March 10 post - Botswana Adventure

Good morning, Dears.
Lovely day for drive -the sun shines, the coal dust settles to reveal fields of wild flowers and rows of maize-corn. Some of the trees are wild and mysterious -foreign to my western-Canada trained eye; some are familiar -sitting there, among long yellow grasses, normalizing this country and returning me to Alberta.

Here we are in our little, white rental locker: the music’s loud, the windows cracked –the first half of our trip behind us. We just spent a lovely weekend with a lovely, little lady named Candice in Witbank/Jo’burg, and now we head towards Durban area, to an self-sufficient communal living place where we’ll spend a week wearing floor length skirts, attending two sermons a day, working in a yoghurt factory and learning about living in a (successful) commune. I suppose Peter’s off the hook with the skirts, but he’ll most likely be sporting his collared shirts for a while. We’re hoping that Gil won’t be seduced by the romance of the community, (her dream world,) and abandon Pete and I. There’s so much to come.

We finished off our time in Ontario on Friday, and opted for an hour-long flight from Maun to Jo’Burg instead of a sketchy two-day bus trip. The older couple I sat beside were odd enough to keep me quite entertained. She played Sudoku the entire trip while complaining about the flight delay, the “uncomfortable seats”, and the fact that Gil got a whole can of Sprite. He wrote, crossed out, and circled strange, coded combinations of consonants on a pad of paper –probably a spy, almost sure of it.
Spent Friday night at Candice’s in Witbank, and set off the next morning for the big city. Walked around in a market and Africa’s largest mall Saturday afternoon, and out for a sushi dinner before we settled in to our backpacker’s hostel for the night. I’ll let Gil describe the scene and Peter describe the host; they’ve already got it down.
Sunday morning we went to my favourite church service. I felt unbelievably blessed to join that group of God’s children in worship. I know Gil has some to share on this, don’t want to steal it… I’ll just say that I was very encouraged by their Christ-focused mentality, and their understanding of whole-church responsibility for community. That was an awkward sentence. Sorry.
After church we managed to maneuver our way through the mass of concrete that makes up the “heart of South Africa” with only two maps, four navigators and a few minor detours. It turns out that neither of our fairly recent maps were quite recent enough for the ever-changing street names in Johannesburg. We wandered around the Apartheid museum, where I’m sure Pete memorized every fact he read to recite to many of you at a later time, when it’s convenient to show off his history skills. It’s strange to learn about “history” that happened within your lifetime and is still so responsible for affecting everyday life here.
South Africa is samesame, but different. Our time in the cities here felt like we were somehow dropped off in Vancouver, or in some random American city where the earth was dyed red.

I sometimes become quite overwhelmed with how all that I am learning here is supposed to fit into my life. Or how I am to articulate exactly what I’m learning while it’s all so fresh in my mind. I feel as though I cannot properly relay my thoughts on my experiences, because I have yet to discover all of their significance, or all sides of their truth.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t remember how I interact back home, not that I’m entirely different –but right now it’s hard to imagine being anywhere but here, living any life but this transient one. I suppose I’m quite used to being away now.
Life is very large.

Will you take me as I am?
Lovvve,
Krista

Post Script: Dear Southview members -I thoroughly enjoyed reading your cards and letters. It’s encouraging to be reminded that though there are only three of us traveling here, many more at home are joining us in prayer. Thanks!



Peter In

I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, “yes, these narratives and expositions are lovely, but what are the concrete things you’ve accomplished? If you could make a list titled, ‘I have served God in these physical ways’ then what would the list say? Very well, I hear you shouting for the list and I am happy to oblige. In Maun we accomplished the following:
-Sealed and installed flashing and painted around the steeple of the church.
-Helped paint interior doors for the church.
-Installed 13 interior doors (actually only 11 but we had to do 2 twice because of poor cuts).
-Crashed one of the missionaries’ vehicles into the other.
-Replaced lightbulbs and adjusted the hanging lights in the church.
-Paid for damage caused by Peter crashing one of the missionaries’ vehicles into the other.
-Paid for doors damaged by poor cuts.
-Help ramjam some errands to pick up church stuff (Gill and I spent over an hour in Cashbuild while the clerks figured out how to scan our purchases – and I later spent an hour convincing the manager that he’d sold us two faulty doors that they needed to replace)
-Dusted 24 pews and swept the sanctuary and washed 9 of the 11 aforementioned interior doors.
-Installed 9 interior door handles and one lock.
-Upholstered 8 church pews.
-Pushed 8 wheelbarrows full of dirt from a pile on one side of the church to a dip on the other.
-Accidentally scraped the paint on the back of the church when the ladder fell.
-Painted over the scrape-marks on the back of the church.
-Picked up 12 large used tires for the sewage soakaway from a bush hotshot company.
-Hauled 11 pickup truckloads full of dirt from a pile on one side of the church to a dip on the other.
-Set up and took down our tents that we stayed in for the end of our stay.
-Set up a huge canvas tent for a week of gospel meetings in town.

