Sheep or McDonald's

Thursday, June 24, 2010, 8:00PM

Pneumatix, Somerset West, South Africa

It’s been a couple days since I’ve written, so hopefully I will remember everything:

On Tuesday, we went to Kayamandi again, but this time we set up to show the South Africa vs France game on a projector screen.  The plan was to do the usual show after the game- good thing we’re used to staying flexible!  The set up went smoothly, as usual.  When it came time for the game to start, that’s when things got a bit hectic.

If you have been watching any of the World Cup games on tv, you will here the constant sound of horns.  They call them “vuvuzelas” here and literally every soccer match sounds like the ones we’ve been experiencing here.  (As a side note, SA actually has a national Vuvuzela group that puts on concerts, check it out here) So, naturally, all the people that came into the tent brought their vuvuzelas.  With the hype of the match and being in an enclosed space, I thought my head would burst with the noise.  Some of the team had to step out for a bit due to the noise, but the majority of us toughed it out.  Personally, I was a bit excited to be experiencing the true nature of the soccer fan in SA so I still had a good time, despite the headache.  By the end of the game, the tent was packed with people, all cheering in unison and as loud as possible- such a cool experience.  And SA won the game! -But not by enough.  They needed to score at least four goals to make it through to the next round.  They had tons of shots on goal, but only two went in.

After the game, we made sure the kids stuck around and we did a little dance competition instead of the play.  Unfortunately, we realized that there was not going to be deep enough attention span for the hour that was needed.  As the team packed up all the gear, I stood off to the side and talked with some of the local boys.  We had a very interesting and somewhat sickening conversation.  They are all between 12 and 15 and the conversation actually started out very fun, talking about the U.S., Obama, how he has two daughters (yes they knew who Obama was and his kids), Zuma, how he has five wives and 23 kids (Zuma is the president of SA), different soccer teams, and soccer players.  They told me that Zidane came to visit their school!  You know, the guy who got a red card last World Cup for head-butting the Italian player!  Yeah, apparently he isn’t so bad after all!  Anyways, in the middle of all that, they were telling me, “Hey that girl there, yeah she’s good for you.”  They were pointing to one of the girls on the 13^th floor team.  “Nooo,” I said, “I have a girlfriend back home!”  They asked about her for a couple seconds and then went back to say, “So what!  That girl, there, she good for you.”  As I shook my head they asked, “So you don’t cheat?”  I was actually very surprised at the question and went on to say that there was no way I would ever cheat.  I asked if they had girlfriends and all three of them buffed up and smiled, nodding with pride.  Then I asked them the same question they asked me, “So do you guys cheat on them?”  I was actually asking it as a rhetorical question, expecting them to laugh, “Yah!” They said, “I have three.”  I was shocked.  “Yeah we like Zuma because he likes sex!  That’s why he has many wives and many kids.”  I was still shocked, and I had to ask, “Wait, so you guys have sex?”  “Yes!  We like sex, that’s why we like Zuma and we cheat.  Obama doesn’t like sex.”  I was still very shocked, and sadly had to keep from laughing at the last statement about Obama.  I asked if they wanted to have kids like Zuma at their age and they said, “No we use condemns.”  I continued to try to ask them questions and make them see how wrong all of it was, but I realized to do that, I needed to rewrite their culture, their entire society.  I needed to remove the sexually explicit media, redo their parenting, reestablish (or establish) ethical values, and teach them about love- true love.  It was an extremely tragic moment for me.  I really did not know, and still don’t know what to do.  And honestly, there probably is not much I can do at all, except to love on them.  Only by God’s grace will huge social changes like that occur.  Please join me in praying for this change.  Some change actually has started to happen.  Deep inside the Keep Them Safe motive is the slow process of establishing some of those key values and characteristics.

