I am not an animal person. At all.
I realize there are people reading this who can’t get their minds around that. If you are one of them, I recommend you go on the South Africa trip next year; I am convinced that spending a week in Red Hill will make you sympathetic to my point of view.
Red Hill is populated by approx. 1000 people and approx. 200 dogs. Apparently each dog has an owner, and the majority of them all look the same: 50-60 pounds, brown/blond hair, pointy ears and medium-length tail. Someone told me last year that after 5 generations of cross-breeding, dogs all gravitate toward this look. I don’t doubt it.
But those aren’t the dogs I’ll remember ten years from now. I will, however, remember Foxy, a black and white dog that looks to be a generation or two away from pure-bred pit bull. For the past week, Foxy made pouring concrete a nightmare.
You see, I was on the construction team this week, and we were tasked with pouring a slab of concrete. This slab, once completed, will be home to the Red Hill Kids Club and will receive 40-50 kids every weekday to learn about the love of God. There were three of us on the team, and I was the only one not licensed as a general contractor. We were paired up with a local contractor and two local workers for what looked on paper like an all-star team. With this team in the US, I would have been saying “A 25×25 slab in four days? No sweat, do you want us to throw some walls on there while we’re at it?”
But this is not America (we affectionately call this phenomenon Tina, and she shows up any time you let your guard down in Africa), and thus we were not framing on day one and backing up a concrete mixer to pour the slab on day two. No, we were mixing cement, sand, rocks, and water on the ground batch-by-batch and installing the concrete in 8×8 sections. And all the time we were battling the elements, especially on day one when we had 20-30 mph winds blowing through on a regular basis and on day two when the thermometer hit 41 Celsius (that’s roughly 105 Fahrenheit). By the end of day two we had our perimeter cinder blocks installed and one of our six sections poured.
As you can imagine, this was a frustrating point. It was becoming clear that we were going to be pushing it to get everything poured before we left.
Oh, and did I mention we ran out of water at one point? ‘Cuz we did. You can imagine it becomes difficult to mix concrete when your hose runs dry.
Which brings me back to Foxy. On the off chance we were able to complete a section and get it leveled, Foxy would feel the need to walk in it. At one point, after we fixed her prints and had cleaned up for the day, she bit the caution tape we had set up and ran through the slab just to show us this was her house and there was nothing we could do about it. This only reinforced my feelings toward animals.
This whole time, I was trying to see why I was here this week. We obviously weren’t going to finish the slab, and everything we did finish was soon marred by one animal or another. It seemed every obstacle we climbed was followed by another.
And then we had our big community celebration tonight. 200 members of the community came together at the clinic I had helped restore last year to see what their kids were learning and get some free food (mostly for the free food I suspect (an uncooked hot dog on a bun with butter and a watered-down ketchup-like substance (I’m not prone to parentheses within parentheses (within parentheses) but this just tells you how far these people will go for free food))).
During this event, the “mayor” of Red Hill got up and thanked all of us and talked about how much he appreciated us getting the clinic fixed up last year. He thanked us for working on the slab for the Kids Club. And in that simple gesture I was reminded why I traveled 30 hours to spend a week seemingly beating my head against a wall. Because it’s not about me and what I want to accomplish and how I think things are supposed to go; it’s about being a part of God’s plan for Red Hill. It’s about allowing God to use me however he sees fit.
We have spent much of our debriefing time in the last couple days talking about our role in the redemption of Red Hill as planters and waterers of seeds. In our brief time spent with these people each year, we are best used as a connection, a conduit to merge the needs of the community with services provided by local organizations. It’s not the most glamorous of roles; it’s often quite frustrating in fact. But it’s what they need.
And the best part of coming back a year after my first trip has been seeing where the seeds planted last year have started sprouting. For a community that appears so stuck in its ways, change is obvious. To come back and see the clinic being used to teach people basic health tools makes last year that much more worth it.
So I prepare to leave Cape Town again, leaving a slab of concrete mostly finished and another piece of my heart here as well. I don’t know what the next year holds for me, but I am eager to get back here next February and see children praising the name of Jesus on a slab of concrete laid by a couple of nobodys willing to be used by God. In that moment, I’ll ignore the dog prints in the corner and forget the frustration of a week of obstacles and know that this year, too, has been more than worth it.
*On a side note, I find it very appropriate that we spent the week working on an area for children’s ministry to happen in South Africa while our church is starting a campaign to build new space for children’s ministry in Nashville. The first phase of Wildest Dreams 2 is done, it’s just in South Africa!
Posted in South Africa, UncategorizedTags: SA 2011 | by markahlberg No Comments