Now I know at this point some of you are thinking to me (since I’m not there and you can’t speak to me), you’re thinking, “but Peter shouldn’t missionary-type work be more about building relationships than just seeming busy and accomplishing tasks?”
“Well, not to worry.” I think back to you, “along the way we are also meeting many people, both Native Africans and Missionaries, both Christians and non, and we didn’t accomplish the tasks above entirely on our own, we received much help from our new Botswana friends. The work, in fact, even facilitates the building of those very relationships often, rather than detracting from it.”
“So don’t think we’re just mindlessly trying to keep ourselves busy,” I think to you at last, “God appears to be at work in much of what we are doing, whether through helping people, learning things, or ramjamming dirt into a dip, He is here.”
After Botswana we had the lovely good fortune of being able to meet up with the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. By coincidence she is also my fiancé. We drove out in our white Volkswagen rental car (that was upgraded to air con and remote locks for free – although still no power steering) from the Jo’Burg airport to where Candice was working at the hospital in Witbank. She seemed much smaller at first, than I remembered. (Has anyone else noticed that Candice seems much larger once she’s talking to you than say, when she’s still walking at a distance? – She uses this power to such an effect that Gill herself thought Candice was taller than little Ruthey Calder.) After I got over the initial appearance of Candice’s shrinking stature, we all had a lovely reunion and spent a nice holiday weekend in Jo’Burg. Krista left the description of the hostel-owner to me, and I will now oblige:
We got out of the Air Botswana transport and right into both the hustle and the bustle of the Jo’Burg Airport. In Jo’Burg everything goes much faster than in many other parts of Africa and you can feel it immediately. People actually seemed to be walking twice as fast off the plane in Jo’Burg as they had been when they walked onto in Maun. There were about a million shops, which appeared all around us as we walked on, and I suggested the Girls get us a SIM card for our cell-phone while I sorted out our rental car. Having left the ladies behind at MTN Cellular I strode on in the direction of rentalcar. There was a line of people shouting at the new arrivals that they had taxis, hostels, etc to offer, and one woman in particular looked right at me as I passed and inquired if I needed a hostel in Jo’Burg. My natural inclination obviously would be to say, “Oh, no thank-you.” But since we actually were looking for a hostel in Jo’Burg, I was caught with a momentary loss for words. What do you say to someone trying to sell you something that you need when you’re so used to brushing aside a constant barrage of salespeople offering products and services of dubious usefulness? Well I said, “well…” and then I regarded this woman. She was shorter than me by several inches, but she stood in a way that made it seem like she didn’t know how short she was. She seemed to be able to look at me eye-to-eye, perhaps by some trick of bending the light reflecting off her through some sort of refraction technique created by affecting the atmospheric densities in her immediate surroundings. However she did it, as I was walking I was now looking directly into her sternly confident off-coloured eyes (one was light blue and the other was an unnatural-seeming cloudy grey blue) as she launched into an uninterrupted monologue on everything I would want to know about Jo’Burg, her hostel, and specifically the area of Jo’Burg surrounding her Hostel and why it was the superior area of Jo’Burg to hostel in. Her hair was curly but pulled back into a tight medium-length ponytail with a short wisp of straightened curl shooting across the top of her forehead. Her skin looked like it had been very white at one time but now looked like it had been simultaneously tanned darker and burned redder with freckles added underneath. She spoke with an English accent that had been influenced by South African dialects for many years. She seemed sturdy in stature, although very slight in build, without anything but that consisting of sinuous muscle and bone in her body. To put it simply she looked like a British rock band groupie from the 60s who had managed to kick the drugs, move to South Africa, and become a business woman all while staying young and growing old in just the way that all British rock band groupies from the 60s had wished they could though few succeeded.
“Well, I guess we are looking for a place..” was all I could think of responding with, and with her card in my pocket I continued towards my rentalcar destination wondering if the woman was awesome or crazy or both. It turned out she was both, and we enjoyed a pleasant stay at her place – to be described by Gill…
I better leave it here, before I develop blisters on my fingers, and the girls seem to want to induce me to participate in another round of their reading a book out loud sessions. Try not to picture it, and you’re face might not get scrunched up into the same contorted look that mine now has.
Peter out.



Julieen….

Hi lovettes,

Not feeling it today dudes. Sorry. I want to tell you about the Methodists but not at the same time. Sometimes relaying experiences makes me feel like I’m making them up. So I’ll show you what I learned when I come home!

Gillian

p.s: description of the hostel.
Go to the video store. Rent He died with a Falafel in his hand. Watch enough so as to appreciate the atmosphere. Turn it off before you waste too much of your evening. Sit for a moment and recall the spirit of the rooms, etc. What you are left with, a slightly sandy taste in your mouth – there. You’ve found the Hostel we stayed at in Jo-burg.
*Tattooed, SA man with a bruised eye and a rat-tail looking like a wound. Free-range Parrot. Seedy-looking white man with colorless hair (in someway attached to Peter’s rocker lady?) Sinewy Asian with tasty food. An unfortunate dog who ate the pool chemicals, causing his tongue to swell so much it stuck to the carpet over night. Something which was described in detail by our frentic host, poor Mr. Paddle-Tongue*