I figure now that I've been here for six months and have decided to stay where I am for another six months, it's probably about time I explain a little more about how and why I got to be here in the first place.

I had been interested in South Africa for a long time, even before I decided to study abroad there in January 2010. Certain books I'd read, news stories I'd heard, and what little I knew about South Africa's history made me want to learn more. I was especially fascinated by the country's history of racism and segregation, to which I could see so many obvious parallels in my own country. Studying in South Africa in January 2010 was such a fascinating and life-changing experience for me, almost an emotional overload, that I knew I had to go back at some point, and I hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

I was hoping to do a year of volunteer work abroad after graduating from St. Olaf. It was a dream I'd had a for a long time, and I figured it would never again be this easy to travel and see the world. I really wanted the volunteer work to be to South Africa, though in retrospect I realize I probably made an effort to seem open to never-before-visited countries also. Through a number of friends at St. Olaf I had heard many good things about a Lutheran global service progam called YAGM (Young Adults in Global Missions), and I knew they sent young people to South Africa, so I decided long before the beginning of my senior year at St. Olaf that I would apply to that program. After an interminable application process, during which time they sent me someone else's rejection letter before sending me my own, then changed their minds and decided I was accepted, I finally went to their four-day interviewing event knowing that I was interviewing for two country programs: Slovakia and South Africa. The interviews went well enough at the time. Afterwards, though, I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable in response to many things about the program's attitudes towards global service. Over time, those feelings of discomfort turned into outright revulsion.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Though I was still more interested in the South Africa program, and expressed my feelings to them, I got assigned to Slovakia instead. As immature as it may sound, I felt angry and gipped: I went through the whole process only to get assigned someplace I didn't want to go? I had been telling myself that I'd be open to going somewhere else besides South Africa, but the reality of having to choose between doing this program in Slovakia and looking at other options in South Africa made the choice very clear. I turned down YAGM without a clear idea of what I would do instead, while feeling very much like I was not winning at life.

In early June, after graduating from St. Olaf, I made contact with Marjorie Jobson, the woman who led the second half of our trip to South Africa in January 2010. I told her about my desire to volunteer in South Africa for a year or so. She told me about many of the initiatives her organization (Khulumani Support Group) would soon be soon starting, and how I could spend ~six months with Give a Child a Family and Siyavuna Dvelopment Centre to learn their ways, so to speak, in order to be of use to Khulumani during my second six months. I applied to Give a Child a Family, got accepted, and was suddenly faced with the reality of how I would pay for all that time here. (There had been a misunderstanding between Marje and I regarding the financial help she could offer me.) I was fortunate to receive money from, ironically enough, the Orthodox church I had attended as a St. Olaf student (whose priest is South African) and an Orthodox organization that's published a lot of my Dad's church music. Without those two grants (and the money raised from a smattering of summer jobs) it wouldn't have been possible, but I was blessed and I'm deeply grateful for the help I received to make this possible.

Now that it's been almost a year since I was struggling to lay out my plans for the year following graduation, I have a much better sense of why I intuitively didn't feel like I could, in good conscience, accept my offer to do YAGM. During both interviews, the program coordinators kept emphasizing that the point of being a YAGM volunteer was to "walk with" people, to be with them in their lives (which were almost certainly less comfortable than ours), and that we shouldn't really come in with high hopes of changing any of these people's lives. We were to be ambassadors of our country, and we were there to serve those we came to know in many different circumstances and organizations (apparently volunteers have a wide open range of options when it comes to the work they actually do) but the point was decidedly not to enact lasting change for the people we came in contact with. I found that I simply couldn't accept that. I didn't think then, and I still don't think now, that it's morally justifiable to go halfway around the world for a year, become a part of a community, use their resources, let them expend the considerable amount of energy necessary required to orient you, and only figure out what you're doing there after you get there. I decided that if I was going to go all the way to South Africa for as long as a year, I needed to know what I would be doing there long before I left. I also needed to know that I would truly be needed in a project that was truly making people's lives better. I never could have dreamed the degree to which my hopes and prayers would be answered. Not only am I getting great experience in so many workplace skills, and making a real difference in poor people's lives, I also, if I may say so, have no idea how SDC got all the work done that needed to get done before I got here. :)

The longer I attend Gates of Praise, the more great sermons I hear. Sometimes the message seems especially relevant for where I am at that particular moment. Two Sundays ago and last Sunday I heard a sermon like that. It was on hope, something I think we all need more of. There were a few main points, four explained on one Sunday and four the next Sunday:

1 Get excited when you find an area of your life that needs hope.
God is fully able to breathe life into hopeless situations (ie situations that look hopeless to our eyes). The facts might make a situation look hopeless, but God's truth is greater than the facts.

