I only have one formal goal for the year.
[Besides learning to surf and being able to make my rent payments every month.]
A Picture a Day…all 365 days of 2010.
I’m off to a rough start, thanks to an injury suffered by my camera on our flight to Indiana for the holiday that has resulted in him being out of my life for the next month. However, that complication simply makes way for greater creativity and ingenuity.
It will be called Project365 and you are welcome to come along for the journey, or to sit out until 2011 when the picture frenzy has passed. Either way, we will be here, my camera and I, capturing snippets of life as we walk out the year.
They may occasionally be great. More often, they will probable be completely random and sometimes even quite horrid. But rather than a project of artistic precision, it is to be a project of documentation and seeing.
My days in Africa have been flying by, and an update is long overdue. The internet connection that I regularly use is too slow to allow for blog updates, so today I set out determined to find an internet cafe with a better connection.
Random excerpts from my life the past month and a half:
Since returning from the overland trip on July 27, I have been staying at a hostel near the YWAM base in Muizenberg. Getting "plugged in" has seemed like a rather long process--there are so many needs and opportunities to get involved with various ministries in the larger Cape Town area that it has been overwhelming at times. My daily activities have varied widely and taken me to all different parts of the city, whether it's to do street ministry, interview fishermen about pay inequalities, speak to a youth group about sexual purity, sort bags of donated clothes to be distributed to the community, or tutor students at an orphanage.
The other day I was thinking about my last-minute decision to do the DTS and my preparation to leave for Hawaii. It is crazy to find myself at the other end now, with only ten days of ministry left and the six months almost gone. The past months have seen times of learning and growing, ministering and having fun, challenges and triumphs. The most valuable thing that I will take away is a new depth in my relationship with my Creator, and I hope that out of that, I will have left something behind in Africa, as well.
At the beginning of the month, our team split into smaller groups, based on the areas of ministry in which we wanted to be involved. My group has been focusing on raising awareness about human trafficking, which is a huge issue in South Africa and is becoming an even bigger one because of the 2010 World Cup. We have spent numerous hours researching, talking to organizations that deal with trafficking, hanging awareness posters around the city, and talking to people to raise awareness. As we have delved deeper into this issue, it has been heartbreaking to see the dark reality of trafficking in this country...
I cannot look at these numbers as just statistics; each number has a face, a name, a life. Not a single one goes unnoticed by the Creator. "Slavery" is often talked of as a thing of the past, but there is more slavery in the world today than at any other point in history. I wonder, in our modern world that boasts of freedom and equality, how has this been allowed to happen?
July 2, 2009
"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
Our first stop of the journey is at the small coastal community of Victoria Bay. We are staying in safari tents in the middle of a mountainside, surrounded by trees, solitude, and monkeys.
I am blessed, in every moment, simply by the vibrancy of being alive. There is magic in every breath of wind, every rustling branch, every bird's whisper, every stroke of the Painter's brush across the sky.
Beauty.
Magic.
Life, in its rawest form.
That people go through their lives without fully awakening their senses to experience and engage and live is one of the greatest tragedies in the world.
Peace. I am enveloped in it, as the sun casts its final glow across the day. Life, for this brief moment, is perfect.
July 9, 2009
I was up before the sun to witness its awakening... it was surreal, casting brilliant hues of light across the sky, their reflections turning the sea into a glistening mirror of color. It was entrancing...
one of those moments when life stops and you forget to breathe.
I went on a safari today. It was a journey that cannot be adequately described with words.
July 10, 2009
We crossed over the Kei today, entering the Transkei area where we will spend the rest of the month. We crossed the bridge on foot, praying as we entered the territory.
The change is drastic...dry, arid landscape; mud huts; no white people anywhere; poverty; women in long skirts or colorful dresses carrying water on their heads; animals roaming free; barefooted children running alongside the road, waving as we pass...
...it is beautiful.
"A traveler without observation is a bird without wings."
-Moslih Eddin Saadi
July 15, 2009
I think you cannot truly know that a world like this exists until you actually see it.
There are so many thoughts to think; sometimes my head is not big enough for them all.
July 16, 2009
The Peach Hut
I sit on the doorstep of a mud hut in Lubanzi watching the sunlight play tricks across the valley. It is a peach-colored hut. It smells of paint and must and cow dung. It is my home for the next eleven days.
The Peach Hut sits atop a mountain, overlooking the sea on one side and a valley on the other, with cows and donkeys and sheep wandering freely, littering the ground with future flooring material.
Lubanzi is a world removed from the world I left... It is a world where time is marked by the rising of the sun and the returning home of the sheep; a world where candles are a necessity rather than a festivity; a world where a "shower" consists of a small basin of water carried up from the river; a world where light switches and faucets and stoves and televisions do not exist.
We hiked 21K's along the coast to get here; up mountains, down mountains, across long stretches of deserted sandy beaches, over rocks jutting up from the sea, alongside pods of dolphins...
