Heading to Rundu

We headed off to Rundu last Monday afternoon, 9 of us fitting into an 8 passenger “Combi” (the “record“ is 22 adults and children). The journey north usually takes 9 hours, so we went half way to a town called Grootfontein. We stayed at an awesome lodge which is home to Moufassa, a nine year old male lion who pretends to be a large house cat. He was living in the house until he was four but eventually outgrew it and now has a very large space outside all to himself, on the other side of a secure fence! Moufassa loves to be petted and growled loudly throughout the night.

The lodge also has two cheetahs: unlike Moufassa, attempting to pet the cheetahs would be a very bad idea! There were also two gargantuan Ostriches: you can see that I was a little scared on getting close - he had just spat on me! Along with the exciting big animals, there were meerkats, caracal cats, and pearl spotted owls. All in all a fun little overnight stay.

The next morning in Grootfontein was spent visiting fellow AIM missionaries working hard with dedicated locals at a soup kitchen for the local school. We also visited the biological father of Christy, who is in the custody of the Rineers, our leaders here in Namibia. They are in the process of trying to officially adopt her. It is a very long story but in short she was brought into the Rineer house at 2 years old after severe malnutrition. She is now 6 years old (and let me tell you one of the cutest kids ever!) and adoption still has not gone through. It was challenging to see what difficult surroundings her birth family lives in and how big she is in comparison to her siblings simply due to having proper nutrition and a safe place to live.

As we approached Rundu it was amazing to see the landscape change from bushes and trees to clumps of little mud huts along the highway, with the huts become more frequent as we approached our little town. Having seen so many pictures ahead of time, it was similar to some of our expectations, but lots of intrigue. In many ways we were just happy to finally get here.


If you want to see more photos, see link below:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=22725&l=1b757&id=518018255