Pictures galore!

A group of kids in a Johannesburg township.









Serving the kids at a soup kitchen










Speedy the chameleon...he kinda became our team pet for a while










One of the main projects was to build this workshop next to the youth center in progress.










None of the students had any real experience doing a project like this, but they stepped up to the challenge brilliantly.











The guy who this was built for is named Oupa, pronounced o-pa. He is the man standing on the righthand side of this picture.









So the building was affectionately deemed the "Oupa Cabana". This is the finished product.







Here are a few of the shack houses in Leseding, the township in Vaalwater. There are an estimated 25,000 people living in the township. And as many as 8-10 could live in one of these shacks.







A couple kids praying at the soup kitchen.








This is the way they carry small children...strapped to the back with a towel or blanket. And many of the older brothers or sisters would be in charge of the smaller ones, even though they were not that old themselves.






We went on a bush walk and climbed some of the rock formations out there, just enjoying the beauty and diversity in creation.






A giraffe, close up. By going on the bush walk, we were able to get pretty close to the animals. But it also helps to have a good zoom lens.






We went to a rhino musuem and were able to feed a 1 1/2 year old female. I never knew that rhino's make noise, but they sound a bit like a whale and she would make this noise when she wanted us to feed her.






Avery's favorite movie is "Madagascar" and he absolutely loves to dance and sing to the lemur's song, "I like to move it, move it." Here he is singing along.




Wayne, one of the leaders, rode in a mountain bike challege/race while we were in South Africa. It was organized by WWS, the Waterberg Welfare Society, that we worked with for the 2 months. The proceeds all went to continuing to build the youth center for the kids.






One of the skits the students would do involved putting on clown outfits and dancing around. It was amusing to watch and the kids loved it too.





Orange bounty! We were invited to go on a tour of a citrus farm and at the end, the farmer was generous enough to give each one of us a bag of oranges for ourselves! We ate so many oranges and drank A LOT of freshly sqeezed orange juice in the last two weeks of our trip. This Florida girl was delighted!






On the left is Mary, our contact and marvelous host for the 2 months in Vaalwater, and on the right is Anja, one of the students, from Switzerland.






This is the whole team, just one day before we left South Africa.