Moving Moments Ch.15 - SU South Africa, Launch to Liftoff

Moving Moments

Chapter 15

SU South Africa – Launch to Liftoff

Returning to South Africa was an adventure. We had left the country two years earlier as practicing professionals, me as a Chartered Accountant and Cher as physiotherapist. We were returning as missionaries. We had no plans to return to the secular working world. It required a bit of a mindshift. Fortunately our two years at ANCC had prepared us to be living in a different reality and with refocused life objectives. We returned home expecting life to be very different and were excited to see how the adventure of following God would unfold.

On our trip home we decided to fly on Zambian Airways. It offered the cheapest flights and also took us via Lusaka in Zambia. This was the city in which Cheryl had been born and spent most of her childhood and early teens. We thought it would be fun to go and take a look see for old time’s sake. We arranged for our connecting flight to South Africa to give us about 12 hours in Lusaka. When the plane touched down in Lusaka and we stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, the smoke from villager’s fires was in the air. It reminded me of how much we had missed the smell of Africa in our nostrils. It felt good to be “home” in Africa.

The sights and smells of Africa were wonderful

Highly skilled Zambian woodcarver 

At the airport we were accosted by a bunch of enthusiastic taxi drivers all vying for our business. We ended up negotiating a deal with one guy who agreed to drive us around some of the places that we wanted to visit, for the day. He ushered us into his beaten up old Datsun 1200 sedan. As I climbed into the passenger seat alongside the driver and shut my door, the window slid down into the door and stayed there for the rest of the day. Our driver was a Christian guy and gave us the royal tour of Lusaka and even took us to his home at one point. We visited some of Cheryl’s old haunts and the house she had grown up in. It was fun, but Zambia was going through a tough time economically, much of it self-inflicted and poverty, dirt and brokenness were all around. The tires on our taxi were completely smooth and over the course of the day our driver had to deal with four punctures, all of which he managed with good humor and help from his other taxi buddies who gladly loaned him their spare wheels. I guess shared suffering makes for good friends. The final puncture occurred as he was dropping us at the airport. As we got out of the car we heard an ominous wooshing sound as one of the tires gently let go of its air.  Our day in Lusaka had been fun, reliving some of the memories of our youth, but we had been tangibly reminded of the needs of Africa and felt glad that we were home to be playing our part in helping.

Bald tires as far as the eye can see

The  house in Lusaka
that Cheryl grew up in 

Our taxi driver extended Zambian hospitality
and took us to his home.

Lusaka Convent - Chery's old haunt

A warm welcome at Nanna and Granddad's house

We were met in Johannesburg by family and spent a couple of weeks getting ourselves re-oriented. We had to buy ourselves a car and in short shift we were the proud owners of a nice beige Mazda 323 which was sufficient for all of our needs. We were under a bit of pressure to get down to East London to meet the local SU committee and Jeremy Clampett who I would be taking over from as he was needed as soon as possible at the SU office in Cape Town. Before we began our role with SU though we had something we had decided we needed to do. Whilst at ANCC we had become convinced of the need to speak the language of the local people. This seems so obvious and logical it should go without saying. However we had grown up in colonial Africa and spent our early adulthood in apartheid South Africa. The prevailing mindset in our world had been that “the locals” needed to learn English so that they could communicate with us. There was no thought given to us white folk needing to learn one of the predominant African languages in our area, nor had our schooling situation allowed for this. Cher and I were going to be living in East London. The local African language in that area was Xhosa. Recognizing that once we got going in our SU role we would quickly become very busy, Cher and I decided that we were going to do our best to acquire some Xhosa before taking up our SU assignment. The expectation from the local SU committee was that we would be working primarily amongst English speaking white youth and so needing to learn Xhosa was not high on their priority list. In addition Jeremy was needed in Cape Town as soon as possible. This had become a bit of a sticking point, but we had stuck to our guns and eventually it was agreed that we would spend our first three months in East London, dedicated to language learning ahead of taking up a six month training period with Jeremy before he moved to Cape Town.

