Back Home - Africa

We returned yesterday afternoon and it's back to work today.

It was another amazing experience. A ton of work and not much sleep, but it's always a great experience to serve others. We had the best team I have been on so far. I was on the team that was focused on the Academy. We taught classes during the day and ran an After School Program. There were a lot of teachers on the trip since it is summer here. I knew I would be teaching one computer class to each of the grades and didn't prepare beyond a few ideas and having downloaded some software I might need. I was just going to offer a few different topics and let the students decide which one they wanted the most. I could do any of the office tools, image editing (using Gimp), html and website creation or programming. Most of their current learning has been with Word so the office tools were out. They chose image editing so I helped them load Gimp.

All of the kids at the academy are orphans from the townships where Bridges Of Hope is working. The Bridges Of Hope model is away from state run orphanages (even the state sees orphanages as an unacceptable model) into a boarding school (the elite schools are boarding schools) where the students return to their communities when school is out. The townships are very dangerous and this may not be the best place for these students when school is out, but they still have the connection to their home and become role models for positive development. Turning what was a desperate situation for them into an opportunity to be a community leader.

They were pretty far behind in their computer skills so part of my goal was just to get them to click around on menus and try stuff. The first class was all about using the brush tools and learning to zoom in and out of a picture.

It looked like I was going to have a light load on Friday and I had fully planned to do some manual labor around the school. As I tried gather a few people the head of the school said the Computer teacher had failed to show and asked me to teach the classes. I spent another class on Gimp and showed them how to use selections to remove someone (me) from a picture and place me in another picture. This was a lot of fun and once they figured it out they were moving each other from picture to picture. I also showed them a few of the effects tools to change image colors and such. All and all it was a lot to pack in in an hour, but the students said they loved it and I did see them using Gimp outside of class which was nice.

The second week I had a few math classes with my wife. We taught Money math which included, saving, tithing, investing, and credit cards. We handed out monopoly money and asked them how they would each spend their first pay check. There were not many "savers", but after our class I'm sure most of them would have put away as much as possible and always fully pay a credit card bill. Some of the best lessons my father ever taught me. The only (nearly) guarnteed way to get rich is over a long time with a constant savings and a good interest rate.

I learned that the computer teacher had actuall quit and I got to teach four more classes on the second Friday. This time I knew the kids a lot better and had watched them all playing music from their thumb drives. I decided to teach them Audacity to make music. They really went crazy with this. It was hard because I tried to cram three weeks worth of classes into an hour, but by the end they were recording their own singing and creating rudimentary mixed tracks. They now have the software and enough knowledge to take it to the next level themselves.

For the afterschool program we helped put on a school play (High School Musical) and worked on it over the two weeks. They showed the play on our last night along with a talent show and it was a lot of fun. We also ran our "Choose To Wait" classes the second week. These are basically sex ed type classes where we talk about God's plan for sex and marriage. In an area that has 20-30% HIV/AIDS infection rates the best thing is to get young people to abstain from sex. Wear a condom if you are going to have sex, but don't expect that to fully protect you from HIV/AIDS or pregnancy. Even the condom box says that they are not 100% effective. I've taught this three times now in Africa and I went from being a partial skeptic to a full believer in the curriculum. It does an amazing job and I think that committing to abstain before my wife and I were married really helped us create a much deeper relationship. It is much different when you explain to kids why God wants us to only have sex inside of Marriage instead of just telling them to not have sex and giving no real reasons besides HIV/AIDS and pregnancy. Or just giving them a condom and falsely telling them they'll be safe as long as they use it.

The other teams spent a lot of time in the township called Sweet Home training leaders there on how to teach an Alcohol Abuse prevention and recovery program. They also taught first aid and classes on emotional wounds. The township we have adopedted is one of the poorest places I have ever been and it was exciting to see the foundation laid for a more positive future. It will take years and years, but I can see that there is potentional to change generations of neglect. The Life Wind model is all about community development with a focus away from relief. I have seen communities transformed by this process and I'm still excited to see more positive changes than what normally happens when we in the west simply throw money at problems and think our ideas will solve the needs that communities don't even recognize as needs. If you want to stop throwing money and time down the drain and truely make a change, Life Wind is an organization with a revolutionary model of community development.

Another team ran a VBS camp for the kids in the same township. I was there for part of two of the days and I would have to say that VBS is really just a bit of semi-controlled chaos.

Everyday was pretty much the same. Up at dawn, work all day, homework until 9pm, team meeting at 9pm then crash at midnight to do it all over again. We did get two days off. One was a trip to Robben Island to get acquinted with the CHE leaders from Sweet Home and the other was to a game drive where we saw the Big 5 animals from a jeep. It wasn't "in the wild", but it was a good time and a fun experience.

All in all it was a great first trip and the start of what looks like a long and fruitfull partnership. We relieved some of the staff at the academy for two weeks and help sow seeds of change in a very poor township.