Sunday, January 09, 2005
Day 7 Worship and Boulder Beach
9 January 2005
Wow! What a day! We started out this morning as usual. Waking up and kind of groggy then moving on to making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, followed by eating Rice Krispies for breakfast. Almost all of us had the pleasant surprise of not being sore from our trek up Table Mountain yesterday, so that helped a lot today.
Then, we loaded up and went to church in Guguletu. Guguletu is one of the townships where blacks were forced to live during apartheid. Today it is a very large shack town and is very poor. The church we went to was very nice. I did not expect the church to be near as nice as it was. The pastor took our group on a tour of the trip and explained how the church was at the very forefront of combating AIDS and developing community. They even won the President?s Award from Nelson Mandela himself for developing community. We looked around the church for a while and then the service began.
This was the third week the sanctuary had been used, and the pastor said they were still figuring out the acoustics in the building. To me, it sounded like they had mastered the acoustics. The singing was phenomenal! It echoed throughout the sanctuary, and although they were singing in a foreign tongue, it was beautiful. It sounded like angels singing. Then a group that had performed at the waterfront a few days prior in a jazz festival performed for us. One man stood up, about 5' 10" not weighing a hint over 120 lbs. And sung. I was expecting some type of hip-hop or regae, but, he sung like he was in an opera. It was amazing, like a counterpart to Charlotte Church or Josh Groban. After the singing, we moved on to the sermon, it was half in English and half in Zulu, I think. He spoke about how we need to be active agents, sounds like a good Calvin sermon, in stopping HIV/AIDS.
After the church service, we met in the foyer and talked with one of the interns at the church for awhile. He told a little of the history and what the church was doing now. He then tried to take us to a market, but we wound up not going so we went back to Cornerstone for a little while.
While at Cornerstone, I personally took a nap for an hour, so I do not know what everyone else did. After the nap, we headed out to the beach. After the last windy beach experience, we were looking for a more secluded spot, so we went to Boulders Beach.
As we approached the beach, we were all surprised to see 5-7 foot waves pounding the beach. The wind was hurling sand all over the road. We were all thinking about how sandy our things were going to get at the beach but we continued on. We finally arrived at the beach after 30 minutes of beautiful coastline and seeing the whole South African Navy (which was not very big), to see penguins everywhere.
These were fearless African penguins. Being a photographer, I took about 130 pictures of them. Everyone else had gone swimming while I was taking pictures, so I did not get to swim, but that's ok. Then we all sat around the beach and talked for awhile. We talked about how we were getting sunburn down here and how there had been 8 inches of snow in Grand Rapids 2 days ago, not to rub it in too much. We also talked to a man from Johannesburg for about an hour, and that was very interesting. The beach was very aptly named because there were huge boulders all over the place to sit on and climb.
At about 6 we left to go back to Cornerstone, and lounge around while 3 people cooked for us.
From there we had devotions and played games before we hit the hay.
God bless!!
-Joe Byker