Our last day at Christ Amazing Love ministries was Thanksgiving Sunday. This is a big service for the church and the pastors spend the entire night before cooking over 1500 pieces of fried chicken to feed the congregation.
I spent part of the 5-hour service in the children’s room, a small room where all ages spend the long services.
I have never seen so many kids in one room in my life, at one point there were 89 kids in a room the size of my bedroom back home—to say the least it was complete insanity.
In Sunday school classes I’ve volunteered at in the U.S. the kids get one small snack; here the kids are fed a feast.
Throughout the five hours the kids were given pop, suckers, cake, multiple bags of chips, a malt drink, more pop, meat filled biscuits, more chips and the finale…Fried chicken and rice.
So on top of having so many kids in one room, they were pumped full of sugar, making our task of controlling them for 5 hours impossible and exhausting. By the end of the day the floor looked as if a party bomb had exploded and the teachers looked like zombies.
The next morning we left for our new ministry site in Ocean View Township. We arrived and were welcomed with open arms. Rachel and I are staying at Auntie Nettie’s apartment, a mother of five and a grandmother of many. She has welcomed us as if we were her own children cooking us a delicious dinner and breakfast (complete with coffee) and then packing our lunches for the day–the generosity of South Africans even when they have so little amazes me.
View from the train
On our way to Ocean View
The next day at 8:00 am we headed out to work. Rachel and I are spending the week working in a school for disabled children. I’m working in the older kids classroom giving the teacher some much needed help. The class has 16 kids with a wide range of disabilities including cerebral palsy, autism, down syndrome and other diagnosed handicaps.
After spending my first day teaching I was exhausted; many of the kids come from abusive backgrounds and imitate what they see at home by lashing out and attacking the other kids, so the majority of my time was spent simply being a referee.
Several kids had to be physically restrained in order to keep them from hurting the others. While it was exhausting, it is amazing what a little perspective can do for a person.
When Mrs. Carmen asked me if it seemed like chaos, I told her nothing would look like chaos after attempting to entertain 89 children for 5 hours in a room half the size of her classroom with no toys or games (not to mention all the sugar).
In only three months my perspective on a lot of things has changed. African townships don’t look like poverty after the dumpsite of Tondo, being allowed to simply say the name Jesus as a Philippine prisoner seems like freedom compared to not being able to proclaim His name in China without being persecuted and teaching 16 special needs children seems like peace compared to the insanity of 89 kids in one small room.
