed bikes, and camped out by a beach on the island. We had some sweet bike rides around the island through the think jungles and down some awesome hills. Uganda has the largest number of species of birds in the world (I believe...at least in Africa), and even Kampala has a lot of cool birds. But the wildlife on the island was beautiful and even more plentiful.

On Monday, we hopped on a flight over to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. We took a public bus, where we discovered that everyone in Tanzania speaks Swahili, and no one really knows any English. (Despite the presence of regional languages in Uganda - namely Lugandan in central areas - most people can understand English). After a crowded bus ride, we were dropped off at the fish market, where a man we met (who called himself "Starfish") directed us to the ferry docks. We got a ferry after some intense bargaining wars, and got ourselves over to Zanzibar. Zanzibar is one of the most unique places I've been this year! We've just had a day or so of exploring and taking many pictures of the old Zanzibar town, Stonetown. It is as though we have gone back in time. Very beautiful and very surreal.

We've got a week in Tanzania before we head back to Uganda, then catch our flight to South Africa for the last leg of our adventure. I'm pumped.