South Africa: The Other Side of the World

Sent on July 30, 2007

Greetings!

I'm blessed with a few minutes to sit down and update you on the work that my friends and I are doing for God's Kingdom in South Africa.

Late last night we returned to Cape Town after spending one week in the Transkei region of South Africa, in the villiage of Gulandoda relatively near Engcobo (in case your looking for something you can find on a map). The time we had in Transkei was a new experience for us. Our days consist of a morning devotion followed by some milled corn for breakfast, then about four hours of evangelism in various nooks in the large valley we stayed in (we began to make light of the phrase "just over the hill" to describe any one of our destinations), a lunch of fried bread, bible stories and songs with the children in a nearby church in the afternoon, then a church service around sunset (it being winter here), and then dinner. The conditions were spartan and foreign, but comparable to tent camping, though we stayed in a normal building instead of tents. The people that we stayed with - the Nositile family, I believe - provided us amazing hospitality.

A few anecdotes and thoughts:

-In huts, the men generally sit on one side and the women on the other. After a few days, this stopped being foreign, and we got used to "talking to the men and looking at the women" and vice-versa, I would suppose. We did, of course, bridge the divide often.

-The people we visit suffer outwardly more than the people I am usually around. Diseases of many sorts cause problems in these rural areas, not near to the medicine that I am usually surrounded by. There are also great problems with family conflicts or brokenness, and with envy between neighbors and relatives.

-On Thursday night during dinner, the family saw grass fire in the valley out the window. So David, Eric, Simon, and I grabbed wet towels and joined the men and boys of the family in fighting the fire. Fire is a real force of nature! It made me understand how we sometimes see it in nature specials on TV or movies: there we hear the sound and see the flames, but in the valley we felt the wind and heat. But a wet towel is amazingly effective against a grass fire! It consumed many acres, though. We pray that it was not too damaging to people's posessions, and give praise that no houses were damaged. However, that fire began in high winds that persisted for the second half of our time in Transkei, and did damage some houses.

-The people that we met and spoke to are very different from ourselves. How can we bridge the gap between our different forms of faith? How can we forge a meaningful connection with people that we want to share God's love with, in less than an hour? I think that the blessing that I gathered from encountering this question in Transkei is that God does the work for us. We can take joy in God's love for us, and take the risk of opening our mouths in the power of the Spirit to say what words we are given. Then we can pray that God will complete our work. I think that this is the most important thing so far in South Africa: I have seen that my faith doesn't depend on my own strength, but in my trust.

-How much do we depend on the translators! To communicate with people whom we evangelize, our hosts, etc. We are very thankful for their presence and partnership.

-The Xhosa people that we are minstering to in Cape Town and Transkei are exceptionally hospitable people to strangers, even just passing by. I'm very thankful for this.

I would love to write more, but my relatively short internet time was taken up by managing business back in the States. However, I think that our daily activities may abate slightly, giving way to writing to you back at the mission house and bringing the message to the internet cafe to send it off. I look forward to writing to you again whether it's in that more coherent fashion or not. But even more, I am excited to work for the Kingdom in the coming days leading up to my return to the states on August 12. The only prayer request that comes (quickly!) to mind as far as this Transkei work is that God would not forsake the people that we were with. We also pray that God would send rain to grow the small seeds that we planted, but even more important is that he be compassionate to these people whom we came to love and help them to overcome the problems that I described above.

For the Kingdom,

Carl