Safari Pics

Here's some pictures that I was able to load from my safari at Pilansburg...








Sunset





Sunrise over the lake as we watched a pride of lions hunt a herd of wildabeasts in the field to the right...the next picture is one of the females who had just crossed the rode in front of us a few minutes earlier.

Weekly Schedule

Well I'm back from my safari which was an amazing time, I'll tell more about it later when I am able to post some pictures, for now let me just give some more details about what I've been doing in Joburg. I know a lot of people have been asking what a normal week looks like for me so here's a summary...

Sunday - me and two of the girls (kelsey and mercedes) on the team attend Troyeville Baptist which is in inner city Joburg, we teach youth sunday school which normally has between 20 and 30 youth. Sunday afternoon is nap time (except for the next couple sundays when we have youth planning meetings at Lyndhurst Baptist) and sunday night the whole team attends Lyndhurst Baptist (real close to my apartment).


Monday- our day off...usually we hang around the Tadlock's house (one of the missionary couples here) and use the internet and phone, sometimes we'll go to the mall and see a movie


Tuesday - we have a hang out time for the youth at Lyndhurst in the afternoon where we play sports and board games

Wednesday - me and the two girls are in Troyeville for most of the day, we have a meeting with the youth pastor, prayer meeting with the church, tea and sandwiches, and a wednesday night bible study where everyone watches a video and then the youth breaks off and we help facilitate the small group discussion...Troyeville also has a preschool for kids whose parents can't afford it, so we get to play with these kids for a lot of the day as well


Thursday - we have our weekly meeting with our supervisor Chuck which usually lasts for most of the morning, and he generally takes us somewhere in the afternoon for "cultural learning"...we're suppose to be going to the apartheid museum sometime soon

Friday - so far we've been attending youth at Lyndhurst Baptist (about 60 kids) which we've helped to plan and have facilitated small groups...In March me, kelsey, and mercedes will be in Troyeville on Fridays where we are going to start a Friday night youth group event

Saturday - we have a prayer meeting at Lyndhurst in the morning but besides that every saturday has been pretty different so far, we're hoping to start volunteering at an AIDS orphanage associated with Lyndhurst every Saturday. We've been hanging out in our complex with our neighbors on Saturday nights, last Saturday one of our neighbors took us to the market in one of the townships with them to get fresh vegetables and then cooked for us.

Whatever downtime we have in the afternoons is usually spent hanging around our complex (sometimes at the pool) and trying to meet people or preparing for whatever Bible study we have to lead. We've already met several guys in our complex that have come to youth at Lyndhurst with us, eventually we're hoping to start a house church in our complex.

I think that will give you a pretty good idea of what I do most of the time...if anyone has anything that they want me to talk about then post a comment and let me know.

Safari

I'll be going on a safari next Monday and Tuesday to Pilanesberg National Park. So check back for pictures sometime next week. Here's the website if anyone is interested

http://pilanesberggamereserve.com/index.html

Pictures from Tanzania

The entire group at orientation plus the Tanzanian college students that helped us.







The dining room








Playing spades, our nightly entertainment

First Two Weeks in Joburg

Well, I’ve been in Johannesburg (Joburg) for about two weeks now and a lot of that time has been spent on even more orientation with our missionary supervisors here. Our apartment is in a pretty nice part of town outside of the main city, and it reminds me a lot of the states (there’s a mall and a grocery store within walking distance of my apartment). The big difference is the way crime affects how you do things here. Everything closes at four or five o’clock and almost no one goes out at all after dark, plus every house and apartment complex has multiple layers of security with guards, gates, electric fences, and bars on the windows and doors.

One of the coolest things to me so far has been the variety of languages. Its impossible to tell what someone’s first language is until they start talking…whites will either be of British heritage and speak English or they’ll speak Afrikaans (which is a Dutch and German based language) and blacks might speak any variety of tribal languages, Zulu and Xhosa (which uses different clicks with your tongue and is really cool sounding) being the main two. But pretty much everyone knows English and a lot of people speak at least 4 or 5 different languages.

We’ve really just started getting into the ministry we’ll be doing, and I don’t think we’ve really had a normal week yet, but here’s an idea of what I’ll be doing. We’re working alongside two different churches, Lyndhurst Baptist, which is within walking distance of our apartment, and Troyeville Baptist, which is in the inner city, pretty close to downtown Joburg. Our main job with both churches is helping organize and lead the youth groups, although there are other things we’ll be involved with as well (we're going to be volunteering at an AIDS orphanage that is associated with Lyndhurst Baptist one day a week). Our main goal is to develop relationships with the people in our area in and around our apartment complex and eventually start small house churches and Bible studies.

