So just this past weekend we got to spend a night with a bunch of different families living in the poor communities of Port Elizabeth. They were kind enough to open their homes and offer their food and bring us to their church and experience a more “genuine” African culture. It was certainly a once in a life-time experience. We have been in the townships before, in fact most of our ministry is done there, but most of us have never been there at night. Unfortunately there are a lot of misconceptions about how dangerous it is to go there at night. So we were all on our toes, just waiting for something bad to happen. But of course it wasn’t all that bad, and our hosts took real good care of us. The reality is, especially on the weekends, a lot of the adults spend their time getting drunk and partying until late into the night. As I recall it can be pretty hard to sleep when the teverns are pounding out dance music until 3 in the morning.
Andrew and I stayed with a guy at the church named Asanda and his family. The three of us and some of his friends all chatted about a lot of different things. They really seemed to like Andrew’s American jokes, and then we talked about what everyone likes to do for fun. Mostly those guys just go out and buy snacks at the local Pick ‘n Pay and then hang out together and talk, so that’s we did for most of the time. We talked a little bit about the issues they face being young guys in a very difficuly culture. One of the biggest issues is that they have a hard time meeting good Christian girls, because they are not really supossed to “date” in their culture. If they are “dating” it is pretty much assumed that they must be having sex, whether its true or not. And since they don’t want to have a bad testimony before non-believers, they have decided to hold themselves to a higher standard, which I think is really awesome. They are really strong believers because of all the difficult situations they constantly live around, and I know that God will bring them to the right people.
After we spent the night, then we went to their African church service, which is usually between 3 and 4 hours long. Thankfully we got the shorter end this time (most of us were still tired from the previous night). They love to sing their worship songs, that’s for sure. In fact between every little thing that happened was another worship song, with a lot of dancing and singing throughout. Overall it was a really beneficial experience, it was definitely eye-opening. Our hope is to also bring some of the youth from the local church next time, because they are just as unaware of the black and colored cultures and we were before.
