Sawubona! Yebo, Sawubona!

The term "Sawubona" means hello! so Hello friends and family! Wow, I have had a very busy two last days! The academic portion of studying here is very intense! Today I sat in class for at least 12 hours!! I had Art from 8:00 until 1:00 p.m. (with a tea break in between there for 30 min) and from 1:30 - 6:00 p.m. (with another tea break). And after dinner at 6, I had intro to zulu which lasted until 8:00 p.m.! I have not felt this exhausted since the plane ride over here. But my classes are very interesting. I really love learning about their culture and comparing it and contrasting it to our culture and back in Jesus' day. Something that stood out to me about the South African culture is that in some places you find the women carrying the giant heavy buckets of water on their heads and their husbands right beside them carrying nothing. This is just in case there were someone to come and attack them and the man would have his hands free to protect both his wife and himself. This is the same as to why the men in this culture go inside the rooms or doors before the woman, in case of someone being inside who would hurt him or his wife. This is unlike our culture where the men open doors and let woman in first out of being polite. I found this to be very interesting!

So the it rained all day yesterday and when the sun came out today everyone was smiling! Except for the fact that we were inside for classes all day. But none the less, the raining had stopped. Every morning I have been waking up at 6 am to run through the game reserve! I run with my new friend, Corisa, who lives in the room next to me! Every morning usually a few of us go and run up these very tiring hills and find new animals every time. Today, we say antelope again and also ran into a clan of monkey's! It was Corisa, Tanja, and I who were minding our own business until these monkey's were blocking our path. So we were told that monkey's don't like girls and also that they can see that we are more timid than the males. So I tried spooking them off but they didn't move an inch but just continued staring at us and looked upset that we tried to spook them. So as Corissa put it, "the Monkey's owned us." Haha... And we turned around and went a different route back to our campus.

I am looking forward to tomorrow because I only have one class in the morning and the rest of the day free to go out and explore more. Alrightyy I hope you all are doing fine back in the states!
Love, Jamie