The beginning

I guess the best place to start a blog is at the beginning. And there is a whole lot to tell. I’m 22 years old and I was born in Swakopmund, Namibia. (For the uneducated, this is in Africa, for the readers of celeb gossip, it is also where Brangelina had their baby) My parents are both originally from South Africa and moved to Namibia some 25 years ago to establish YFC (Youth for Christ) there. I can’t say as I remember much about living there as I was still very young when we up and moved to the capital city of Windhoek. I don’t remember much about living there either. Only a couple of memories here and there. Just before my 5th birthday we moved to the small town of Okahandja. It means: “the place where two rivers flow into each other to form one wide one.” I remember learning that from my 4th grade math teacher. I can’t possibly tell you why I remember that. Anyway, getting along in my story. I don’t remember when exactly but my dad initiated the building of the YFC training facility known as Hodygos, and that’s where we moved. It’s about 8 km outside of Okahandja. In my mind, this is where life began. When we moved there, there wasn’t much. My dad started it off with the idea of building 8 cabins. Each cabin housing about 8 people. There was an ablution block (bathrooms) that had men and woman’s bathrooms. Behind the bathrooms there were washing basins to do your laundry. If memory serves me correctly, we started living in cabin 3. It had a basin, but we had to trek a couple meters outside to get to the bathroom, not much fun when it’s dead of night and you’re only 5 years old, J. The memories of my younger years are a little few and far between. Hodygos (oh btw, hodygos means “leadership”) took off at an alarming speed. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, they built a huge kitchen, a dinning/lecture hall, and later on our house was added on to this great building. As were some more bathrooms and my dad’s office that would later become my grandma’s apartment. Over the years Hodygos became an amazing place. Right now there are 3 different camp sites: site one, (where I lived) site two, (this consists of 6 cabins holding about 6 to 8 people each. These cabins have the bathroom in the cabin. There’s also a kitchen area and later on a chapel was added so that the people that rented out site 2 had a place to meet) and the tabernacle site ( the tabernacle cabins were built on the front side of the tabernacle (huge meeting are where we would have summer camp meetings. It was built because we had too many kids coming to camp. It holds about 600 to 700 people.) it also has a small kitchen.) A couple years after my dad had our house built we got…a SWIMMING POOL!!!! Where I spent many a summer, swimming, sun tanning and having a wonderful time with friends. I think one of the things I loved about living at Hodygos was that I was never alone. There were always people around. People who worker for YFC, campers, students, (later YFC started STMT: short term missionary training) kids from kids clubs, and of course people from around the world that would come to Namibia on missions trips. When I was 17 my parents started a new organization called Christ’s Hope International, working directly with people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS and we moved away from Hodygos. It was a sad day for me. I had to pack up, not just everything I owned, but many of the memories I had from living there as well. I will never forget Hodygos, it was the first place I ever remember calling home. I hope that one day I can get married in the chapel, at the place that will forever be etched in my mind as home.