Hello from JoBurg, we made it back in!

I know that it has been a while since the last update, and a fair little bit has happened since then. The day after the last update we went to a village about two hours outside of Gaborone into the bush, at this village we essentially watched as local believers that we had gathered from another village went around sharing faith.  The stage of saturation that we were witnessing was nearing to a CRCH plant. It was better for us to observe the local believers share than to try to share with people ourselves in English. The locals were using the people’s heart language and the observable response was exciting to witness.

We were able to talk for several hours with one of the young men in discipleship training as we rode in the back of a Toyota Hilux to and from his village into the bush.  It was refreshing to see the work that had started to take off with the local body of faithful. They have m!ss!ons as their foundation and all else is built off of that. ASAP new believers go into the community or to other villages and repeat the process that was used with them. Disciples making disciples….first century model style.

After the village we had the opportunity to meet and talk to/be quizzed by other expatriate career families. We talked about our reasons for being over here and our life goals, where we fell called in the future and such. The week in all was a good one. To cap off the week we essentially walked right through the boarder without any hiccups or issues.

Once we were back to JoBurg the reality of where we were set back in, I mentioned xenophobia in an earlier post rather hurriedly. If I can I will try to explain how the situation here had been in the last few weeks (no harm has befallen anyone on our team or to myself as a preface).  The area of South Africa has dealt with racism for many centuries. Not the gentle racism that is supposedly in the US of today, but rather on a level more like Nazi or Middle Eastern – for conceptualization sake, not the mass murders per se. Through different regimes and reigns it even became law in the early 1900’s – apartheid. Separation of races was enforced with military precision and aside from the racism ZA was developed and westernized until the end of that harsh rule.

Once Mandela became president after apartheid ended he brought a message of peace and reconcilollation, but according to locals from native and colored races the majority of peoples who had been suppressed wanted retribution and revenge for the wrongs done to them. This led to revenge killings and riots.  

Around the same time the whole of the rest of the continent saw that, at least on the official level, the country of ZA was the rainbow nation of many peoples and here to help the suffering of the destitute on the continent. Refugees started to pour into the country from all over, some got jobs others didn’t. The ones with jobs usually are doing the kind of jobs no one else wanted, but with high unemployment rates in the socialist economy, the native populace that had fought for liberty and freedom see the refugees as taking their jobs.

With tensions high and a lack of jobs some portions of the local populace found a new enemy of their way of life in the foreigners that they see as having stolen their jobs and pieces of their cities. In 2008 tensions peaked and in the ensuing riots many refugees were killed as well as their businesses and homes being looted and burned.

Here enters the part of the story that I have witnessed, most of our students at the ESL center have their businesses in the townships rather than in the city proper. The townships are the areas that during apartheid the coloreds and blacks were forced to live, essentially cities outside of the cities, making the mega-city. In recent weeks the beating of our students has pick up to the level where they are far too afraid to travel to work, their stalls and shops have either been burned or robbed in higher frequency than usual and there have been riots and the threat of riots in some cities around ZA. The news here has more correctly defined the type of hate here as “Afro-phobia”, so while the term xenophobia applies, the term afro-phobia designates more specifically the fear of other African peoples.  

This week one of the female students had black eyes where she had been beaten so badly that she was taken to a hospital to check for broken bones. Swollen faces have become shockingly too common around the area we teach, there are foreigners and refugees from all over in that area. I have noticed more homeless people sleeping in these areas of town due to being forced from their homes in the townships. These are daily observances, and the riots have never reached or affected us personally.

With the mob things can escalate very quickly and things that would never be done alone are committed when there is anonymity in the crowd. That is my explanation and recap on xenophobia here in ZA, we are in no more danger than before, but the refugees are for the time being.

 

Once back to class we started in on our lessons, with the cold coming the men are sleeping later and sometimes not even coming in to class. We had the opportunity to talk to our friend about his readings and if he had made any significant discoveries while reading. My roommate has an app for the Word on his iphone and this app just happens to have a translation in the language that we need. He has been using this app to test the waters, so to speak, and I think that we are going to work on printing off several key books in a word document for the barber. Gen. up through the covenant, Jn. acts and Rmns. He seems to be able to understand the language even though it is a bit more formal than the everyday Somali. Also he is interested in finding out more about these “other” holy books that he is supposed to read as a good Muslim. We are more than excited to help by showing the right texts in the Word.

Thank you for reading and keeping us in your pr@yers, have a great spring week.

Ethan.