13.5 hour workday

The Torrance River that is in Adelaide was accidentally drained last night... which is bad because they are going to have a lot of festivals this next month, and no water in the River Torrance. The water was dammed to prevent it from going into the sea but there was a wheel malfunction, and now the river than ran through the city is dry.

I stayed the night at Helen's house last night because the two of us were going on a long trip with Peter (one of the family counselors) and it would be an hours drive out of the way for Helen if I stayed at Hosanna Heights. The trip was a lot of fun. We picked Peter up at Mount Barker and stopped in Swan Peach to meet Malcom, a new pastor of a Lutheran Church. We had coffee with him, then kept driving through what is known as the hills. The scenery is beautiful- it goes from tall, thick trees to vineyards, to rocky (literally, almost all rocks in the land), to dry grassland with the road lined with trees. We took a car ferry over the Murry River, my first car ferry ever.

The Murry River is Adelaide's (and many other southern Australian cities) only water source. There have been many scares because if the Murry River is contaminated or no longer flows (which many rivers no longer flow in the area... and the Murry River is significantly lower than it used to be. In some areas entire docks were standing in what used to be water, and now they are just dry poles) there will be no more water source for the city. If this happens, there will be major problems for Australia. -scary.

We dropped Peter off in Waikerie for a few counseling appointments where Helen and I met with an Elder named Tim. After another coffee we went to Berri where we stopped by the women's meeting at the Lutheran Church. We introduced ourselves, and learned more about the way that church does emergency relief. The pastor there (also named Tim) took us to a Vine Church where the congregation opened a cafe for the community to come in and have reasonably priced meal/coffee. The cafe first started off as a place for single mothers to come and have a cup of coffee and have their children being watched in the playground at the church- most of these moms have never had a "coffee with other women" experience before. This was awesome to see because one day I'd like to open my own coffee shop that ministers to the homeless population and at-risk youth.

After the cafe we returned to the church where we had tea and met up with the women again. They were so old and sweet! They were talking about how hard it was to keep their lawns looking decent in the water shortage, I can't imagine how hard that would be, especially for some of these women well into their 80s.

We then stopped by Relationships Australia in Berri. This organization does a lot of the same things LCC does, but it is a secular organization. It was really need to see the two organizations working together and understanding that they cannot meet the needs of everyone by themselves. We then drove back to Waikerie to pick up Peter and go home. The funny thing is that the ferry broke down and we had to drive a bit out of the way to get to the next car ferry. After we finally got across, we went an extremely long way to get home. It took about 2.5 hours drive to get there and at least 4 to get back. We had dinner around 9:30 in Mount Barker, dropped Peter off, and returned to Helen's house. The point of the trip was for Peter to meet with his clients, and Helen (and I) to network and introduce LCC to some new communities. It was a good experience and I'm glad I got to see more of Australia, but I'm a bit tired and 13.5 hours of traveling makes for a long day.

I stayed the night again at Helen's house because we didn't get back until 10:30 and it was an hours drive for Helen if she wanted to drop me off and return home again that night. I'm so glad/surprised that my allergies didn't react to her cat, although the cat was outside most of the time.