With less than a week to go until the launch date, we had another all-day workday at the Aphiwe Good News Centre in Tembisa. Megan and Liezel did a great job of painting a light brown section of the walls in the main room and bathroom. Hendri finished hanging more bathroom fixtures (this time avoiding the water lines, thankfully). Christy and Llewellyn painted a beautiful mural on the backyard wall behind the kitchen.
Lucas and I have been working outdoors on the landscaping around the building and today’s projects were removing leftover rubble, spreading gravel for the parking area, and cleaning the street which had inches of compacted dirt layered on it that had to be broken up and removed.
Working outdoors around the building regularly puts us in contact with the thousands of people walking by on their way to and from the train station down the block, and it’s always enjoyable chatting with people throughout the day who want to know what the building is going to be used for. Today was one of the more unusual days in interacting with people, though. One car driving by was upset with the speed bump we had installed last week and then a few minutes later a man walked up and thanked us profusely for installing the speed bump (his 5-year-old daughter had been hit by a car on the same road last week and her leg was in a cast – the reason we installed the speed bump). I was asked to pose for a photo with one pedestrian (white people are a novelty in townships like Tembisa) and may have been proposed to by another lady. We regularly have people who ask us for work at the community centre and we politely explain that we’re all volunteers and that we don’t have any paid positions available. This explanation didn’t stop one young man from trying to take my shovel out of my hand to do my work for me and earn himself a job. We had an almost-comical, five-second tug-of-war match over the shovel. All of this while there was a chanting ritual going on in the house behind us offering sacrifices for their ancestors. It’s never boring spending a day in Tembisa!
We have a tremendous amount of interest from the feedback we receive in starting bible classes there immediately along with life skills courses like first aid and sewing. It’s easy to foresee an ecclesia forming in the new community centre within months, God-willing.
Christy and Llewellyn in the beginning stages of painting a wall mural on the backyard fence.
Halfway through the painting process of Christy’s creative wall mural.
Breaking up inches of compacted dirt with a pick on the street outside the Good News Centre.
Liezl painting the main bathroom.
Lucas and myself removing dirt from the street while children take the liberty of playing on Lucas’s trailer in the background.
Recycled pavers from the construction site form a new entryway to the yard from the street.
Megan painting a nice light brown border around the main classroom in the Aphiwe Good News Centre.
The main room at Aphiwe all finished with painting.
Sweeping the streets just in front of the building alone became an all-day task in removing all of the compacted dirt and dust that is common in townships.
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