 

And that brings us to Wednesday- Compassion Day.  Every Wednesday in Kayamandi and Enkhanini (I have been spelling it “Kanini” this entire time… oops) Serve the City hosts Compassion Day.  I started the day (right) in Kayamandi with the 13^th Floor crew.  Our mission was to organize the kids to clean up a park and plant several trees (below left).  The stress was on having the local teenagers and children do the work because it would give them a sense of ownership.  It is also a very cool thing to watch a tree grow that you planted.  The park had some serious issues.  Broken glass was everywhere, old chip bags, used bottles, and burnt logs; I mean any type of trash imaginable was there.  We filled ten black bags full of trash and still did not clean everything up.  As many of the kids helped pick up the trash, others were busy digging holes for the trees.  They all did a great job, really making the park look much better than it was before (below right).  We marched back to the home base in victory after the long morning’s battle with the park.  The kids ate lunch and I played some more soccer- much worse than I did on Monday.  (Actually, so much so that they didn’t ask me to play today! Ouch!!) (below bottom)

From Kayamandi, we walked to Enkhanini.  It was a very interesting walk, actually, seeing the different parts of the township and stopping for a picturesque photo (right).  Once there, we split up to conquer an epic task- to build a bridge!  When it rains in Enkhanini, the hills become very slick and people often fall on them.  In the ravine, water collects and creates a sometimes-impassable river.  So, over the past couple months, on Compassion Day, teams have been building stairs in a heavily trafficked area of the township.  The final touch is the bridge.  The manly men started digging and mixing and moving and talking and planning the structure.  For some reason, I was left out of that group, so I was given the task of bread-man, which I actually preferred!  The same slices of bread we had last week with the verses written on them, we got again on Wednesday.  I talked to my group, explaining the goal of our intentions with the bread.  We wanted to completely avoid the close-ended questions so that we could produce the purposeful conversations.  And I think we did!  We went to the same houses we had last week, trying to continue to grow those relationships.  The neat difference this time was that most of the verses on the bread were actually written in Xhosa (as opposed to English last week).  Since the people here speak Xhosa, they were able to get a lot more out of it (so we assume).  And, since I obviously cannot speak or read Xhosa, I asked the English-speaking people to translate the verses for me.  This lead to some cool conversations, working over the verses, trying to both figure out with the exact translation was.  Overall, it was an awesome experience of doing a micro-Bible study with some of the people in Enkhanini.  After our escapades, we had a traditional Xhosa dinner, which was an adventure in itself.  On the menu for the night: sheep stomach (below left).  To answer your questions: yes, I ate one bite; no, it was not good; well almost, I gagged and muscled it down.  Since a majority of us didn’t eat dinner that night, we stopped off at McDonald’s on the way back.  By the end of the night my stomach was feeling really weird.  I’m not sure if it was from the sheep or the McD’s…

And now we’re at today, Thursday.  Lourens picked me up early this morning to take me to Kayamandi for the day.  Africa time was at its best today since it was a painful 40 degrees this morning, making everyone fairly late.  By ten oclock we had the program rolling.  Loud music brings children in droves, and gives everyone something to dance to and sing along with.  A team from SCAS (Sport for Christ Action South Africa) runs the morning program, so a couple of them jumped up front to lead us in a fun dance and aerobic icebreaker.  The genius aerobics ended in calming stretches and a final sit-down stance.  [Let me take a second to explain how terribly hard it is to 1) try to organize kids 2) try to organize kids in Africa and 3) try to simply get the kids to sit down.  In Cameroon, half of our struggle was in trying to settle the kids down.  This amazing aerobic beginning brought the kids to an even more amazing focused seat.]  Once the kids were settled, another group from the SCAS team hopped up to perform a great skit that depicted Jesus’ sacrifice for our salvation.  They had a nice discussion after the skit with everyone and dismissed the kids to their assigned age groups.  From there the kids went through rotations of several different games.  I got on board with the relay races.  With each set of kids, we had them do several different relays.  They started with a normal run, then the classic wheel barrel, and ended with “last person in the line crawls between everyone’s legs to stand in the front of the line” race which ends when the whole line reaches the finish (not sure if you visualized that correctly, hopefully the picture helps, below).  A brief discussion afterwards lead us to talking about how teamwork was vital in the family and how we could all be better players in the family team.  At the end of the rotations, kids were dismissed for lunch, and we got a break.  The leaders were eventually fed and then were released back into the wild to defend ourselves from little children.  Well, it wasn’t that bad, but at times it felt like it.  As the little kids did their thing, the older teenagers, who had been helping us translate the entire morning, were in different workshops, all geared towards building the quality character.  I sat in on a poetry workshop that encouraged us to express our feelings through artistic poems, building the creativity in all of us.  Then I was picked up and met the 13^th Floor team at the beach where we watched the sun set before eating dinner.  It was quite an amazing day.