We managed a few days in the bush
before heading down to East London

The method of language learning which ANCC was promoting was an informal one called the LAMP (Language Acquisition Made Practical) method. It didn’t require formal grammar learning, but rather focused on learning language as a child learns, by listening and practicing, surrounded by speakers of the language. To do this one needed to be immersed in a situation where the language is being spoken all the time and which forced one to be dependent on local people for practical help and language coaching. This immediately took one out of one’s comfort zone, but created a wonderful learning and relationship building opportunity with the indigenous communithy. Jeremy had arranged for us to go and live in the Ciskei, one of the apartheid “homelands” at a Baptist Bible College at Debe Nek for black students. The college was situated alongside a village where we could visit daily to practice our conversations. One of the staff at the college was George Ngamlana, who was on one of the SU committees. George lived on campus with his wife, a teenage daughter, Busisizwe and a five year old daughter, Ntombolelo, nicknamed Ntombi. This was perfect as it would give our girls a built in playmate on site.

Bible Institute, Debe Nek, Ciskei

Our home for three months

It wasn’t long before we were ensconced in our very small married quarter’s student house that we had been allocated by the Bible College. It was pretty basic. Our bedroom was barely large enough for a double bed, as was the girl’s room. The toilet and cold shower were in one small room. To have a shower one had to remove the toilet paper from the room. For the kids to have their daily bath, I would walk to the main building a couple of hundred yards away and collect two buckets of hot water which I would put into a galvanized iron tub for the girls to bath. Our small kitchen and living room were off of the bedrooms. Electricity was supplied by generator which went off at 10am. Once lights went out things got really dark. We didn’t complain. Compared to the villagers next door we were living like kings and queens. One night Cher and I were in bed, just nodding off, when I heard movement in our bedroom cupboard. We both listened intently for a few minutes. The movement was slow but steady. My imagination was going crazy. I was imagining a snake in our cupboard, making its way over to our bed to settle down with us for the night in the warmth of our bed. Ugh! The mind boggles. With no lights, there was no easy solution. Eventually we got out a flashlight and a large plastic bowl. With a flourish we opened the cupboard door, switched on the flashlight, plastic bowl at the ready to trap our would be attacker. What we found was a very frightened little mouse staring up at us helplessly. We caught him with the bowl and somehow got him outside where he belonged. We slept the sleep of the just that night – snake free and safe.

We got to meet many of the trainee
pastors en route to churches
 across the country

Cher, bravely coping with
a less than perfect kitchen

George Ngamlana arranged for a language helper to visit us every morning. He was a young guy by the name of Mandisi. Daily he would help us develop a conversation of a few sentences which we would then be able to practice with him prior to taking it live to the village in the afternoon. Each day we would learn conversations such as how to meet, greet and introduce ourselves, ask for directions, shop and so on. Xhosa has a number of clicks which we needed to master before we could hope for locals to have any idea of what we were saying. This was a challenge as our English trained tongues were not meant for this kind of abuse. Slowly, day by day our conversation capacity went up. Each day we would then take our show on the road and go and visit the village. For the village kids we were the entertainment for the day. We would arrive and immediately be mobbed by kids. They were particularly fascinated by Elaine and Julia. They would rub their arms, tug at their hair and generally give them a going over. Eventually an adult would arrive and call off the kids and we would proceed on our way to meet adults and try out our conversation for the day. I take my hat off to those villagers. We heaped a lot of abuse on their language. Occasionally our efforts were greeted with merriment, but by and large they would listen graciously and try and decipher what we were saying. If we were sounding too good, then it was immediately understood that we were fluent and we would be on the receiving end of a stream of fast and unintelligible response. This whole exercise was hard work and emotionally draining every day. We felt like helpless children, which wasn’t far from the truth.