On Friday we went with Chuck (our supervisor) to one of the townships several miles outside of the city. It was one of the poorest areas I've ever seen, no running water or electricity, dirt floors, with shacks built almost on top of each other. There are hundreds of thousands of people living in townships like this around Joburg. Most of the people live there because it is land that the government has said they will eventually develop and provide housing with plumbing and electricity. So people from all over southern Africa come and live in these areas for maybe five or ten years hoping that eventually they'll get a better life. I didn't take my camera with me but here's a picture I found of what one looks like...

...so Chuck took us to a church inside the township that he has helped start and we played with about 20 kids that they were keeping at a daycare inside a building similar to one of those in the picture, we also helped them build an outhouse. It was a great experience and hopefully we'll be going back pretty soon...to me the saddest thing about it is the fact that a few miles down the road is the financial capital of Africa with millionaires and a very American style of life.

Well, I’m finally in Johannesburg, I’ve been here about a week now, but I’m not able to use the internet very often so it has taken me a while to update this. Here’s what I’ve been up to…

I spent two weeks in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at orientation and training with everyone else doing the Hands on Africa program. There were 23 of us total, two different teams staying in Tanzania, and four teams going to different parts of South Africa. The team I’m a part of in Johannesburg has two guys and three girls.

We stayed at a catholic center, which was a lot nicer than I expected. We had to sleep with mosquito nets and no air conditioner, but we had plenty of good food, which pretty much consisted of rice, some form of meat, and mangos every meal. The center had plenty of room outside to run around and play frisbee, which we did a lot of when we weren’t sitting in training.

Several different IMB missionaries from the region helped with our training, which covered stuff like Bible study and small group methods, cultural training, and practical things like safety and medical training. The main Bible study technique we learned is the concept of chronological storytelling. The African culture is much more oral than ours and they tend to learn better by hearing stories, which also enables them to be able to pass down these stories and tell them to other people. So we were given a set of about 20 stories that tell the story of the Bible from creation through Jesus and we practiced every morning in small groups telling these stories and leading discussions.

Most people in Tanzania don’t speak English, however, it is taught all through school and all of high school is taught only in English, so only those people that are able to afford to finish high school, which is not many, can speak it. The two missionaries in charge of the orientation, Travis & Charity, do ministry with university students in Dar es Salaam, and some of these Tanzanian students, who all spoke English, came and stayed with us for a few days. While they were there we had several “Daily Field Assignments” as they were known as, where we were paired up with a partner and a Tanzanian student who served as an interpreter. These pretty much all involved walking around the community near where we were staying and meeting people, in order to get a feel for the culture and to practice some of our storytelling, including “Creation to Christ” which is where we tell the story of the Bible in about 15 minutes.

The area where we were staying was several miles from the city center; we weren’t allowed to take our cameras with us when we went out in order to avoid looking like tourists, so I’ll try to describe what the area was like. It was extremely poor and probably what you think of when you think of an African city. It had dirt roads and the sewers were just ditches on the side of the road covered in flies most places. There were lots of kids running around not in school and probably without parents. There were people everywhere and I constantly thought someone was about to get hit by a car or a bus. We found out that most of the people there that have jobs are probably lucky to make 5 dollars a day. But everyone there is extremely welcoming, several of our groups were invited into peoples homes. It was common to have people to call us over just to sit and talk with them.

Besides the daily field assignments, we only left the catholic center a couple other times. Once was to go downtown to the main part of the city for a day. We were dropped off with our teams in one part of the city and were given a meeting place to be a few hours later. We had to find our way around by ourselves without an interpreter. The downtown area was nicer, with paved roads and shops and even a few other white people, which was always weird to see. Our last day in Tanzania we went to the beach, which was a nice secluded area used mostly by Europeans. I wasn’t really impressed by the Indian Ocean though. Supposedly, the water is usually crystal clear, with no waves, but when we were there it had a ton of seaweed and I got stung by a jellyfish within five minutes of being in the water.

Anyway, now that I’ve written such a long entry about Tanzania I think I’ll wait till the next one to tell about what’s been going on in South Africa so far.

I was hoping to get some pictures up on here but its not working right now for some reason, hopefully I'll be able to find a way to do it and get some up soon.