The leading cause of disappointment in this world is expectation. When your expectation of something is not met you will be disappointed. You can’t do anything about being disappointed, its just something that happens. What you CAN do is change how you react to disappointment. That will make a world of difference, and can make your life a whole lot happier.
When I first heard that i would be working at Beam Africa, an organization that works with orphans and widows in the poor areas of Pretoria, South Africa, I had a lot of expectations of what that would be like. I imagined myself playing with awesome little orphans all day. Then (thanks to a bunch of world race blogs) I imagined that I would come home to my dirt floor accommodations and sleep on my sleeping pad inside my tent after taking a nice, short, cold bucket shower. Not to mention the rice and beans I’d be eating every day. I created this imaginary little life in my head and thats what I expected. I was even looking forward to that. I couldn’t wait for that bucket shower and sleeping on my sleeping pad. But I could not have been more wrong!
We got to Johannesburg and stayed at this nifty little hostel in a room packed with like 20 bunk beds. It was NUTS. Bunk bed city, kid. Anyway we stayed there overnight and said goodbye to our squad mates that were going to Cape Town, which is like a 20 hour bus ride away (WOOF) and waited for our ministry contact to come pick us up.
So eventually Erika Lingenfelder and her husband Louis show up. They were this well dressed older white couple. They drove us to the place where we would be staying and when we got there, all of our minds were blown.
Beam house is DOPE.
We got rooms with beds
A kitchen with a stove and a fridge and coffee.
Bathrooms with showers and real life toilets not squatty potties!
The bathroom the girls use even has a freaking jacuzzi in it! 
YEAH DUDE. JACUZZI.
So right off the bat our expectations were SHATTERED. Being able to stay in this awesome house was way more than we expected. Definitely wasn’t mad about it…but it wasn’t what I expected. So we rejoiced in that unexpected situation, and that was awesome. We got there on thursday, hung out for a bit, tried to figure out some visa stuff on friday, and we had the weekend off. So we spent our first four days chilling at Beam house, getting to know each other. That was cool and all but we still had no idea what we were gonna be doing…
Those first four days were pretty easy but also really hard because those expectations I had were constantly being broken. We found out theres not really an orphanage or ministry base anymore because they had gotten run out of the place where it used to be because of some race issues. We also found out that we would mostly be doing manual labor around beam house and the compound where it stands, as well as this neighborhood called Mamelodi. My dreams of the awesome little orphans was gone.
It was really hard to maintain a positive attitude about everything considering our expectations were so far from being met. All we could do is try and bless the Lingenfelders, the people we were working with, and the people we were working for. And we all found that when we had a positive attitude about the work we were doing, even though it wasn’t what we thought we’d be doing, we were really able to bless everyone and have an awesome time doing it! Mamelodi was wicked cool! It was so cool it’s getting its own blog so you can hear all about it! The people we’re working with are super awesome, and we’ve just been learning a lot from them and from Erika and Louis.
I guess my point is that if we had grumbled and fussed about not having our expectations met, we would’ve had an awful time, despite the awesome accommodations and awesome people we’ve met. But since we chose to take things as they came and make the best of every situation (even construction work) no matter how difficult, we’ve had an amazing time here in South Africa. So when something comes up in life that isn’t quite what you expected, try to make the best of it and look real hard for that silver lining. It might just be the one thing that gets you through that hard time, and it could even turn that hard time into an awesome time.