Mandisi with Cheryl, patient despite our stumbling efforts

Village time - to practise a conversation

The girls were the star attraction

Elaine and Julia had made good friends with George Ngamlana’s five year old daughter Ntombi. She spoke no English, but somehow the three of them seemed to communicate and have fun. She had mastered one English word well and that was “No”. Nandi was our most ardent critic. She would listen to our efforts whilst we practiced with Mandisi. Mandisi had long ago let us off the hook and indicated “Ok, fine, it’ll do”. Ntombi was not to let us off so lightly. She would listen intently, with her little round eyes getting wide and then announce “No”! We would try again with the same response. She was without mercy and obviously a frustrated perfectionist. We started encouraging the girls to go and play outside with her while we were practicing. One day when we were getting ready to go to the village, Julia was dragging her heels. We chivvied her up and she said “I don’t want to go to the village”. We enquired why and her direct and clear response was “I don’t like black people”. Ouch. We could rely on Julia for an honest opinion. We persevered, but recognized that it was not only hard for the two of us, but also for the girls.

Ntombi - our severest critic

Government of Ciskei flag

The Ciskei, was one of the South African government homelands. They were more or less self-governing. By setting up the homelands, the government was engaging in a “divide and rule” strategy by diluting the numbers of black folk in the “white areas” and then separating them off into their own tribal group, thereby avoiding one united black opposition. The Ciskei government had their own police force, army and legislatures. It was in the Ciskei authorities’ interests to quell dissent in their areas as their jobs and livelihoods depended on the status quo. In the mid-1980s there was a lot of dissent across the country. Public gatherings were not allowed, especially if they were to oppose government policy. However funerals were considered legitimate public gatherings, so were often used by black opposition to the government as a vehicle and means of expressing dissent. One day, about two months into our language learning time there was a funeral up in the village. We noticed a large crowd gathering up on the hillside alongside the village. We also saw police and army vehicles positioned strategically here and there keeping watch on the crowd. The next thing we heard all kinds of uproar and the crowd started to scatter. We were watching this, fascinated by what was unfolding, when suddenly we heard the roar of engines coming up the driveway of the Bible College. Army jeeps came to a halt not far from us and a bunch of soldiers leapt out, machine guns in hand and charged directly at us. I just about had a heart attack. Were we about to be shot? Had no one explained to the local police and army why we were there? As they arrived at us, they kept going beyond us and ran into the field behind our house. They were obviously trying to cut someone off from escaping in our direction. We breathed a big sigh of relief. This episode rattled us a lot. We had figured out already that another month of language learning was not going to make a lot of difference to our conversational capacity. We decided it was time to call it quits and head for East London, an hour’s drive away, to begin our assignment with SU. The limited Xhosa we had managed to learn in those two months stood us in great stead in future years with local black folk. We had learnt some basics and that was often enough to establish bona fides and the beginnings of a relationship. Fortunately the realities of colonial Southern Africa were that most black folk were schooled in English which meant that communication was still possible for us in most situations.

The Ciskei even sported its own international
airport which was seldom used for that purpose

 Jeremy Clampett had arranged with First City Baptist Church in East London for us to live in the house that they owned alongside the church at 6 Belgravia Crescent. He mentioned to us that the house “might need a bit of cleaning up”. When we arrived the house looked like it had been inhabited by squatters for years. The garden was full of junk and the house was dirty beyond belief. There mounds of goop on the floor in the kitchen. Well this kind of challenge is what gets Cher’s heart racing with enthusiasm. We piled in with all hands on deck. Jeremy arranged for a bunch of students to come over and clean up the garden. Cher and I cleaned the house and then approached the church to pay for materials and we offered to paint it for them. This arrangement worked out well for all concerned and it wasn’t long before our house was looking good enough to live in. Our neighbors were the church Associate Pastor Brian Still, his wife Veronica and their dog Adam. Adam was a pit bull, good natured apparently but also tough as nails. Adam and our dog Boerie, who were both aggressive male dogs in their prime, became mortal enemies and would regularly engage in snarling and growling matches over the wall between the houses. We lived in this house for six months while I spent time with Jeremy learning his job.

