Diary of a ministry trainee #2

Today I’ve been in Johannesburg a week. And what a week it’s been!

I’m living in a house next door to Melville Union Church in Auckland Park. The SABC (television and radio studios) are at one end of my street and the University of Johannesburg at the other.

It’s a beautiful place: Jo’burg has got lots of trees. Lots. I’m told that the city scans up as a rainforest on satellite pictures. Well, not the whole city. South of the CBD, in the townships and squatter camps, there’s hardly a tree to be found.

The wide blue sky and spread-out single-storey houses - even the freeways - remind me of Australia, but there’s plenty that’s different. Most of the houses in my street have electric fences, and pretty much every gate sports a sign warning of rapid “Armed Response” in case of a robbery.

Unemployment’s a big problem here, so people go out of their way to create jobs. Every petrol station has an army of attendants who wash your windscreen and fill your tank, and some of the supermarkets have one person to scan your items, and another to put them in bags.

It’s a cacophony of different languages: most people in Jo’burg speak English, but you’ll regularly hear most of South Africa’s 11 official languages: on street signs and in supermarkets there’s Afrikaans as well, and the other widely-spoken Joburg languages, Zulu and Sotho are starting to make an appearance too. There’s even sitcoms on TV where people speak to each other in different languages: one lover in Zulu, one in English. Then their friend will come in and speak Afrikaans!

The contrasts are incredible: I spent Friday night at Montecasino, which is basically a painstakingly recreated Tuscan village indoors. You walk in past the gun safe, and there’s ‘daylight’ and ‘night-time’, three-storey flats with washing strung between them, cobblestones and Italian police cars. You’d almost think you were in Italy, except for the poker machines in the piazzas.

But the following day I helped deliver some furniture to Kliptown in Soweto. We were carrying a wardrobe and a double-bed on a ute, and I was following behind on the back of Mark Grieve’s motorbike through the winding streets of an ‘informal settlement.’ The streets were muddy puddles of raw sewage in places: there were a few scattered communal taps and shabby portaloos.

When we finally got the furniture to the house where a lady called Miriam lived. It was a corrugated iron shack next to the railway embankment, and it was about six metres squared. We couldn’t even fit the wardrobe in standing up, which completely broke my heart.

The place was full of wide-eyed kids: they were mostly just hanging around, playing marbles and stuff. I waved and gave them thumbs up, and they came running out to see the motorbike.

We went home, back up the Soweto Highway to my huge room with six windows and a polished floor. My first reaction was just to weep about the injustice. But then I realised that wasn’t all I could do. I could start living out my faith, to call out in prayer and act with faith in the God of justice who loves the poor and the powerless.

Ministry to homeless youth from Melville/Auckland Park starts for me on Sunday, and work on campus at the University of Johannesburg starts Monday. Thanks so much for your prayers! grace and peace,

Andrew Robinson

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