March 18th? Commune.

WE WENT TO A COMMUNE!!!! IT’S CALLED KWA SIZA BANTU WHICH MEANS A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE FIND REST (OR HELP DEPENDING ON YOUR TRANSLATION). ACTUALLY WE’RE WRITING VERY LOUD RIGHT NOW TO MAKE UP FOR THE LATENESS OF THIS POST!!!!! CAN YOU HEAR US?!?!
Okay, okay we’ll turn it down. This is Peter now, so if you don’t like reading my posts or if you have more of a crush on Gill or Krista (understandable, I may be irresistable, but I’m engaged) you can skip down a few lines. Actually it wasn’t really a commune, but it seemed like one. I think they refer to themselves as a mission. I was a bit leery about going to some hippie place nonetheless, but Gill was all for it (being a hippie) so I went along with an open mind. It’s free to stay there, and they provide free basic meals for you while you’re there, and they make it clear that you don’t have to help with anything and they want people to be able to come and rest. They stuck me in a dorm with a bunch of Europeans who mostly were there to help for a year or so, and on our first day we got a tour. He mission started with a Zulu revival where God’s spirit came down and hundreds of people came to repent of their sin and know God. It was started by these German South Africans praying in 1966, and the two main guys are still around running things. The mission grew and grew though, and there are over 100 “coworkers” (full-time missionaries) along with other full-time volunteers, hundreds of paid workers, and various other people associated with the mission. Over the years they’ve started various projects to help people or raise money, and now there’s about a million things going on there all the time. To make a short list:
-they discovered an underground spring, built a water-bottling plant, and are now south africa’s #2 producer of bottled water with a tractor-trailer full of water bottles leaving the mission every four hours around the clock.
-they had a few dairy cows which they’ve expanded into a huge dairy plant that sells milk and yoghurt all over SA
-some hydroponic expert taught them growing techniques and now they have state of the art greenhouses supplying the best peppers all over the world.
-they have planted several churches and schools throughout Europe
-they started an AIDS hospice where they pray for people to get better and it works
-they started a school for mission kids which now takes in several students from all over
-they started a college to train teachers which also now takes in students from all over.
-they started a radio station as an outreach to Zulus which now broadcasts all over SA
-they started a bakery which sells all over now
-and on and on, knitting, building, etc, they are always looking for more projects and use the money they make communally and to help people.
They have odd customs that remind you of a Mennonite colony like guys and girls don’t associate with each other, and girls wear skirts, but God really seems to be at work. Often a guy will sense that God is telling him to marry a particular girl. Often the guy doesn’t really know the girl, but he goes and tells an elder, and the elder goes and speaks to the girl, and then the girl prays about it a whole bunch until God confirms with her, and then they get married. We heard many personal testimonies of this, and it always seems to work out “wonderful!” The lovely lady who ran the coffee shop (another enterprise I forgot to mention earlier) said she hadn’t even touched her husband before they were married twenty years ago, and it’s still as lovely today as the first year they were married (which was lovely, I was told).

So, to sum up, a bunch of German guys got together and prayed for revival, and then it happened and tons of people came and became Christians, and then they set up this place for people to find rest and help them and then God gave then huge financial blessings so they could do it, and then God started setting up the marriages and everyone seems joyful and devoted to God.
I spent the week helping a couple Germans (Eddie and Marcus) building a cool octagonal kindergarten. Fun fun.

Peter out!

p.s. joel, you could come here for a year to see God working.
p.p.s. big shout-out to Josh who’s hair is dashing!! I mean seriously, have you ladies checked out that boys hair lately? Dashing.


Hello there littles, let me say something about Kwasizabantu. Pete forgot to mention that after the first day a cloud descended onto our hill and never left. My lips were blue, I wore sneakers with my skirt, the sweater I washed reeks like mold. Poor thing couldn’t dry, hanging out there for days in the cloud.

For all who wondered, I’m not staying at the ‘commune’ forever, not even longer than a week. I’m coming home, coming back to the World with all its confusing, convoluted splendor. Unlike Peter with his happy-go-lucky, all is well personality, I seem to think most things kind of suck. So, Kwasizabantu with its happy marriages, fantastically successful business ventures and people who so willingly gave up everything of ‘themselves’ to serve God and submit to the authority of the Mission was a little much for me. Too much sweetness, or simplicity, or purity. I don’t know fully but I suppose most of it has to do with something rotten inside of me. I felt if I stayed I’d have to be entirely different than I am – which was particularly sad for me to realize. For people to live together, so many of them, it seems to necessitate identification with the group self and goals, rather than those of the individual. I did see how the individual thoughts, perspective, etc lost significance in light of the whole, in light of authority, which was taken to be set-up by God. I think perhaps this pattern is indeed beautiful but it is a beauty I’m not quite able to recognize. I was unprepared for how much that bothered me in reality, because I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on about wanting it before. It seems for so many people to live together in peace and harmony they have to become almost un-human.

I came away thinking I needed to pray more, understanding that I do. Fearful – for it seems once you try to pray it brings shame – some sort of litmus test of faith. I never want to stick the paper in for I’m afraid it will come out the wrong color. Not sure what you’d want to be though, Acid or Base and which one does God want more?

