3/2/2008 – Sunday Again

Sunday Worship in Imbali is student led. The pastor has multiple congregations to serve and the ordained graduate students or senior seminarians lead worship. On the first Sunday of each month the students go to a township church for the worship service. Caleb a student in the Ministerial courses [read Senior] is preaching today with two or more combis of fellow students added to the congregation. Cynthia Anderson, the Fulbright Scholar, joins us as she hopes that worshipping in a Zulu speaking congregation will help her language study. With a translator in one ear, the worship is relatively familiar.

At the end of the service there are presentations and introduction of visitors. The students receive applause as each is introduced, but when the three professors introduce themselves, there is an appreciable rise in volume. There may be a slight influence of having two theologians of African descent in their midst. Gertrude Tonsing also receives a good deal of applause, but it is after the service that her history emerges. One of the elders noted that she “looks like Monica.” Monica is my mother, but I didn’t think we looked that much alike.” During the last years of apartheid, Gertrude’s mother spent significant time in Imbali as an anti-apartheid worker and protector, sometimes sleeping in homes of persons that were threatened. Gertrude was a college student during the final days of apartheid and remembers the clandestine meetings in the shadow of the police academy.

For everyone you meet there are stories to tell, yet the students on campus are the leading edge of a cohort of young adults who grew up living in the beginning stages of a “Rainbow Nation” that seems to continually struggle with its identity. That is not to say that we Americans have moved great distances beyond behavior modification to attitudinal adjustment. The issues still arise here sometimes in very public forms. The University of the Free State has had a major incident wrapped around the ‘integration of the university and one of its residences. Please not that the reference has a disturbing video content in Afrikaans, and the story speaks for itself. [The Witness]

The week has been busy with a quick trip to Durban, to see the youngest Farisani Brother, who is a student at the Westville campus of UKZN. A late lunch of fish and chips near the ocean and a walk while looking at the Indian Ocean. The interesting thing is that commuting here is like commuting in the US. People do not consider a forty-five minute drive to be inconvenient for the sake of employment. The US consular officer I met earlier works in Durban and lives in Pietermaritzburg. Travel back to see family may involve 12 hour round trips for some of the graduate students on campus, but that is a part of the sacrifice they are willing to make for the sake of their education, not unlike LTSP’s resident commuters.

All of the eight students have now had a one on one conversation with me about their work. I’m interested in how they see themselves in six months, as all of them are headed for the parish. They have finished their Bachelor of Theology degree and are taking church specified courses prior to be assigned to a parish. Some were delayed for a variety of reasons, so their anxiety level is near the same level as the seniors I normally see.

It’s hard to believe that I have been here a month. Time really does fly, but left over work is being sent back and new work is under way and the teaching continues. Type to you all later.