Jenny and Jeremy Clampett had the job of training
us in the finer points of running SU in the Border Region

About three months into our time with SU, I was at a beach mission in Gonubie, not too far from East London, with Jeremy, learning the ropes of how one runs a project like this. I had spent a good day with Jeremy, was quite relaxed, and was looking forward to Cher coming out with the girls to enjoy the evening program with us. When Cher arrived I called out to her and said “Hi Cher, how was your day”, whereupon she burst into tears. I was astonished, but was enlightened when she recounted her tale of what has to have been one of the worst days of her life to date. Our neighbors Brian Still and his wife had gone away for a couple of days and asked us to feed Adam, their pit bull, and check he was ok. Cher had gone into their house that morning to feed him and noticed that he had found a box of rat poison and all the evidence looked like he had eaten the whole lot. Adam looked his normal cheerful self. Cher knew that pit bulls were tough but decided an emergency trip to the vet was called for. She rushed home and loaded kids into the car and began backing out when she noticed too late that the laundry hanging on the line had been caught by the roof rack on our car and she had pulled down the whole clothes line and a fresh load of laundry into the dirt on the ground. The panic was starting to rise in her. She gathered up the now, filthy laundry and put it in the house for a re-wash later. Repairing the laundry line would have to wait. While she was in the house dumping the laundry she heard a loud crack followed by a mighty bang. On investigation she saw to her horror that the wind had caught the brand new back door of the house and pulled it completely off its hinges and it was lying flat on the ground. By this time she was severely rattled, the kids in the car were getting antsy and Adam needed to get to the vet urgently. In South Africa one couldn’t leave one’s house with the door wide open and unattended. Just then Colin Lee, a young Methodist pastor, who we had met, happened by to drop something off and came to the rescue. His method was simple. He screwed the door onto the door frame with a couple of long screws. No one would be breaking through that baby anytime soon. The fact that we couldn’t enter by it either was irrelevant. Cher was rushing to save Adam’s life. She had to drive the car into the neighbor’s driveway to get Adam into the car. It was important for us to leave our dogs in the garden of our house while we were out as they put up a good show of discouraging would be intruder’s. This had to be achieved without allowing Adam or our Boerie to eyeball each other and be at each other’s throats. Cher had to open our front gate, drive the car through and then get out and close the gate. All of this had to be done whilst keeping two warring dogs in their own respective spaces. As she opened the gate, the gate fell off its hinges. By this stage my poor wife was pretty much a babbling wreck. She bravely stood the gate up and somehow fastened it in place so that the dogs couldn’t get out, or at each other, and proceeded to load up Adam and get him to the vet as quickly as possible. Despite his apparent meal of rat poison Adam was showing no signs of distress and the vet gave him the all clear, whereupon my poor wife had to return home to survey the damage – a wash line, back door and gate to the property destroyed. So by the time she made it out to the beach mission and I asked her how her day had been, she had given in to a full blown melt down and burst into tears. Cher is normally such a trooper in all circumstances, but in this case she had finally cracked.

A typical SU Primary School group

My apprenticeship with Jeremy got going at breakneck speed. The geographic area covered, and which I would be responsible for, was known as the Border Region. It covered about five or six significant cities and towns over an area of about two hundred kilometers by two hundred kilometers. It included the Ciskei homeland where Cher and I had done our Xhosa language learning. Jeremy was one of those guys that we all want to be. He was the guy who would have been voted by his school class mates as “most likely to succeed”, become the school Head Boy and then walk away with all of the academic and sports awards. To top all of that he was charming and a most likeable guy. Jeremy, a couple of years younger than me, had come into the SU office in East London a few years earlier and under his leadership the local SU Area was doing very well. In my volunteer days with SU in Durban, I had been involved in one aspect of what SU does, namely Mini Camps for primary school kids. SU in the Border Region was working in all of the English speaking schools, amongst the white primary and high school young people. The Afrikaans, or Dutch origin, young folks were looked after by an equivalent Afrikaans organization called CSV. As I was apprenticing Jeremy was beginning to make contact with the so called “Coloured” schools and he was forming a Ciskei committee to begin to reach into the Black schools in the Region. The scope of the work was very wide. It included overseeing SU groups in about 35 primary schools, and about 15 - 20 SCA (Student Christian Association) groups in high schools during term time. In the school holidays, a variety of evangelistic camps and holiday clubs were run. This all amounted to a very busy program. In addition all of the fundraising, promotion and running of committees to sustain all of this fell to Jeremy too. To say I felt daunted by all of this would put it mildly.

