First Month!!

Greetings! My partner and I have spent our first month here settling in, getting acquainted to the city, and doing language study. We started out with finding an apartment with the family here in charge of logistics. It took a while to get settled in because things in SA move a little slower than at home! This city is smaller than Delhi and is a little less congested which we like. The people are also a little more traditional. Most are very strict vegetarians and so finding an apartment where we could cook “non-veg” was a problem at first. We are basically adjusting to a mostly vegetarian diet although we try to find ways to eat some kind of meat every day. The temperatures currently are at the highest for the year. The months of May-July are the hottest with temperatures around 105-115 degrees each day. This is probably one of the hardest adjustments and requires staying indoors in the late morning and afternoon and drinking lots of water.

 For the month of May our focus was on studying the local language. We were going to a school every day for about 2 ½ hrs with two teachers who are also believers. They would have us practice verb tenses and learning sentence structure and learning the alphabet which looks completely different!  They would even have us read the Bible in the local language to help learn the characters. It has been really fun but also a lot of work! We feel much more equipped to go out into the community but we will pick up language again in August and September because there is still much to learn. The best thing to do now is practice, practice, practice what we do know.

A couple of college student volunteer teams have arrived in A city which is the reason for a break from language. We will now be guides and partners with these college students as we seek to actively begin going out to meet locals. The main places that we will go include parks, coffee shops, malls, and slums. We are hoping that one place we could do alot is in the slum (poverty) areas of the city. The people here are very excited to meet Americans and talk and take pictures. We will be hopefully working alongside national partners to do Bible story-telling and arts and crafts with the children in the slums. Parents can get involved too. We are also hoping to visit some of the several local college/ universities in an effort to meet students. They will usually have at least some English background and love to practice with Americans! This will be a sure way to lead conversations to spiritual topics and hopefully new relationships. In the evenings when the city really becomes alive, we are hoping to go to local parks and coffee shops and hang out areas in an effort to do the same sort of out-reach. One team coming to A city will actually be putting on a play for the community. This is a student who was a past J-man here and had lead drama performances in the city during his term. His plays usually have a very direct spiritual application and he employs people from every spiritual background to be a part of the drama. It will be held open for the public for three nights in June. This will also hopefully lead to spiritual dialogue and new relationships. This summer with the volunteer teams is really a time to initially develop what may lead to the ministry my partner and I participate in for the next two years of our term.