I had an incredible month two in South Africa! Because it was such a good month, that makes it even more difficult to summarize everything that happened into a semi-short, readable blog post.
But I thought my method from last month worked pretty well, so this month I’m going to do a series of SA Recaps. SA is a nickname for South Africa.
This first one is about what daily life in South Africa looked like for us. Stay tuned for more updates from SA!
1. This month my team and team P31, one of the all girl’s teams, were based in Pretoria, South Africa. Pretoria is one of South Africa’s biggest cities, and it’s about two hours from the capital, Johannesburg.
2. In Pretoria, we stayed at the same place we did ministry at POP UP, a Christian people upliftment program that provides skills training and basic needs. All 13 of us stayed in the main hall.
3. Staying the hall means we didn’t have real beds. Some of us slept on our sleeping pads, but many people made what we call “chair beds.” Chair beds are basically two rows of cushy red chairs pushed together facing each other to make one large, crib-like bed. Most people put their sleeping pads on top of their chair beds for maximum comfort.
4. Because we were just guests at this incredible functioning ministry, we always had to keep in mind that this was an office and school above our home. Therefore, we had to be out of the office building, where the bathrooms and showers were by 6:30 a.m. every week day morning, and have the hall all cleaned up by 8 a.m. We couldn’t be in the kitchen after 7 a.m. and we could only use certain bathrooms during the day. Every morning, all of our stuff would have to be repacked. So we never really got settled because we had to unpack and repack each day.
5. Unlike in Zimbabwe, we had consistent generally consistent power, water, and WiFI. We were very blessed in that way. However, there were two showers between all 13 of us, and one of them wouldn’t stay warm. But we were thankful to have real, non-bucket showers. Also, our teams only used WiFi every other night. It wasn’t the strongest connection, but we were still really thankful to have it this month.
6. The weather in Pretoria was all over the place. It started off chilly, but some days would be super hot. It also rained quite a bit, and there were some serious, hurricane-resembling thunder storms several times during the month. But most of the time, the weather was beautiful.
7. POP UP is located literally right behind the train and bus station, which means we’re basically situated right in the inner city of Pretoria. To get into town we had to walk across a bridge, but then we basically had access to anywhere within walking distance, including several McDonalds, a KFC and a beautiful park, which we accessed semi-frequently. It also means we could hear the sounds of these stations at all hours of the day and night.
8. Just up the dirt path from POP UP is a large shantytown called Bagdad. As you can imagine the area is extremely poverty-stricken and disease, drugs, and crime are very prevalent. Next to the entrance of this neighborhood is an apostolic worship site. This “church” is something we saw often in Zimbabwe, and from our understanding it is a religion that incorporates parts of Christianity with satanic practices. Needless to say, it is a very dark area and we spent a lot of time in prayer for this area and those people.
9. This month our teams were responsible for our own breakfast and dinner. We also had to provide our own lunch on the weekends. When we had to cook our own meals, we were blessed with access to POP UP’s large kitchen. We had to walk into town every few days to go to the grocery store, but even in that we were super blessed because the store had almost anything we could desire. While we still lived on only $4 per day of our team money, this was def. a month of excess as far as snacks because we could buy our own chocolate and Coca Cola whenever we craved it. But that’s only because we know that most likely won’t be the case in every other country.
10. POP UP graciously provided us with lunch every week day. The lunch they provided for us was typically the same lunch that they provided for the learners at POP UP. It usually consisted of pap (an South African staple food made of corn flour) and some sort of chicken or beef stew.
11. South Africa has 11 different languages. Most people can speak English, but Afrikaans is commonly spoken among white South Africans and Zulu is commonly spoken among black South Africans. But because almost everyone speaks English, I didn’t really learn any new words. It’s unfortunate though because I love learning new languages!
12. The currency of South Africa is called Rand. 8 Rand = 1 Dollar, so every time we needed to figure how much something was we had to multiply or divide by 8. It’s not the easiest number to divide by, but we made it work. Some things are very inexpensive here, but some things are very expensive. But for the most part, all the prices are pretty comparable to the states.
13. South Africa is more racially diverse than most African countries. Because we were in one of the bigger cities, it often felt a lot like the USA. But I quickly noticed that the residual effects of apartheid are def. still in place. There’s still a lot of division between white people and black people in most areas, but it’s definitely becoming more racial intermingled.
14. Because we were here for a whole month, we had a lot more time to explore in our time off. Most of the time we either went to a McDonalds for McFlurrys and Internet, one of the two nearby malls, a nearby park, or a café that we found called Café Riche. But we also had a few other fun experiences, including going to the Passion World Tour Conference in Pretoria, having a Braai at our contact’s house, visiting the Pretoria Museum of Natural History and exploring one of the biggest malls in South Africa.
