A Home in Qwa Qwa

Thursday morning, we went back to Qwa Qwa and did more relationship evangelism. We went back to the house where the woman invited us to come today. We got there, and she said that she was afraid that we wouldn’t come back. She left work at 4 am to come home and sleep before we arrived. She was very glad we came. She had her laundry out on the line and was caring for her grandson. We went into her living room and talked. The pictures you see here are of her house. She had a slightly larger house than many in Qwa Qwa. She said that her husband had been dead for about 10 years. Later we discovered that 10 years could be anything from 2 to 20 years. Time didn’t seem to be measured in South Africa like we do in America. She also had a fairly large lot which she used for a large garden. The goat you see tied belonged to her neighbor. The road that Andy is walking on is the road to this house. It is not the alley, this is the only road to the home.

We found out that she owned the land her house was on, and that the government built her house. She seemed to think the question was silly, who else would build my house, she implied. She worked cleaning office buildings in town at night, making 1200 Rand (right now equilevent to $120) a month. She would walk or take a bus into work. Then during the day she would care for her grandson. While we were there, we went out and picked some peaches which we pealed and ate. They tasted a great deal like our peaches. Then a rain sqwal came through, and we ran out and removed her laundry from the lines.

In the pictures, you can see her kitchen, the two bedrooms, and we are sitting in the living room. The bathroom, well, there wasn’t one. The toilet was outside. You can see from the picture of the outside of her house that her house is larger than many houses in Qwa Qwa. She had a living room added onto the house after it was first built. The younger black woman in the picture was our translator. She told us her youngest daughter who lived with her, attended the Launch Pad class at her school. She asked more questions about American than any other person we visited with. How would you answer this question she asked? “Here, a girl gets pregnant and then gets married. Is that the way it happens in America? Or do they get married first?” She was glad we came and shared with her.

We never ate lunch at the homes, we always came back to our staging area, in this case, a church. After lunch, we were going to do Children Evangelism. We would start a program with music and maybe walk down the street, and the kids would come out and follow us, kind of like a piped piper. However, about 1 pm it began to rain and it poured for an hour, soaking the ground and continued to rain throughout the afternoon. In South Africa, no one is outside during the rain, so we had to cancel the Children’s Evangelism program.