matthew, what in the world are you doing over there?

So, I realize I really haven’t given many of you a clear
idea of what it is exactly that I’m up to over here in Africa. Some of you might think I ride an elephant
into poverty stricken villages everyday, or that I’m involved in some sort of
cave-painting ministry. Some of you may
have seen pictures and started believing that I go to the beach and surf
everyday, preaching to penguins and great white sharks or some nonsense like
that. I figured it’s probably about time
I gave you a pretty concrete idea of the structure of my life over here.

I came over to Africa with a team of
nineteen other people. Out of the
twenty, four of us are of the male persuasion.
That’s sixteen girls and four dudes.
This is made even more interesting by the fact that we all live in the
same house. The girls all live upstairs,
divided between two bedrooms. Two of the
males are leaders and married (to two other women) and have their own rooms,
the other two of us live in a little room in the back of the house that
probably used to function as some kind of storage room. It’s cozy.
We like having our space.

My team is great. We
have all gotten to know each other really well.
We know the different foods that each team member eats for breakfast,
which means we know who to be mad at when there are gobs of yogurt on the
counter or clumps of Crunchy O’s skimming across the floor when we wake up (its
probably me). We call ourselves a
family. We act like a family, and we
feel like one too. We work together like
a family and even get a little dysfunctional just like a real, live family.

Three mornings a week we spend a few hours together in discipleship. All that really means is that we read books together and dig through scripture together and have conversations about what it means to follow Jesus.

During the week I spend most of my time at the Joshua
Project. The Joshua project is a simple,
blue and white building on the edge of a township called Pelsrus. A township is basically a really big
neighborhood of makeshift houses piled on top of each other. The folks who live there don’t make very much
money, which is terrible, because they have more needs than any people I’ve
ever met. Huge families live together in
a few rooms. Most of the families have
at least one really sick relative that they’re all taking care of, and a few
kids to keep things interesting. A lot
of fathers have left these families behind, and you can imagine how tough it
would be to juggle a sick aunt, your dead sisters two kids, your dying mother,
and a few of your own kids minus any kind of father figure: not much time for a 9-5, and not much food or money
for the twelve person family in the scrap metal hut.

In the morning the Joshua project serves as a school for
some of the elementary – high school kids from the township that haven’t been
able to get very far in the local primary schools. The teachers at Joshua are incredible. Most of them are Dutch. They know how to teach really well. They also know how to love and discipline
these kids really well.

I’m usually at Joshua in the afternoons, once school is
out. The after school program is led by
a Dutchman named Japp (Yop = see the face painting picture). He is
almost seven feet tall. He loves to
laugh and dance and to make parables out of cleaning toilets, shoveling dirt,
and drilling holes into walls and he’s been working at Joshua Project for somewhere around five years. He reminds me a
lot of Jesus, so I try to learn from him and to do what he does. We walk around the township to pick up all
kinds of kids. We bring them back to a
big room and try to engage them in some creative arts – to express themselves:

Mondays we hang out and go to the beach, or a playground, or
to the Chicken King for some ice cream.
(Sometimes they wipe vanilla ice cream on the faces and do strange
dances. They call it “dancing like a
white guy.” You really must see it)

Tuesdays we make art and create things with paints and paper
and our hands.

Wednesdays we learn about drama. We dress up in crazy clothes and pretend to
be someone else for a little while.

Thursday is wood-working day. We build things like jewelry boxes and
doghouses, xylophones out of bamboo, or if we are feeling particularly spunky
we pull nails out of old crates we find behind factories so that we can turn
their scraps into something new and incredible.

I love every one of these kids a lot – which is odd, because
sometimes it takes everything in me not to slap them across the face or shake
them violently. I’m sure that sounds
terrible, but the 250^th time a ten year old takes your cell phone,
or punches you in the back, or makes a devastating sexual joke about a girl in
the room, your heart breaks and you get tired and you are much more prone to
lashing out. I’m getting better
though. I promise.