A story refreshed

Today I went to church literally down the street, a few houses down from the YDC

As I rethink through the experience, the irony only now hits me; the church's name is Pietermaritzburg Christian Fellowship, or as they abreviate it, PCF :S

It's a church made out of the old Pietermaritzburg prison, the prison which Gandhi was held when he was here, which is pretty cool

Worship was an interesting experience, where the first song (though unknown to me) was in English, the second in Zulu (which is becoming a more familiar sound to me) and the third in Afrikaans, which was simply bizar

The message, was about 'suffering', which I'm always interested in hearing about from the different biblical perspectives out there

Surprisingly (I know, I'm a cynical bastard :P) the message was sound and good, with important distinctions in the detail of points

I took notes, but the one thing that stuck out for me the most, was an analogy I'd heard many, many times before

The story goes that a womens study group had come upon a passage in Malachi 3:3, which refers to God as a refiner and purifier of silver

Not familiar with the process, one of the women volunteered to research the process, to report back to the group the next meeting

So she visited a silver smith (not sure if that's the term for them, it was just the one the speaker used), who showed her the process

It involves the placement of the silver in the hottest part of the flame, to burn away the impurities

Now at this point, I was like, yeah, yeah... I mean I'd heard it, and even sung about it like a billion times over

But the story continued, and I learnt some interesting new bits

If the piece is left in the flame for a moment too long, it is destroyed; therefore, the silver smith eyes are ALWAYS focussed on it when it is in the flame

Why then is it, in times of hardness, we (or at least I), think we're alone...

But the bit that really got me, that cut straight to my core was how the story ended

At this point, the woman then asked the silver smith how he knew then, when the silver was ready

"That's the easy part. It's when I can see my reflection in it"

How much is enough?

During lunch in the park, a little white girl came up to our group, and up to me (I'm guessing as I was the only non-Zulu, and therefore the least scary) and handed me a 100rand note!! She then wordlessly trotted back off to her (I think mother)

We found out that the mother had seen us, figured out what we were about, and wanted to give the money to us

I was pretty encouraged, and gave the money to the workers

The next day (today), I found out that the money was going to be split between the workers (from Masukwana), rather than going to the organisation itself

My initial emotional reaction was of a little outrage; the money was for the organisation! For the kids!!

It hadn't been just the workers that'd decided, it was something the whole department (and program co-ordinator, who's a really good guy) had decided

I then talked to Mathilde about it, and how I thought it was really strange (wrong), but then she put it in context for me; in a country where a car costs just as much (after conversion) as it does in Australia, these workers, these full-time youth workers, get 550rand a month; converted, that turns out as $AUS100, a month

I then figured... oh... ok... yeah, maybe an extra 33rand (or less than $AUS6) to each of them isn't a complete evil :S

Masukwana Museum Visit, Thurs, 5 Jul

Encouragingly, the street team seemed to have enjoyed something about me, cuz they demanded I come back on the Thursday to bring the same kids on their museum trip

So, I wondered down to the office again to meet them, but this time we had the van drive us to pick them up

And there they were, all waiting, and all dressed up in their best clothes; it was heartbreakingly cute; some where in plaid cotton shirts, buttoned all the way up, others in their nicest (cuz they were clean and didn't have holes) jackets

But you could still see the gaps; you could still see the dirt encrusted, sockless feet showing in their school shoes (if they were lucky, the only pair of shoes they had), holey t-shirts (but still their nicest as they were clean) showing under the jackets

The museum itself was pretty ordinary, but the kids were so, so excited; afterwards we took them to a park, where we let them play on the equipment as we assembled a veritable feast of a hotdog, a packet of chips, a few lollies and two biscuits; to them, a sumptous, incredible treat
. And to see a bunch of 3-13 your olds clap their hands together, say a grace that was "God bless this food forever and ever, Amen!"... too cute, far too cute

And then, back in the van, back to Masukwana

I'd been seeing and interacting with kids from this context all the while since being here, but always at L'Abri

I knew that L'Abri was to be a special, rare, out-of-context meeting for them, but to see just HOW out-of-context, I think, is something one has to experience to properly appreciate...?

Dunno

All in all, a heart-checking last few days

Masukwana, Wed, 4 Jul

With only a day of rest (Tues), I decided to join one of the street teams on Wed

After meeting in the morning at the YFC office, we walked down to the Masukwana township, a slum area if you will, of stick shelters, one running water tap between 50 houses and no electricity


There we ran a morning kids programme, of basic comprehension and games

Even now, it's hard not to be a little emotional when thinking about it; kids, from 3-13 years old, utterly and completely adorable, who have so little

Shoes, if they have them at all, that are broken and many sizes too big

I sat on the dusty, dusty ground, with a pair of 3-5 yr olds climbing over me and playing with my cap that I'd put on one of their heads

Later one of the workers told me that one of the 4yr olds, one I'd shared my bottle of water with, was currently eating out of bins, as there wasn't a reliable or secure home or food source

And coming from a Western context where it can be normal for kids to be getting super computer video game consoles, to see the utter enjoyment these kids got from the luxury of a 10c balloon...??? A 10 CENT balloon - flipping heck...

And then in the afternoon we conducted 'home' visits, which in this case meant visiting the older kids where they begged and slept; one 'home' was simply the freeway intersection, and the other a basic concrete alcove

NACCW, Fri-Mon, 29 Jun-2 Jul

I was already dreading this particular camp as it loomed; with most normal camps having numbers between 15-70 people, and usually going for at most 3 days (Fri night - Sunday arvo), this was always going to be a ball buster

The NACCW, or the National Associationa of Child Care Workers, camp came up with 150 people, from Fri MORNING - MONDAY arvo, and we were allocated the number of staff that would normally run a camp of 100 :(

And because the fires had wiped a cabin out, the staff were short of beds and a few of us had to scrounge for a different berth of some sort each night

After a late night on Thurs, the camp staff and I departed for L'Abri at 7:30am, and spent the entire day preparing the site and working with the campers as they arrived from all over the country, representatives from each of the 9 provinces AND visiters from the USA

We were only able to finally hit the sack @ 12 that night (after we'd found spare berths (for that night only)), only to have to get up again @ 4am to start preparing for Saturday morning breakfast, and this sleeping pattern persisted for the entire camp :(

Needless to say, the staff scrambled for hourly naps at every spare moment!

As hard as it was, there were many brilliant moments of the camp; the big field games they ran were fun, incredibly colourful and musical

They brought up with them a collection of at least 15 Jambees (dunno how to spell it, those African drums?), and every night around the camp fire there was African drumming (in South Africa! Now that's pretty cool :P) and dancing kids; incredibly festive

And on Sunday night, they each presented a cultural item from each of the provinces, complete with elaborate and decorative traditional costume, the delegates from the USA even did some rap for us, and some pretty cool 'stepping' (which apparently is some Southern thing)

Came out of it pretty proud of making it through such a gruelling schedule, and feeling blessed to have been able to experience a snapshot of the different cultures in South Africa

Needless to say, I slept damn well Monday night back @ the YDC :S