Thee Jesus Dome

Today started out rather interesting. My South African cell phone died in the middle of the night, and this is the phone that I use as my alarm. So, my brother Luyanda came in my room in the morning and said “Miles is here, I’m going to tell him to leave because you’re still sleeping” and I immediately jumped up and said “NOOO!!!” lol so he waited for me while I got ready in five minutes. We were running late, or so we thought, so booked it to the car rental place to drop off our rental and meet up with Uncle Roy, who was taking us to this building where we can catch a bus out to the La Mercy orphanage. We got to the building at 7:40, and the bus was supposed to arrive at 7:50. We waited and waited and waited….the bus didn’t show up until 9:50! Two hours later. During our wait we kept thinking we heard the bus, only to look out and find a tiny car. Car engines are so loud here you really can’t distinguish between a corolla and a semi truck. The orphanage was another 45 minute drive from this building. La Mercy was Muslim-run. All of the children that were old enough wore Muslim attire, studied the religion, attended a Muslim school and prayed five times a day in the prayer room. The older children weren’t back from school yet, so we played with the younger kids all morning. There were quite a few of them; most of them were boys, but there were two girls. I fell in love with a few of them and wanted to adopt them; two boys and two girls! (: I need to find somebody to adopt them so that I can see them all the time lol. We were served tea (of course) in the early morning. It’s so sweet. When it was time for us to go—or so we thought—we waited two more hours for the bus to come and pick us up. There was way too much waiting for me today. We made it home quite late by the time this was all done. Funny side story…whenever we go to our weekly meetings, and when we came to this building today, we pass a huge dome called the “Jesus Dome” (seriously, in huge blue lit up lights) that is apparently the Pentecostal church. It is the funniest thing ever. I couldn’t believe it was actually a church! We took a picture of it, and later on found out that’s the church Miles’ host family goes to!! And they’re crazy! They pray for like two hours every day out loud and go into speaking tongue in Zulu in the midst. They said that their church (Jesus Dome) holds like 10,000 people and is one of the really loud ‘praise’ churches that screams and has a rock band lol. I still don’t think Miles was quite expecting them to belong to the “Jesus Dome” despite their odd practices.