Day Nine: Dancing Before the Lord *

Sunday was church day. Occassionally the Mhlosheni ADP hosts an interdenominational service at its building, where pastors and members of area churches gather under huge tents in the back yard for music, worship, a message, and fellowship. The Go Team would be the guests of honor, along with he visiting pastors, all of us with special seats along the side of the tent.

It was of course one of the hottest and muggiest days of our trip. What other day would be so ideal for sitting under a hot tent with 500 other people for three hours?

I don't have a narrative of that experience. The setting was beautiful but strange, and it's hard to rethink how one event led to the next one. But I have a series of impressions that are vivid in my mind, and I'd like to see if I can convey some of that clarity.

Women: Amazing! The women in the crowd wore bright hats in many vibrant colors, with fur or lace trim or with feaths and beads. Many wore traditional robes or priestly smocks. They wore every style of jewelry, from having dozens of dangling earrings to simple jeweled headbands. They smiled at the slightest nod in their direction, and were incredibly expressive in grasping our hands and greeting each of us.

Music: Unbelievable! We had been asked to sing a few songs during worship, and Dave and Amanda would lead us. We'd picked out Agnus Dei and a few other songs, but not really practiced them as a group. They saved our songs for last, and the best way to describe how powerful the other choirs were is that Dave leaned over to me during the first one and whispered, "They should have let us go first." In other words, they were awesome and we would surely be a letdown.

These choirs were incredible. Accompanied only by an inexpensive but highly amplified keyboard they belted out song after song in their lilting, soaring vocal style. Everyone gave themselves over to the music with abandon. One group of youngsters stood and sang their praises with one of their members serving as the entire rhythm section. Rick Berry would have loved it.

After all these beautiful, harmonic voices we stood and sang. I don't know what it sounded like, to be truthful. Dave kept us all singing in synch, coming in together and at the right time. Amanda's rich voice carried us through the loud speakers. But however it sounded, they seemed to love us. Everyone was smiles, yelps, and applause when we were done.

Children: The kids were great. They sat silently under the edges of the tent, patiently letting the younger, smaller ones kneel or sit in front. A whole flock of them pressed behind us, seated as we were at the edge of the tent. They grinned and whispered and fanned us. I glanced over and saw two trembling fingers tickling the back of Dave's hair, as if they'd never seen anything like it. He laughed at pointed them to Michelle's spiky hair, and pretty soon she had a small herd behind her playing with the blond spikes at the back of her head.

Message: Pastor Salatiel gave the message in ringing, poetic, fiery siSwati. Mandla Hophle, one of the ADP project managers, translated for us. It was difficult to follow with the visual distractions, the heat and the translation, but I was awed by the passion of the pastor. I was awed by the joyous spontaneity of the "Hallelujahs" and "Amens!" in English.

Ceremony: one of the members of parliament was at the service, and near the end he asked the CRCC team to come forward. He put a Swazi ceremonial robe around each of us, and a beaded Swazi necklace. We felt honored and humbled. And then we danced.

The singers and keyboard players burst into a joyous song of praise. They began to sway and move, and a dancing line started to form with Nonjabu, the ADP accountant, leading the dancing. All of us from CRCC joined the line, dancing and clapping and singing.

I am, as my wife will surely tell you, an ungraceful, uptight white guy when it comes to dancing. If I dance at home my kids will say, "Yeah, that's great dad. You can stop know. Please stop." But I danced in praise and joy, publicly and without shame. We all did, and it was beautiful. Not the dancing, but the spirit that swept into the tent, picked up strength from the ardent worshippers, and was transferred to us strangers as an unearned gift.

There was much more to the service. There was a huge lunch served to all who attended, and again the CRCC team took places of honor inside the building, out of the heat and with the pastors. I think it made us all uncomfortable to be treated in this way, but the food was phenomenal. I had a soda called Schweppe's Dry Lemon, and now I'm in love with it.

Family: Many of the sponsored children were at the service. Reed and Erin's Sisephile, Amanda's Thandiwe. Michelle sat down with both her sponsored children and also talked to her young boy's teacher about her worries. She's passionate about her concerns for them. Words can't do justice here, so I hope to drop in images when I get home.

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When the church service began to wind down Bonginkosi took us all to another project. To give us a sense of the impact World Vision can have on a single life, we met an older woman (sixty-four in a land with an average life expectancy of 33!) named Mrs. Simelane. Eight of Mrs. Simelane's ten children were dead, and one granddaughter lived with her.

She had been injured when her house collapsed in a storm, and after being released from the hospital she was forced to live in a grass beehive hut --- her former storeroom --- beside the broken house. Because Mrs. Simelane was influential in the lives of the local children and a respected elder, the local community petitioned World Vision for disaster relief. In keeping with their philosophy of empowering individuals rather than providing handouts, Mhloshene ADP assisted in locating the building tools and then split the labor costs with the community on an even basis.

We stayed in the old hut quite a while as the old woman recounted first the crushing losses, then the feeling of hopelessness, and then the new start World Vision had given her. It was easy to see --- in her wide smiles and firm handshakes --- why small isolated acts of mercy like this had helped to unite a community being ground to nothing under the burdens of HIV/AIDS and drought.

We drove back to our hotel over Mhlosheni's red dirt roads, passing dozens of finely-dressed people heading back to their homes after the church service. Many held small care packages of left over food, and we learned later that not a scrap of the lunch had been wasted.

Most of us learned for the first time on this trip how World Vision's visions statement reads:

Our vision for every child, life in all its fullness.
Our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so.

What we saw in the field gave meaning and context to this vision. Seemingly disparate acts --- feeding 500 attendees at an inter-denominational church service, rebuilding a house so that a community could continue to have a respected caregiver in their midst, sending the leftovers home to feed the husbands and little brothers and sisters who couldn't make it to the service --- these small separate acts were pulling a community back together that had splintered under the pressures of AIDS, drought, and famine.

We were beginning to see Mhlosheni ADP not as a magical provider of wonder works, but as the mortar that held a community's own inherent pieces together.

With their faith as their guide and their all-encompassing love of children giving them their focus, the staff and workers in Mhlosheni were quietly giving dignity to the broken. In doing so they were also bringing the love and message of Jesus to a stricken land.

It had been a hot day in Mhlosheni. There was no rain.
Over several conversations we'd heard the same message: the first rains had been good and made the brown land go green.

But if the rains stopped now the maize would dry up again before tasseling, just like it had the year before, and the suffering would go on. (When reservoirs are down to 37% of their capacity it takes a lot of rain to fill them to a sustainable level again.)

With the rest of the nation we prayed for rain.

* I owe that personalization of 2nd Samuel, where David danced unashamedly before his Lord, to World Vision's Andy Smith who is with us on this trip. Thanks Andy!

PS: I'm three days behind on our blog. As of this post the team is eating lunch at the Johannesburg airport, on our way home. I'll catch up on the plane. Here we come!