Winter in Jozi

I woke up this morning and I couldn't see the Brixton tower at all. It was like someone had photoshopped it out of the sky.

For the last month I've been living in my new place in Brixton, a suburb on top of a hill with a massive telecommunications tower on top of it. If it's a cold morning, often the top of the tower is covered in mist. Today it was gone. Completely shrouded.

It's really winter is Jo'burg now. It's a rotten time of year for the homeless guys, as well as for the tens of thousands of refugees from the xenophobic violence who are living in tent camps around the city.

"foreigners get out!"

It's been a difficult few weeks over here - I'm sure you've heard about it in the news. The antipathy towards foreigners has been brewing for months - probably years - but things exploded into violence in Alexandra, an overcrowded, poor area in Johannesburg's north-east and spread to informal settlements around the country. Even Jo'burg's CBD saw some outbursts of violence.

Things are calm now, and the issue now is housing the something like 50,000 foreign citizens whose homes have been destroyed or who are quite legitimately fearful about returning to live in their former neighbourhoods.

For me, it's actually been a bit difficult dealing with the hype: people overseas and even in other parts of the country got the idea that the whole city was in uproar.

We'd hoped to have a Kenyan speaking at our student Winter Conference, but he pulled out as a result of the violence, and I've been in communication with many nervous Australians considering cancelling their trips here.

The violence was serious, and horrific - many of you will have seen the Mozambican man set alight by the mob - but it was mostly confined to places where the poorest of the poor live.

Chris Rock, the big-time American comedian on tour here at the moment calls it 'broke-on-broke' violence. It's very poor South Africans frustrated with the slow pace of change and service delivery who are jealous of foreigners who seem to be making out just that little bit better than them.

The whole situation needs a multifaceted solution: sorting out poverty here, a positive resolution to the Zimbabwean economic and political crisis, and real government leadership in times of crisis. Foreigners have been sporadically murdered in informal settlements for months, yet very little was done to address an impending crisis. Please pray for good leadership and for the possibility of reconciliation.

the campus

The term has wound up on campus and we're gearing up for our inaugural Winter Conference. It's a new camp we're pioneering this year, with a focus on solid Bible teaching (I mean, we try to do that all the time, but we're really hoping to stretch people more than usual) and an indepth exploration of key theological issues.

We thought we'd start with the main thing, so this year's conference theme is Crucified: understanding Christ's death on the cross, substitutionary atonement and the whole deal. We're also hoping to cover some interesting stuff in seminars as well: I'll be looking at how Christians can respond to and interact with pop culture.

the homeless

Thembalethu continues. We've had a few small-scale success stories: ID books for a couple of the guys and a few more in the pipeline. (ID books are essential for SA citizens to get jobs, apply for bank accounts - basically for them to function normally in society, but they're difficult to obtain if you can't locate a birth certificate. A lack of an ID locks a lot of the homeless guys out of jobs and even shelters.)

The initial BEADwork (Basic Education and Arts Development) project ended in our Spotlight concert a month ago. We held the show after the morning service here at Melville - it was rap, dance, music, all produced by the homeless youth. It was a pretty amazing show: the performers did incredibly well, performing confidently, and, on the whole, cooperatively.

The whole point of BEADwork was to try and engage the guys with something they could be excited about - performance - and hope that they'd learn lessons in literacy, teamwork, and confidence along the way. It was an interesting ride - to be honest, most of our dreams of incorporating literacy fell by the wayside, and discipline became increasingly difficult - but it looks like we'll persevere. We've now moved to a more formal phase - I'm helping teach a computing class, and my colleagues are running Art and Mathematics. I'm fairly sure we'll see another Spotlight concert later in the year.

"airtime" - the evening service

Our evening service is continuing from strength to strength, but things will go quiet over the next few week as students head to exams. I don't know if I've mentioned the choir before: as part of our attempt to reflect our congregation in the music we sing, we put together an evening service choir which leads the church in worship once a month. Luckily a good friend of mine, Mbulelo, stepped up as choirmaster, and the choir nights are actually something else. You sing until you can't sing any more. And you dance. I think people enjoy seeing a mlungu (white person) like me trying to make the right choir moves.

Things are so crowded at the evening service that we had to order 100 new chairs, and the plan to plant a new church in neighbouring Sophiatown is still rolling along. Mark Grieve was investigating other churches in the area, and realised that out of twelve churches in the suburb, only one ran services in English - all the rest were in Afrikaans. But the demographics of the community are changing so fast that there is a massive amount of people who aren't being catered for. So that's a big opportunity.

die ouers (the parents)

And I've had my parents here the past two weeks. They spent a week living it up in Jo'burg seeing my ministry, and last week we spent a week away spotting lions in the Kruger National Park. (That national park is big: imagine a park the size of Victoria!) If you're reading this from Springwood, feel free to bail my parents up when they get back next week.

in Christ,

Andrew