I learned a new way to eat marshmallows my last day at the Tembisa Baptist Church. Put it in your mouth; chew it; spit it back in your hand; stir to a paste with your finger and lick. Fully half the children ate their marshmallows this way. To make it last? my daughter suggests. Maybe. But I think next time I bring sweets it will be hard candy. (You will appreciate that this blog does not include a photograph for your edification.)
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As you have probably figured out by now, things in Africa don’t always go according to plan. As they say, the three most important qualities in a missionary after faith in God are flexibility, flexibility and flexibility. Wednesday was my last day at Arebaokeng. “When are you going to bring the children some sweets?” I was asked. My last day seemed like a good time. I figured out last week that it wasn’t going to work. In writing workshops I have often used an exercise with three groups writing dialog to tell the story of Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. In one group Jack and Jill are pre-schoolers. In another group Jack and Jill are an old couple who have been married for 50 years. In the last group Jack and Jill are a brother and sister who fight all the time. This time the chaos was at Tembisa Baptist Church, the second location I visit. I tried the dramas. Without a translator it never would have worked. It was hard enough to make the children understand that I didn’t want a speech but a drama, and that I didn't care what language they used. No one got the idea of showing the plans needed to reach the goal of becoming a nurse or teacher or police. I had to talk about that after the presentations. “Where have you been so long?” “I live in the States now. Wisconsin.” “Is it cold there?” my questioner asked warily. It only he knew! I took advantage of being back in Johannesburg to visit my old writers club, Writers 2000. The group meets the last Saturday of the month in the elegant clubhouse of a retirement center surrounded by manicured gardens. Today for Tomorrow lesson one was about journeys—to places like Mpumulunga or Johannesburg or the one each of us makes through life. Lesson two is about dreams of where we would like to go on our life journey. I took a stack of library books about places one might visit—Namibia, Swaziland, the Drakensburg Mountains of South Africa—and another stack about jobs and professions. It does this librarian’s heart good to see the children sitting on the steps devouring books. One girl held an armload, not wanting to give any to one of the younger boys. “He can’t read yet.” I got there early. Very early. I was afraid of rush hour traffic, but of course, it was Saturday and traffic was light. Even though I was early, children streamed ahead of me through the gates of Central Johannesburg College, Alexandra Campus. They were neatly dressed, many in T-shirts that said Rose-Act Saturday School. The program out of Rosebank Union Church in the wealthy suburb of Four Ways rents the college facility for an extra-tuition school for children from the crowded Alexandra township across the road. (For my American readers, “tuition” here means “instruction”, not the money paid for a private school, although these students do pay a modest fee to demonstrate their commitment to be in class.) By all appearances it was an idyllic little town surrounded by miles and miles of sweeping grasslands. The streets around the classic Dutch Reformed Church at its heart reminded me of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe—broad enough to turn a span of eight oxen. The houses were quaint reminders of a former era. They were a bit run down, perhaps, and the unpaved side streets showed erosion from recent rain. Most of the buildings were Edwardian or late Victorian. A good development committee might turn the town into an arts center or major tourist attraction. But the era was not as idyllic as it appeared on the surface.
Six hundred girls in blue cotton pinafore dresses with crisp white blouses looked up at me from the auditorium floor at Kingsridge Senior Primary School in King Williamstown, South Africa. They sat in neat rows from grade four to grade seven, while we talked about the stories they tell and the stories told to them. “Your life is like a story,” I told the girls. “You are the main character—the star of the show!” They smiled and looked pleased. “You are not only the main character,” I went on, relying heavily on Daniel Taylor’s ideas in Tell Me a Story; the Life-shaping Power of Stories. “You are also in some ways the author. You get to decide what happens in your story.” |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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