Ciskei SU committee. Middle front row: Xolile Solani
who was to become the SU Ciskei staff worker.
To Xolile's left is George Ngamlana, later to become
his father in law/ 

A Holiday Club group from
the so called "Coloured" schools

Jeremy’s job was to expose me to as much of what he had been running as possible so that the chances of a good transition were as high as possible. We embarked on a breakneck tour of every part of the work, over a six month time period. We visited numerous school groups, we ran holiday clubs and camps and we participated in a variety of administrative related activities which supported the running of all of these activities. Jeremy moved apparently effortlessly between this array of activities and functions and seemed to operate at a very high level, with a minimum of preparation and effort. My whole personality needs to be much more structured and careful in my approach and I need to be thoroughly prepared before I can relax into enjoying whatever it is I am doing. Jeremy’s style caused me quite a bit of stress at times. For instance, we would be driving on our way to a school meeting. I would have no idea what we were going to do in the meeting and Jeremy would say, “Rob I’ll introduce you and you can give the twenty minute message to the group”. Well that would just about throw me into a caniption, as I needed time to think what I wanted to say and five minutes in the car en route to the meeting didn’t cut it as far as I was concerned. The one time we were in at the Clarendon High School in front of a group of fifty or so girls. Jeremy was going to be doing the presentation. Our projector bulb went out. Unflustered, Jeremy said to me, “Rob you talk to the girls, while I go and find a replacement bulb”. The meeting was about 30 – 40 minutes long. I had no idea what to say. I ended up telling them about Cher’s and my experience at All Nations, which seemed to interest them. Despite the pain of being thrown into the deep end like this on more occasions than I would care for, it was good for me as I began to develop a capacity to think on my feet, which in the real world, has saved me more than once. I learnt a lot under Jeremy’s “on steroids” leadership style and was thankful to him for having taken the time to lay a good foundation for me.

Group of mainly teenage leaders - veterans of two
back to back Mini Camps at the very primitive
Stutterheim campsite

During my apprenticeship with Jeremy, we ran two lots of two back to back Mini Camps. I was on familiar territory here, as this was what I had done in Durban. However it was good to meet the various key people and get acquainted with the local campsites and so on. We also ran an SCA leadership camp, which was a weekend gathering of a couple of hundred teenage SCA committee members who were leading the Christian group in their local high school under the oversight of a Christian teacher. Our job was to train and encourage them to do a good job. In many of the schools, the SCA group was the largest “club” in the school, so these committees were key in maintaining that level of success. We also ran the Gonubie Beach Mission and also pioneered the running of the first ever Zwelitsha Holiday Club with the SU Ciskei committee. I gained an early understanding that working with translation across two languages, although necessary, can be tedious. 

More fun with Zwelitsha
Holiday Club kids

Zwelitsha Holiday Club was a first

One of the activities we did was a five day beach hike from Morgan’s Bay to East London. It was a wonderful hike. We carried volleyball poles, a net and a ball and would stop off and play a few games each day in some of the most beautiful spots on the planet. On our first night our frame tents were blown down by a gigantic wind that came out of nowhere. We sat, miles from anywhere, wet, huddled and miserable in the dark for the rest of the night eagerly awaiting dawn, when we could get ourselves sorted out. Our camp cook, Michelle, came to me once daylight arrived to show me our only source of fresh water from the storage tank where we were camping. The water was filled with tiny little red wriggling worms. After a long hard night we all needed a coffee badly. We decided to boil the water, make up a pot of coffee, hope all the worms had died and say nothing to the teens. We continued on the hike that day strengthened by the extra portion of protein we had all ingested,  no one the worse for it apparently.

