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.