It is an hour and a half walk to the village of Zithulele... a walk I will become very familiar with over the next week as I work in the village's HIV/AIDS clinic and the pediatric ward at the Zithulele Hospital.
July 19, 2009
Today my friend and I led Sunday School for a group of 70 Zithulele children. They had no chairs to set on the dung floor, no brightly-lit classroom, no craft materials, no books, and no marker board, but they were the most enthusiastic sunday school group I have ever seen.
July 23, 2009
Winter has descended with fury... the wind howled around the peach hut all night; I feared it would be picked up and hurled into the ocean. Such a terrible clamor... our hut is unusual in that it has a tin rather
than a thatched roof, and it makes a dreadfully frightful racket in the wind. We made a painstakingly long drive to the clinic this morning, under the cover of a menacingly dark sky... so cold.
July 24, 2009
There is one little girl that has completely captured my heart... she is in the malnutrition room, but also has TB. She is nine, but looks to be about four, and is the most frail child I have ever seen... I don't know how she could weigh more than 20 pounds. Every bone sticks out; her thighs are as tiny as my wrists; her wrists are no more than an inch wide... every part of her body looks elongated, because it is so narrow. She has long lashes and the most hauntingly beautiful eyes in the world, huge in her tiny face. She is shy, but will occasionally peer up at me with a little smile...
There is no spark in her, but she is so incredibly beautiful...
July 25, 2009
We cooked dinner for our hosts this evening... they have been very generous throughout our time here, feeding us four dinners of milli-pop and chicken. We invited them all into the hut after dinner to watch Spiderman on a laptop run off of the truck battery. They were mesmerized, despite not being able to understand a single word. It was a unique experience, all of us crowded into a mud hut in the middle of the Transkei, 20 English speakers, 15 Xhosa speakers, lots of body odor...
I am realizing how privileged my life has been, simply for having experienced flipping on a light switch... little things you never even think about until you live for two weeks without them... but I could not say "my life"--or the western world--is "better"... and I have developed a deep respect for these people and their way of life. A person's level of happiness is not dependent on whether they live in a two-story house in Suburbia or a mud hut in the Transkei, which is made obvious by the number of both happy and terribly unhappy people living in both worlds.
July 26, 2009
With every step we take, we are writing our past...
We crossed back over the Kei today, in the same way that we entered, walking by foot across the bridge. It was a unique collision of two times, past and present, every step I took in the present mirroring the steps I took 16 days ago, except that the unknown that I was walking toward then is now in the past; fixed, unmovable, imprinted on the pages of my memory, but never to live again. Time is such a curious thing... so fleeting, and the only dimension we can live in is
the briefest thing in the world...the past and the future are huge expanses of time (or can seem so), but the present--what we live in--is ever escaping us to take its place in the past. We cannot slow, or stop it, but I think that for the most part we are unaware of it...
Over the past ten days, Team South Africa has been slowly winding our way up the Eastern Coast in an oversized yellow "truck", on the first part of our month-long overland adventure with Cross Country Missions.
We've made stops in Victoria Bay, Jeffrey's Bay and Cintsa, and are currently in the Transkei region in a small coastal town called Port St. Johns.
The primary language spoken in the areas we will be visiting during the rest of the month is Xhosa, a language filled with pops and clicks that make for interesting truck rides as we all practice our clicking skills.
Our ministry has taken a variety of forms--weeding gardens, ministering to street kids, making connections with people through our cameras, praying Scripture out over a region from a mountain top, street evangelism, and sharing God's love to kids by joining them in their national sport, soccer.
We have had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of South African-style worship, from the very colorful and eclectic Jeffreys Bay YWAM base worship to the liturgical formality of an Anglican service (conducted entirely in Xhosa).
It has been a delight to be able to see and experience more of the contrasts that exist in South Africa, and we have been filled with excitement and hope as we imagine what God envisions for this land and these beautiful people.
After 40 of the longest travel hours of my life... I am in Africa!
I will not even attempt to describe with words the beauty of Cape Town, because I would fail miserably.
It is a city of contrasts; it seems that when God painted Cape Town on the canvas of the world, He chose from some of His best creations and put them all together in this one place... I have felt as if I were on a mountain top in the Swiss Alps, on an endless stretch of white sand beach in the Caribbean, in the heart of third-world Africa, and even in Paris' Montmartre... all on the same day.
Our team will be leaving tomorrow on an "overland" journey up the coast. I would appreciate your prayers, specifically along the following points:
-It is quite a bit colder than we anticipated; there is no heating anywhere, and many of us "freeze" our way through the nights. Coming from Hawaii's hot temperatures, this is quite a shock...please pray we stay healthy!
-Team unity... we will be spending the next 30 days together living out of a cramped bus (with no access to showers for much of the time :-) )
-Keeping our focus on God regardless of our circumstances is so key in effecting our ability to share God's love. Please pray that the next 30 days are a time of drawing closer to the Lord and learning to walk in His presence as a lifestyle, unhindered by distractions.