Rob watching a volunteer trying to eliminate the
rot, representing sin in a log in the forest. 

Enjoying a meal at the
Gonubie mansion

Jeremy, had this remarkable ability to connect with the movers and shakers in the area and get things done in co-operation with them. One of the folks he had recruited for the SU Committee, which shared responsibility for the work with Jeremy, was Fred Burchell. Fred was a local farmer who had a talent for making money. He had made his millions by running a very large chicken farming set up. Fred owned land and houses all over South Africa. He was an unassuming character and if one had lined him up with five other guys and said “pick the millionaire” he would have been the last one to have been picked. Fred owned a seven or eight bedroom mansion, in Gonubie, not far from East London, on a rocky point overlooking the Indian Ocean He and his family would use the mansion as their getaway cottage from time to time. Most of the time, the house was unoccupied and the permanent staff of two ladies were left with little to do. Each year all of the SU Area Directors from across South Africa would need to meet to discuss business. Jeremy, not one to miss an opportunity, had persuaded Fred Burchell that it would be a good idea to have this SU annual meeting hosted at the Gonubie mansion. Fred, agreed and it was so. Cheryl and I joined the other key SU South Africa staff living in the lap of luxury for a week at the Gonubie house as we called it. We would sit at the long dinner table, able to seat at least twenty, and enjoy top class meals prepared by the two ladies who were delighted to having something meaningful to do. Once again Jeremy had laid the foundation for me of a relationship with Fred which was to bear much fruit down the line, both locally and nationally.

Julia and Elaine were our most enthusiastic
SU Volunteers and wore their tee shirts proudly

Towards the end of my time apprenticing with Jeremy, Cher and I were required to attend a New Staff Training conference for SU staff across Southern Africa. It was to be held in Harare in Zimbabwe at the house of David and Janet Cunningham who were directing SU in Zimbabwe. There were 7 or 8 of us in the contingent from South Africa. A mini bus was rented in Johannesburg and we all departed for an overnight drive to Harare en route to our training conference. All of the changes we had been experiencing over the last few months had been taking their toll on us and we were feeling a bit stressed out. On the long night drive through miles of lonely Zimbabwe bush, Cher began to get a case of “the wobbles” questioning whether we were doing the right thing with our lives and generally getting close to falling into a pit of despair. She called out to the Lord for re-assurance. Just then she looked up at the moonlit sky and noticed a cloud in the shape of a long arm with cupped hand. She felt that God was reminding her that He has her in the cup of His hand. She felt encouraged, but then started to doubt again and she continued to cry out for encouragement. The morning after we arrived in Harare, we were having a group bible study on Psalm 147. We went around the room, with each person reading one or two verses. When it came to Cher’s turn to read, at verse 8, it read “ He covers the sky with clouds”. At that point Cher knew that God had spoken to her directly and was re-assured. We were learning that life in ministry is not always easy, nor do we necessarily feel strong, but we are called to be obedient and faithful and trust in God. When we do that we derive a lot of strength and encouragement to keep going, despite how we may be feeling at the time.

It was time for me to
step into the lead role. I
did so with much trepidation

Around the end of March 1986, it was time for Jeremy to leave East London with his family and head for his new role in Cape Town. I was dreading him going as I had derived a lot of security from the work being in his capable hands. On the other hand I was ready to give things a shot with my own personality and style, recognizing that I would never match Jeremy’s set of talents and skills, but that God had called me here and it was time to bite onto that and see what God could do with my gifts and talents. And so it was with mixed feelings that we bade farewell to Jeremy and Jen and their two girls who had become close friends with our girls. Little did we know but the next five years were to be action packed and full of spills and thrills as we navigated our way in trying to follow the One who had called us.