Newcastle & Drakensberg

At the invitation of President Ngubane, President of the South Africa Newcastle District, we were assigned by the Area Audit Committee to provide financial and audit training to the Newcastle District. The visit included training the district presidency, the district clerk, branch presidencies and branch clerks and the district auditors.

These were wonderful brethren.  They were enthusiastic and humbly recognized some things they would like to do different.  President Ngubane closed the meeting, bearing testimony and encouraged change.  He said, "Brethren, we've been bad."  Chris quickly said "No, president, you have not been bad."  I loved President Ngubane's reply, "Elder King, Let us be bad, so that we can be good." His comment to the members was that there was room for improvement in the district.  What a great man.  Sincere and humble and pure hearted.

Newcastle

We stayed at Avalon.  They had an OH SO Beautiful garden!

We stayed in the Loyalty room.
Some other room names were
Love, Peace, Kindness, Patience, Goodness, Compassion, Humility etc.

A few months ago we went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir and decided it would be fun to go a day early to Newcastle so that we could see Drakensberg Mt area.  We stayed the night and went on a nice hike the next morning.  We didn't hear the Boys Choir sing but we sure did hear bird choirs!  It was a beautiful area and the trees were "alive with the sound of music!"

Here is one of the interesting discoveries when we stayed in a room with at thatch roof at The Cavern (Drakensburg Mountains) on our trip to Newcastle.  Did you know that worms live in the thatch?  We were advised by the management not to be alarmed because they are harmless.  Sure enough, the next morning there was a very small red worm in bed with us.  It may sound “exotic” to sleep in a grass shack; but I’m happy to report that the bed bugs don’t bite.  And, that the early bird gets the worm.

We had a visitor to our flat today.  There are no screens on any of our windows.  We are on the fourth floor so insects are fortunately rare (but pigeons are not).  Today we had this beautiful black and yellow beetle crawling around our flat.  It reminded me of our first car – a VW - short and squat and not very fast.

And this was another visitor today.  I shooed two of these out of the kitchen...2nd time and probably not the last ha ha.  They sit on the ledge outside the kitchen and come in the window.  Fortunately they are very smart because they don't panic and flap around when I walk in the kitchen, they just go back out calmly.  Quite beautiful birds.  I found this picture on line.