Today was supposed to be very similar to a Hazyview day—visiting homes and praying with families in the rural and impoverished communities. I really enjoyed doing this last time so I was looking forward to it. We followed Themba to our meeting place for the day. As a person with no sense of direction- even with the help of civilized roads, interstates, and landmarks- I’m daily amazed by our nationals’ ability to find schools and other meeting spots in, literally, the middle of nowhere. The Reverend we met up with took us to his nearby tent church. He invited us in for fellowship before we did our home visits. We soon found out fellowship meant one of us needed to share a message. I’m learning that is so much of mission work. Be prepared for anything… and be flexible in everything. So after a few brief messages and a worship song in Zulu we discussed the plan for the day.
Next came the not so uncommon miscommunication. It seemed that they thought we would be doing humanitarian relief as we visited the homes… giving money and resources for the people we would meet. After an awkward discussion explaining that was not our ministry and focus here, they decided it would be best for us to visit schools. So we ended up doing our school visits as usual.
After we finished our presentations, we got to visit a local Afrikaans woman who assists with training the BoH Life Orientation program. She had us over to her art gallery where we had tea, coffee, and scones… one of my favorite things here!
Marina is your typical artsy lady. Wild hair up in a clip, the classic artistic framed glasses, and slightly clumsy (spilled the coffee two or three times). She was very friendly, welcoming, down to earth, and quite inspirational. She has a passion for art and a passion for spreading the love of Jesus in this community. Seven years ago she started an art mission where she began training local Zulu women to stitch and embroider. This is such a cool concept because it provides skills for these women to make an income and a means to support their families. Projects like this instill work ethic and employment into these communities.
At first the women were compensated with tea and biscuits for their work. As the project grew, she was able to employ her workers with regular wages. Now she has 17 women sewing and stitching in her mission creating quilts, picture frames, key chains, greeting cards, and framed artwork. The art all has an authentic African influence and is VERY well done. The facility is pretty amazing. I think it was a unanimous decision that we all wanted an outdoor wedding there. She was telling us stories of how God provided for the mission, how it grew, and the people that have supported along the way. She was saying how there was a hair company from the States that heard about her project and bought a ton of Christmas cards from them last year…. She was trying to think of the guy “umm… Mitchell..?” I was like “Paul Mitchell?!” “Yeah, him!” Haha, that was pretty crazy to me. I mean I have his hairspray back home and I’m glad he supports cool projects like Marina’s. ;)
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