I spent time alone this week, for the first time really in months. Normally I’m addicted to being alone but, being lately out of practice, found my own company unsettling, equally unsettling the company of others once you realize you’re not comfortable on your own. Being on this trip and trying to learn and make the most of my chance to change, serve people, etc, I sort of forget how to be at rest in my own skin. Forget the significance of sitting and thinking, forget about your own self as it is, apart from its growth.

I think I did find help at Kwasizabantu and for that, as well as for the many small and unforgettable examples of self-sacrifice, I say thank you and recommend their hospitality to any of you traveling through South Africa.

Now…
o Leah and kajsa, I’m glad you found the cream. Left it for you guys to fight over, thought if we were going to be away we shouldn’t take Everything good with us. Who knows but you girls maybe in need of a little ‘pick-me-up’ one of these slushy march evenings…
o I made Cream puffs in the Bakery.
o I’m addicted to Peanut Butter
o Janess, I hope your eyes have stopped exploding

That is all, sorry for the low-quality post, there was something about my week at Kwasizabantu that sits oddly with me. I find it difficult to post.

Love,
Gillian

p.s. Josh Wilson is my favorite person to make Ginger Tea for (next to Janay Newton I suppose who introduced it to me… Janay is, for the record, one of the best people to be next to). I wish you well in Vancouver Joshie, I feel a kindredness for your time there and my time there and hope you don’t get really sad. And if you do it goes away eventually.

Welcome, dear wonderers, wanderers, wisemen and wives.

According to Peter, my task now is to “endeavor to temper Gil and Peter’s opposing steel into a double-edged sword.” He seems to believe that I always fall exactly in the middle of any contrasting points of view that he and Gil muster up, and because of that I must always be a forceful advocate for peace and understanding. On the other hand, Gil brings up that she hopes I don’t feel as though I need to play the balancing, peacemaker role. Such contrast.
It’s lovely that I mostly enjoy falling in the middle, and I really don’t feel as though I must translate (I try to do it only when it seems absolutely necessary).
I have wonderful traveling companions.

KwaSizabantu feels like a long time ago. It’s a good thing those other two filled you in on the basic details of the operation, I don’t think I’d be very up for such niceties. (Writing last in our posts has its definite upsides.)

In this case, I believe Peter’s over-glossing life at the “mission”, I definitely understand Gil’s unsettled feelings about the place. (Pete really is pretty happy-go-lucky.) But I found a lot of comfort there, despite the constant (twice a day, everyday) sermons on sin and rottenness and the sometimes eerie, Pleasantville atmosphere. I drank a lot of tea, read pieces of multiple books, wrote some, drew some, walked around the beautiful gardens, and had numerous valuable conversations with people who were either visiting or living at the mission. Since you basically get to make your own “program”, there was a lot of leeway regarding my everyday routine, and I was very pleased to have a downtime week. I feel bad for poor Gil, forgetting how to be alone with herself. She’s been doing such a great job socializing with everyone since we’ve been here that it’s understandable how she could forget. But since I’ve been incredibly introverted, and a little bit of a mute at times I had a grand time in the slowness and solitude. (I hated the damn cloud though. One day I was wearing a tank top, a T-shirt, a sweater, a zip-up, and a wind-resistant raincoat. Too bad I had to wear my dang skirt, so I managed to remain freezing.)

I still don’t know how I feel about the apparent losing of individuality for the sake of a smoother community. It seems like it’s a little bland. It may be Pride, or some other warped part of my ideas talking, but it seems like God made you and I unique, and I like it when there’s a little more room to express that than there seems to be at KwaSizabantu.
The people there were really hospitable to us though. We had invites to tea dates, lunch dates, supper dates, all sorts of dates –and the people we interacted with were quite open to expressing their interpretations of the mission’s ideas. We asked a lot of questions, trying to figure out how things worked, and got a lot of biblical-based answers. People really felt called to be there, and God is obviously using the place to changes lives.

So, there are many things to ponder and perhaps integrate into my own life, and a few fixations I’d rather not spend any more energy on putting into practice.

Peter asked me numerous times, “What if God tells you to go back there?”
Well, if God tells me, then I guess I’d have to go back. (God’s track record of specific demands regarding the direction of my everyday life is comforting here.)
“What if God tells you to marry some guy there?”
Marry someone I have probably never even had the chance to talk to one-on-one? Probably one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard of, and one that I’d have some serious issues following through on. It’s not happening anytime soon.

In any case, I’m glad that I don’t live in that commune. But I’m glad that some people do. There was a lot of beauty there, even if I was a little disappointed that I didn’t find a bunch of Amish people churning butter and making yoghurt in large crates.
I echo Gil’s recommendation to check it out. (Joel, I wouldn’t say that you should come for a year, but I did think that you would find it interesting.)

I love a lot.
Sometimes I’m not very good at showing it.
Krista

P.S. I helped out in a Kindergarten class where the children spoke German, Afrikaans, Romanian, and Zulu… anything but English, really.
P.P.S. Big shout-out to Josh, who we really like.