Well somehow we have made it to this point! Tomorrow night 7 of us are departing heathrow at 8pm to fly what is now the familiar route to Johannesburg to visit Beautiful Gate in Lesotho.
We are an eclectic group. There is me (of course) and Christian McGill, my builder and friend who is now on his 3rd trip. He is bringing his 9 year old son who today has been in a and e after and accident at school when they thought he had broken his ankle! Fortunately it is only badly sprained but he is on crutches and has a supportive boot , exactly the same as i had to wear last year after my rather unfortunate accident 5 weeks before we departed! Then there is Emma who is a fellow GB leader and of my daughter Jo's generation. Emma has never been to Africa before and I have spent many a happy Girls Brigade camp week with her but i think she will find Africa quite a challenge as she is a very tidy and organised person (everything that AFrica isnt).. Finally i have a colleague Tracey coming for the first time with her dad (Terry) and her 15 year old son (Nicholas) who i used to teach in primary school. I look forward to us bonding and getting to know each other better as we spend 11 hours on a plane together and then a good 6 hours in the minibus which we are hiring.
We land in Johannesburg at 7 am your time which will be 8 am our time and then we are driving down through the Free State - a pretty straight road which goes on for a very long time down to Ficksburg which is not far from the Lesotho border. We are spending the night in Templehof which is, if you have read my blog before, a familiar place to you. Templehof is a private game reserve owned by Afrikaans Chris and his wife Ansie who breed lions and wild dogs for game parks and safaris parks. We are spending the night there as Steve, Fred, Nell and i did some years ago and are looking forward to meeting some animals close up. He has promised us an early morning game drive on Saturday when i hope we will see zebra and bok as well as maybe a hyena or 2 and a few monkeys. The estate is beautiful and expansive and the views are amazing and i can't wait to be back there again, it is a place of peace and beauty and could have come straight off the set of the Lion King.
Then on Saturday morning we will leave after breakfast and take a leisurely drive past a couple of my favourite haunts to the Lesotho border and cross into the Mountain Kingdom, so called because its lowest point is higher than Mount Snowden. My friend Andrew (an English man living and working in Belgium) will be there to greet us and he has promised to cook us a meal on SAturday evening which will be lovely. It will be good to be back in Beautiful Gate, a place i love and feel at home in.There will no doubt be many changes from last year and there will of course be challenges as we start work there on Monday morning. My main job is to ensure that the rest of the team have a great experience and to ensure that we do all that we can to maximise our usefulness for the work that Beautiful Gate do among the orphans and abandoned children of Lesotho. I will also be visiting the school over the road and hoping to make contact with the Rugby academy of Lesotho and Kick4life football charity. We will work hard and spend time in the evenings relaxing and enjoyng each others company and hopefully sampling some local cuisine! I hope you enjoy my blog which i will try to write each evening depending on availabity of wifi and my tiredness levels. Please pray for us as we embark on our 2019 trip. If we can make a difference in the life of just one person who we meet then our trip will have been a success.
Love Jenny
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