Day 13 was an interesting day. We started off with a motivational chat for teachers at Klein Nederberg High School. The talk was given by Professor Alex Wiseman of Lehigh University. It was a pep talk on change, and I kind of checked out of the talk fairly early into it. It sounded like your typical "change" talk... positive thinking and a little sermonizing. So I decided to slip into ethnographer mode and started taking field notes. As I looked around the room, I noticed many people had checked out along with me, except instead of being ethnographers, they were staring into space, text messaging, sleeping, and fiddling. My impression was that a few of the teachers were interested, but many tuned out. Probably because it was actually a holiday. Oh well, such is life!
Next I had 2 unexpected treats...
The 1st was when one of the teachers approached me and said, "I asked God to send you supernaturally to talk to me, but since He didn't send you, I decided to come to you." I was a little surprised at first, but knowing that this is a faith community, and that they had already been acknowledging me as clergy, I was very interested in what she wanted to talk to me about. We ended up having a wonderful conversation about ministry beyond the church, and about how we make the gospel a central part of our communities. It turns out that she and her husband had already found 3 poor families who they were teaching about budgeting, helping to grow their own food, and selling the excess food at different places around town. I suggested that they disciple these families and she was already on board with that. She was also praying with her husband that God would open a door for them to minister to married couples. Unfortunately we were short on time and we hand to end our impassioned talk with me offering a prayer for her and her giving me a word of prophecy. I was so blessed to see God working in her.
The 2nd treat was the driver who took us back to the Bed and Breakfast. He was a coloured man who lived through the Apartheid era and he shared a little of his story with us... until it became too emotional to continue. One of the the exchanges we had that stuck with me went a little like this:
Me:
Do you see yourselves as coloureds and blacks or all the same?
Joe:
We see ourselves as coloureds. We don't mix. What Apartheid did to us makes it hard to be any other way. We don't mix. Some of the younger people in town you may see mixing, but us, no.
This was a powerful exchange for me because it reinforced just how deeply Apartheid had affected the people of South Africa, and just how much pain is unresolved.
Finally we arrived at Fairview Wine and Cheese Estate for a wine and cheese tasting. I'm not a wine drinker so I just smelled. Monique on the other hand was tossing them back! The cheese was not my thing either, but I did enjoy an alcohol free beverage they shared with us called Ega.
Finally we had a lecture and chat led by Ilan Ori. Ori led a spirited talk about the issues faced by the local farm laborers and the farm owners after he discussed a project that he has been working own to build a sustainable, holistic community for the farm workers. More on that at this link: http://fairvalleyecovillage.blogspot.com/?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=close&toggle=MONTHLY-1204322400000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1204322400000
Ori answered some difficult questions for us about the farm workers, and he shared some interesting stories with us about race in South Africa. I can't say that I shared all of his opinions on race, but I appreciated his willingness to engage in a difficult conversation. We all need to be willing to have frank, sometimes irrational conversations about race if we are ever to move beyond our differences as a "human race," or at least to understand one another better.
Written by Frederick A Hanna
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