2. The belief that we can't change is a bigger problem than whatever problem we're facing.

3. Change in our beliefs comes from intimacy with God. The more intimacy we have, the fewer situations we find ourselves in that seem impossible because the more aware we are of the Holy Spirit's guidance.

4. Don't lose focus on God.
Along with this was the idea that even when nothing seems to be happening in our lives despite our prayers, God is working behind the scenes. The speaker used the GPS analogy of how God simply "recalculates" when we go off track. We will never be so lost or so far off track that God can't get us back to where we need to be.

5. Don't leave Christ's body and separate yourself. If you got hurt in the Body, you must heal in the Body. (For example, if your hand is hurt, don't cut it of to let it heal apart from your arm!)

6. Be with real friends; people who bring out the best in you.

7. Use faith to get a word from God (this is best done, of course, by reading the Word).

8. Give honor/praise in the area you were tempted to question His faithfulness in. If God proves His faithfulness in one area, never again can you doubt His faithfulness in that area! 

Excited about needing more hope? I often find myself feeling depressed when I comprehend how incapable I seem to be of fixing a dead area of my life on my own. But when this happens, God probably needs to become bigger so that the problem can become smaller. I'm also not entirely convinced about #2; or maybe it's just so counter-intuitive that it is in fact the truth. My rational self (which I think is growing stronger lately, probably due to reading Atlas Shrugged) would like to believe that the problem is the problem, and can I really be blamed for not seeing potential where God does? So, not sure about that one.

Those of you who know me well know that I have a hard time accepting the doctrine that Christians are supposed to be the happiest people around. I don't think following God is supposed to be easy, and I think happiness is much too slippery to be our natural, expected state of being for the majority of our lives. But the idea that Christians should have more hope than others, defined in this sermon as "a confident expectation of good from God that demands an action in the present", is right on. If we don't have such hope; that God is good, even in painful or difficult situations, how can we be said to have a strong faith? If the problems of our present moment consume our consciousness, how big is our God anyway?

Both parts of this sermon made me think for a long time afterwards, and they also gave me greater energy to go back into the world with greater focus. Some good sermons have the opposite effect; that of making you want to stay in church longer so that you don't have to face the world. It's great when a sermon can have the former effect.

I had hoped my next post would be much sooner than this, but my computer got rolled over by the vegetable truck hours after my parents' departure for home (a very sad story) and is still being repaired, and it hasn't always been easy to get to a computer.

My Mom was here in South Africa for twelve days (March 1st-13th), and my Dad, four and a half days (March 9th-13th). We had a really great time together and had many chances to talk, which was good since we had a lot to catch up on! I got to show them just about everything about my life here. At least one of my parents got to see almost everything I do here: my mom got to go out collecting vegetables with me one day, she sold vegetables with me a few different times, and went to both the Monday and the Wednesday night home groups I go to every week. She also went to a Jesus Culture concert with me, which was memorable and a lot of fun. It probably wasn't something that would've occurred to either of us to want to do on our own, but the group we went with made it a blast. My parents both got to go to church with me one Sunday (my first Sunday singing with the worship team, incidentally enough). The three of us also got to do some fun touristy things like ride the zipline at Lake Eland (the longest zipline in Africa) and see some amazing animals at Pure Venom Reptile Farm.

While they were here they stayed with one of my co-workers at SDC, which gave them many opportunities to talk to him about the project: how SDC got to be where it is now, and where it's going. Along with that, we talked about ways that I could continue to be useful there. At this point I'm thinking that it doesn't make sense to start somewhere completely new for the next six months; I'm very needed here and there are marketing things I could do for the Co-Op that no one has had much time for yet, but which would really help us start to make money (something that hasn't happened much yet). I'm going to be working on starting a weekly vegetable bag system where customers can pick up a set amount of produce every week, starting active facebook and Twitter pages for the organization, and finding new volunteers who come specifically to work with SDC, among other things. I'm happy this is looking like the most feasible path at this point; I would have been willing to help start a new project somewhere else, but the friends I've made here and the way the work here is going made it a fairly easy decision.