On Friday night I came home after spending a week in Botswana with a team of students from NETS. Here's some of what we got up to.
Saturday June 21I packed into the NETS mini-bus with 12 students for the 8 hour drive from Windhoek, Namibia to Ghanzi, Botswana. for the entire length of the trip, the scenery changed very little. On the Namibian side of the border there were some hills and mountains even in the distance, I don't remember seeing so much as a hill anywhere in Botswana!
We were partnering with the Ghanzi Reformed Church for the week, and they had a grfeat variety of activities planned for us. The first of these was a welcome brai (BBQ) at a farm just outside of town.
Sunday June 22
For Sunday morning our team split up into pairs and went to attend and preach at 7 different churches. I preached at the host church, Ghanzi Reformed, on what it means to live for Christ from Philippians 1. I was translated into Tswana which is, along with English, an official langauge in Botswana. I've managed to add another greeting to my growing list ("dumela")... but didn't make a whole lot more progress with the language.
Monday June 21
We spent the Monday travelling another three hours into the centre of Botswana, to do 'walk up' evangelism around the shopping area in Maun. Maun is a busy town and we had no shortage of people to talk to. I spent most of my time with a young bloke and his two sisters who were operating a kind of stall in a carpark. He was a keen Christian and owned a Bible, but had been encouraged not to read it apart from church on Sundays, in case he misunderstood it. By the time we had to leave, he was very keen to start reading Mark's gospel for himself... and he was on the lookout for some other people at his church who might read it with him. Unlike most of my experiences of contacting strangers like this in Australia, we found no hostility at all and most people we spoke to were very happy to hear more about Jesus. We were able to put some of those who indicated an interest in knowing more, in touch with local Christians before we left.
Tuesday June 22
Groups of students met with business leaders and in the local prison from 7am on Tuesday. There is an amazing openess to beginning the day with a Bible reading and prayer time, and we had been invited to lead many of these regular times for this week.
The rest of the day we spent in a
settlement called West Hanahai. It was a 45 minute drive on dirt roads to get to the settlement. These settlements (there are several like it) were created by the government to relocate bushman from their traditional hunting grounds which were being turned into game parks for the tourists. West Hanahai reminded me of Aboriginal mission Stations in the Northern Territory of Australia. The same kind of social problems. The same sense of hopelessness, lack of motivation and dependence on welfare. These people had been moved against their will from a land which enabled them to live contentedly for hundreds and hundreds of years... and been
dumped too far away from any
commercial centre to have a chance at making a new kind of life. There is an ongoing case against the government in the High Court. We spent our day doing manual work to restore and maintain the church building and yards. It was great to see the willingness of the students to get their hands dirty and simply serve others in doing jobs that needed doing.
That evening I was invited to be the guest teacher in
an informal Bible school. 8 church leaders from around Ghanzi were getting together to learn more about the Bible and ministry. I taught an over-view of the Bible as part of their Old Testament program. Although what I did was well received, as I saw their regular teacher interacting with the students, I was convinced again of the great benefit of long-term ministries where learning and teaching happens in the context of real relationships.
Wednesday June 23
On Wednesday we again began by sending various smaller teams of people to lead 'devotional' times in busnisses and government departments.
From there our team split into four groups and went in four different directions to observe a variety of ministries. One group attended a training session which had been organised for local church leaders, tackling marriage preparation and counselling. A second group spent time with a program called 'True love Waits', which has been designed to encourage abstainance before marriage in response to the
AIDS pandemic in the country. Programs encouraging condom use have made very little impact on the spread of HIV, and, among others, the Botswanan government has recognised that programs which are 'faith-based' and encourage sexual morality are much more effective at saving young lives. A third group of students travelled to another remote community to watch a leadership training session, where a group of uneducated church elders are being taught to preach. I was part of the fourth group that spent time with a ministry called Bridges of Hope.
Bridges of Hope was established in partnership with the Ghanzi Reformed Church, to bring relief and health services to the most culnerable people in the area. Most of the 'clients' are HIV positive and live in utter poverty. Many also have TB and routinely die from other 'preventable' diseases. In my time we visited a lady who was so ill that she had been left lying in the sand in her hut to die. She is in the final stages of life as an AIDS sufferer. She has all but wasted away, and most of her bones are clearly visible. She had almost no energy to even lift her head. As I helped wheel her into the hospital on a gurney one of the nurses said, "You are going the wrong way. The morgue is that way." There is a free anti-retroviral drug program in Botswana (as in Namibia), but many AIDS sufferers don't understand enough about their plight or the services available to access the program. The staff of Bridges of Hope (a mixture of Botswanan nationals and TEAR fund volunteers) have an amazing ministry of love to the unloved! They seek to empower the dispossessed and bring hope to the hopeless. What a wonderful example they are to those of us who live such comfortable 'Christian' lives.
Thursday June 24
Unfortunately during the course of the week, there were a number of little niggling incidents between some of the NETS students that betrayed a lack of love and trust of one another. Rather than just let these things pass, I decided to put aside time on our last day in Botswana to deal with these things and pray together. I was very nervous of how this might go, as I still didn't know many of the students well.
As we met together and reviewed things that had happened over the week, we found many things to rejoice in and learn from... and we found a shared grief over the 'culture' that had emerged amongst NETS students. We read the Bible together and talked about how love should be seen and experienced amongst us. We allowed time for different students to approach one another, aplogising for and repenting of past behaviour. There were tears and smiles amongst brothers. We then spent an hour in prayer individually and came together to pray again.
Although it might seem very cliched to say so, it was a deeply moving time for me... and most of the students. As we sang together about unity in gospel... I felt that we truly meant itand that
God had done something wonderful amongst us. PLEASE PRAY THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS TIME ON US WILL LAST... AND WILL SPREAD TO STUDENTS AND STAFF UNABLE TO BE THERE WITH US.
We spent that afternoon beating the locals in a volleyball game and being humbled by them in a soccer game. There were many significant friendships formed during our time together.
Friday June 25
We bade a very fond farewell to our hosts at Ghanzi Reformed Church, deeply indebted to them for the warm welcome and wonderful experience they had given us. We hit the road for the 8 hour return trip. The singing quietened down shortly after we left the town and most of the trip was spent in exhausted, contented silence... apart from the defeaning noise of the rattly bus.
