Family from Far Away...

We had the chance to meet family here this weekend. Family we had never met before! This lovely girl next to me is Leslie Hadfield. Her dad and my dad are cousins. Our Grandfathers are brothers. Leslie and I, though attending the same family reunion every year in Logan Utah as kids, don't remember meeting one another. It took living across the world for us to meet. Crazy stuff!

Leslie is a Fullbright scholar (see, I haven't even spelled Fullbright correctly, and she is so accomplished that she holds the scholarship. Wish the intelligence genes had worked a bit more in my favor, but oh well). An accomplished student, Leslie is now finished research for her dissertation on Steven Bikko-a South African "black empowerment" activist who was killed over 30 years ago in a mysterious incident involving the police and his arrest. Leslie will spend most of her time this year in King Williamstown, but this week she happened to be doing research here in Joburg, so we met up and she spent the night and went to church with us this weekend.

Leslie has a quiet and reserved manner. A very kind girl, she is in my mind remarkable. This is her 5th trip to S.A., and she will be living here, with a host family, for a year-wow! I'm so pleased we had the chance to meet. So impressed with her direction and so glad she is my blood. I hope in all the chaos of our moving preparations her time with us was not totally random. Perhaps in our chaos we were a safe haven, family, when you begin a new adventure it is always nice to begin it with family...

it's nice to end new adventures with family too; I"m glad our end to this adventure has included new family from somewhere far away.