Ministries and services at JL Zwane

Yvonne is the director of ministries here, and I will be doing a lot of work with her related to HIV support groups, visits to AIDS orphans (both in foster care and child-headed households -- of which there are five the church serves and over 10,000 in the country), and other psychological health issues in the community. I met with her for a long time yesterday and heard her story of how she got involved in this ministry, generally out of the kindness that was shown to her as a young person and the conviction (strongly emphasized by JL Zwane) that we love God by loving other people.

I didn't make the rounds with Yvonne yesterday, going on home visitations to the elderly instead with Henrietta (another non-Xhosa first name, which makes it mercifully easy for a gringo like me to remember) and Thebu, who was one of the first two people I met in South Africa when he picked me up at the airport last Thursday morning. Thebu is living with umfundisi and is preparing to be a minister. He had an excellent pastoral presence on the visits, and Henrietta knows everybody and their needs and conditions very well. It was a learning experience for me, especially because it was my first time out in the community and I don't know any Xhosa.

Two visits stood out in particular. The first was to an eighty-seven-year-old woman (pictured) who is living alone off of a government pension. This visit was so similar to issues elderly people and their kids face in the US, of an elderly person who does not want to relinquish her independence, even though she clearly cannot care for herself on her own. She doesn't want to move into a home because (among other things) she says they'll make her speak English all the time (although she did just fine with me). Her neighbors take care of her, pick up her pension check, get food for her, and keep an eye on her. But it is exhausting for them, and they worry that she will start a fire when she tries to cook. This reminds me of my own grandparents, and elderly people I interacted with working as a hospital chaplain last summer.

More to say on this but now I have to run...