First Experience with Keep Them Safe

Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 8:53PM

Pneumatix Campus, Somerset West, South Africa

Today was my first day serving in the township of Kayamandi.  The program Keep Them Safe starts each day at 9AM, Africa time, which means people may or may not show up between 9 and 11 but definitely not exactly at 9.  This idea of Africa time drives most American’s crazy.  Good thing I’ve already experienced this once!  Anyways, the leaders, or “teachers” as the children called us throughout the day, finally came together and discussed the game plan for the day.  We departed from the meeting place to see that 25 kids had already shown up for the day’s program.

The entire Keep Them Safe program is held in 13 satellite locations around Stellenbosch.  The one I served at today was at a venue called Apex, right next to the township.  From this building complex, the 20 or so leaders and the now 35 or so kids walked through the township making as much noise as possible to draw the attention of the other children (left).  By the time we returned to the complex, we were at least 200 strong (which means about 10 kids per leader)!  The funny thing to me is that the organizers for the project are expecting that number to grow exponentially into next week to reach at least 3,000.  Yes, you read that correctly- three thousand.  That right there is a serious prayer request!  Please pray for God’s guidance to come quickly and easily to the leaders as we try to maintain order and produce something meaningful for these children.

So after we had our 200 kids, we split them up by age group and proceeded on with the day.  We had some large speakers set up with a microphone and music.  A group of leaders jumped up front (right) and lead all of us in a fun ice-breaker song of silly hand motions, loud noises, and lots of jumping- great way to get them all excited for the day.  Then another group of leaders went up front and performed a silent drama, depicting the scene and character of Matthew, the tax collector who Jesus confronted about his actions.  Some of the children had hear the story before but for some it was the first time.  Then, yet another team took control and taught us a memory verse- in Xhosa (it is the language that most of the people speak in the township and is often recognized by the “clicks” that are imbedded in it).  After the memory verse was game time.  During this time, we tried to play a set of games.  For the most part we were successful in playing them through, but the 12:30 lunchtime didn’t happen until 1:15 so we kind of ran out of ideas to keep them occupied.

(this are the lines for the kids to get food)

As the children were fed, I was picked up by Lourens and taken into the city of Stellenbosch.  We had a delicious lunch with some of his friends, one of which has a passion for community building, so we hit it off talking about the grand idea of community development and the two-sided problem of the rich and the poor.  It is so encouraging to hear the same conversation on the flip side of the globe.  From there we pretty much headed back to the campus where I was finally able to talk to Clancy on the phone.

Tomorrow is an early start so I must be going to sleep now.  As a side note- the internet in South Africa is fairly underdeveloped, so they actually charge you by the amount of data you use, not just the amount of time- something I have never thought about.  So right now, I am actually writing to my Microsoft Word Document until I get access to the internet sometime later.  It’s rather unfortunate, but oh well!  The things we take for granted… haha

And here's a fun one: