Author: Jeanne and Randy

Neither the Anglican nor Methodist churches we attend down here have hymnals with music in them. The words are there, but the no notes. For someone who sort-of reads music, this is a huge challenge for the worship experience. And for an alto who doesn’t like hovering on notes above D, it’s particularly stressful.

It’s not just the hymns. The Anglican service includes a number of sung responses – the Gloria, the Sanctus, and even the Lord’s Prayer in a form you’ve never heard before. Compared with figuring out these tunes, sorting through the rest of  the Book of Common Prayer during the service is a piece of cake!

There aren’t even hymn tune names – not that I would know these anyway. The organist plays an introduction, and occasionally a light will come on – “Oh, this is In Christ There Is No East or West” (St. Peter, not McKee!) – and then you can sing like you know what you are doing (and even make up harmony on the fly if you are lucky!).

Much of the time it’s literally “fake it till you make it.” Of course, the analogy is not lost on us. Much of life is about muddling through with words and no music – but with great sincerity. We’re reminded that the “Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26) – I’m sure we’re the source of many Spiritual sighs during the hymns!!

And singing “new” words to a familiar tune – or familiar words to a new tune – can really give your brain a workout. It can make you appreciate familiar texts in a different way – think of singing O Little Town of Bethlehem to Forest Green instead of the stodgy old St. Louis (it’s life-changing!).

Most of all, we’ve learned that the trick is not to let the details get in the way of the big picture – the important thing is to feel the light and sing, with or without music.

PS  It’s even more interesting in a foreign language like Xhosa, but more on that in a future post!

Authors: Jeanne and Randy spend some of their time in South Africa helping the Anglican and Methodist churches with their work on ECD centers, youth programs, and other priority projects for church staff.

Fire Season in this area of South Africa, it’s either the rainy season or it’s fire season. Fires take on a whole other meaning for the millions in the Western Cape who live cheek-by-jowl in in the “informal settlements.” These neighborhoods are sprawling areas of corrugated steel shacks (4 walls and a roof) on sandy ground with no running water or sewers — and sometimes, no electricity. Cooking is done over an open fire. The residents are jammed in so tight that if a fire gets out of hand, several shacks can be burned in a minute.

It’s also the windy season, fanning any flame. When we attended All Saints Church, they announced that such a fire had destroyed all the possessions of dozens of people, and a special collection was being made to help. The government might give the survivors “sheets” of corrugated steel to rebuild their shacks, leaving it up to the Anglicans and others to provide the other necessities of life. For example, in South Africa, if you don’t have a school uniform, you don’t attend school, so uniforms were part of the assistance. The Diocese of False Bay includes more than a million people living in these “informal settlements.” This country has the greatest inequality in the world. That’s a daily challenge.

Load Shedding – There’s an App for That

No, “Load Shedding” is not a new diet fad; it’s the electric grid shutting down for a couple hours at a time. The electric utility, Eskom, is unable to meet demand a lot of the time. Often, sometimes twice a day (!), the electricity goes off– in the most industrialized nation in all of Africa. It ought to be better than this.

Eskom helps with tweets and a load-shedding app to tell you that a blackout is coming. Mismanagement and corruption have led to low capacity and high utility debt, so repairs and new power-generation facilities are slow in coming. Consequently, schools and businesses have to close, refrigerators and other appliances are strained, and the economy suffers.

Saturday night, the power was out between 8 and 10:30 PM (!). We watched the parking attendant at the restaurant across the street take off his safety vest and head for home because the restaurant closed (no cooking). The wait staff didn’t get their pay and usual tips. And the parking attendant – working only for tips– got nothing. So load shedding means no money for a guy with no other job. Industrial production disruptions, unpaid workers, and a national debt closer to junk bond status, all because of unreliable electricity. Just one more thing to deal with in addition to all the other problems life throws at you. Of course, the poor have it hardest. At least in the informal settlements (shacks) they don’t turn of the electricity. The loss of streetlights would enable greater crime and violence than the severe levels they have already. Candlelight dinners are nice, but not this way.

What we’re actually doing in South Africa

This is a picture of a bit of Visual Basic code (It doesn’t look too basic for me!). This is a program written to assist the Diocesan Office track the leave requests of the priests and office staff. Previously, they circulated a sheet of paper to collect signatures, and Diocese staff tallied leave in a notebook by hand. We still have the leave request paper, but the data are now processed in an Excel Worksheet with the click of a button.

This and other pieces of code do the work of recording, adding and subtracting, and remembering. The newest version creates a new year (they start their year in February!), and cleans out last year’s entries. Additional priests and retirements are also handled by clicking a button on the screen.

Volunteering in church work can take on many forms depending on your gifts. We’re not building or teaching or preaching in our thick American accents or “working in the garden” (a phrase they use here that may mean something else). Instead, we provide office automation and a simplified form of management consulting for the Diocese and our Methodist colleagues. We can’t decide what actions they need to take, but for people trained in theology and psychology, we can teach them fundraising writing forms and a type of structured decision making that leads to better alternatives and, hopefully better outcomes. Besides, we didn’t bring any gardening clothes with us, and the sizes here are all in metric!

Traveling lets you experience different cultures, climates, geographies, and philosophies.  We’ve appreciated different kinds of art, food, and customs across the countries we’ve visited.

But we are also reminded of our commonalities.  It’s not just that we all want the best for our kids, or that we want to treat others as we would want to be treated.  Alas, it is the case that in the most unequal societies – and the US is included in that group – the lowest earners and least powerful have it harder.

Bishop Margaret Vertue in the Diocese of False Bay (east of Cape Town, South Africa), described to us the problems of gender-based violence, bullying, teen-age pregnancies, and substance abuse. And yes, we have those in the US too.  But then she continued to talk about families who are told in the morning that their home (literally, a shack) will be bulldozed today and they need to get all their belongings out before the equipment comes.

So children subject to bullying live in townships where a home may not be there when they return from school.  They have electricity (when there isn’t load shedding), but no running water, communal water taps that leak (and water is precious in still-in-drought South Africa), and port-a-johns that line the townships’ edges. Oh, and 11 official languages!  How do you do your homework under these conditions? As parents, how do you raise your children? 

But Bishop Margaret said the church is THERE to help house the homeless when the bulldozers come, giving them “sheets” (corrugated steel for walls and roofs).  The church is THERE to help growers and workers mediate a harvesting solution .  The church is THERE to help people who have lost everything to fires (it’s fire season in the Western Cape).  The church is THERE to advocate for victims of violence and abuse.

We in the US do this too.  We help people find jobs, pay bills, feed their families (thank you #MetMin in Chattanooga!).  It’s often a matter of scale and scope, but we’re in the same business.  We are loving our neighbors as ourselves. We need to keep doing this at the local, regional, state, national, and international levels as well. We need to be THERE.

Authors: Jeanne and Randy spend some of their time in South Africa helping the Anglican and Methodist churches with their work on ECD centers, youth programs, and other priority projects for church staff.

Part 1: Penguins

We’re in Somerset West, a suburb east of Cape Town. This is in the Anglican Diocese of False Bay, now 15 years old, having been split off from the Table Bay Diocese in Cape Town. We’re also in the Cape of Good Hope Synod of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa — we’ve been volunteering with both on our visits.

 Once you get used to standing upside down on this side of the world, and driving on the left with a steering wheel on the right side of the car(!), you can settle in. One feature of this part of Africa is penguins, so we visited the Stony Point Nature Preserve, east of False Bay. Right next to a neighborhood is a rocky shore full of upright birds. The African Penguins here rest from feeding at sea and brood eggs in nests (either dug under a bush or in a fiberglass igloo, provided by the humans). Alas, the penguins are now endangered — their population is down by more than 50% over the last 30 years. Overfishing their food sources and a population explosion of seals (that eat the penguins’ fish and sometimes young penguins) have resulted in fewer birds. If an oil spill soils their feathers, they can’t stay warm in the water, so they climb onto shore and starve. Besides the nature preserve, few others are taking any action to protect the penguins. But when more than a million people locally live in corrugated steel shacks, and unemployment is at 29% (!), how do you restrict fishing or spend resources reducing the seal population? That’s the challenge of South Africa.

Part 2: A Thirst for God

We stopped by the Diocesan office (only a few minutes’ walk away), in hope of securing a meet-and-greet appointment with Bishop Margaret Vertue for our friends, Jacqueline & Don, who are visiting from the States (as they call it here). While waiting, Bishop Margaret walks in the front door with the perfect “What are you doing here in Africa?” look. Reverend Pieter arrives and we chat for a bit. Bishop Margaret relates that attendance in Anglican churches is up all over the Diocese, and that this increase also is occurring at the churches in the toughest neighborhoods, where crime and gangs are rampant. At one parish, rival gangs use the church building for cover in their gun battles — the bullet holes in the church walls attest to the shooting. The toilets were recently moved from outside to inside the church so that worshipers wouldn’t risk getting attacked or shot if they went to the bathroom. Yet, still they come to church, over and over. People here have a thirst for God, despite the bullets. Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John (Chapter 4) that everyone who drinks the water her gives them will never be thirsty again. The parish worshipers know that living water is stronger than bullets. Their attendance is a testament to the power of faith in the most inhospitable of places. That’s the resolve of South Africa.

Part 3: Safari or Not?

Part of the African experience is to go on Safari, and the closest place to Cape Town is a game reserve. Rescued animals, rhinoceros, who need protection from poachers, and other animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild are in the 10,000 hectare (24,711 acres) fenced reserve. You get up at dawn and ride in a truck fitted with benches to observe and photograph the animals. Elephant, ostrich, Cape buffalo, giraffe, white rhinoceros, zebra (fun fact: a group of zebra is called a Dazzle), and various antelope wander and graze inside the preserve. Lions rescued from an illegal trophy hunting operation are in a special enclosure. They were previously fed steroids so they would bulk up fast and could be shot sooner. As a result, they have flabby skin on their otherwise normal bodies. This game preserve is really a cross between a zoo and a safari in one of the national parks. The organization’s purpose is to “protect and preserve Africa’s increasingly threatened wildlife and is fully committed to social upliftment, job creation, skills development and various sustainable empowerment programmes.” Enlightened groups can create sustainable balance between nature conservation and the empowerment of the local community. We’ve seen several examples of businesses dedicating themselves to conservation, sustainability, and worker involvement as they serve their customers. That’s the hope of South Africa.

It started with a video. We missed Sarah McLaughlin’s performance at Wolf Trap, so we went to YouTube, where we found the 2009 World on Fire video. In it, Sarah compares the music video production costs with alternative uses for the money (economists call this the “opportunity cost”).  For us, the spark was an example of a $16,500 director’s fee that could pay the running cost of a South African orphanage for a year.  We had just been to South Africa, and could feel the potential and hope of the people we met.  The spark became the light – we could do this.  We could help those schools and orphanages.  And so our adventure began.

In subsequent visits, we connected with the Methodist and Anglican churches who administer children and youth programs.  We met with the teachers and the caregivers, with ministers and priests and bishops. We visited preschools, elementary schools, children’s homes, and youth drug rehabilitation programs.  Staff all shared their vision for the children and youth they work with – the raw talent and energy that is the future of South Africa.  It is irresistible.

Children are a long-term investment – the teachers and doctors and scientists and engineers that they will become are in the future, but they start now.  Our aim is to help them feel the light when the dawn is still dark.

In the weeks and months ahead we will share stories of our continuing adventures with feeling the light and singing to the dawn.

Authors: Jeanne and Randy spend some of their time in South Africa helping the Anglican and Methodist churches with their work on ECD centers, youth programs, and other priority projects for church staff.