In our last prayer email (the everyotherfriday email - post a comment or send me an email if you don't get this and would like to), I wrote about going to visit a township north of Cape Town with our friend MacDonald who is a young Xhosa pastor.
It was different than I thought it would be... Amy and I have been to plenty of townships since moving to South Africa. Black townships in Cape Town tend toward the "informal" - there are plenty of shacks made of scraps of metal and wood and only a few (but a growing number in some places) permament structures. Some, like Red Hill where Amy works every afternoon, are only shacks with bumpy dirt paths they call roads and are pretty small. Others, like the sprawling Khayelitsha on the Cape Flats, have somewhere near 1 million residents. In other parts of the country, Black townships are like the "Coloured" townships here with thousands of cement block houses and apartment blocks.
But this place wasn't really a township. It was near townships, but this community was a settlement on the grounds of an abandoned factory. It seems that in the 1940s, someone built an asbestos factory in the empty land north of Cape Town. Over time, this area became swallowed up by middle class suburbs and the factory shut down when manufacturing asbestos was no longer allowed. The company built "hostels" for its workers on the property because they were not allowed to live permamently in Cape Town during that time because of their skin color. The hostels are asbestos boxes on cement slabs placed in neat rows and divided into five or six two-room homes per slab. When the factory closed down, they allowed the workers to stay.
Now the hostels are home to former workers, their families, extended families, and friends of friends. The factory and the jobs that came with it are gone, but the people remain in these little carcinogenic boxes. The toilets that everyone shares overflow and poison the children, the young men sit around and drink all day, and the old women try their best to look after the children left behind by mothers claimed by AIDS.
But MacDonald met a woman who lives there and he told her about Jesus. She became a follower of Christ and wanted her neighbors to know this Hope. MacDonald goes up on the weekends and leads a Bible study in this lady's room and they worship and sing praises to Jesus for His goodness to them. MacDonald was praying for someone to start a Sunday School for the kids, and one of the young women in the little church started a Sunday School... every day of the week! She turned an unused section of one hostel into a "creche" (preschool) and operates this day care for sixteen children where she looks after the children, feeds them, and teaches them about Jesus. This little group of people have their eyes on an unused "community hall" where the workers used to meet with the factory "baas" - they want to turn it into a bigger creche and a soup kitchen and a church and a training centre.
This place isn't a "township" proper. It is a group of forgotten and abandoned people who live in crumbling boxes that cause cancer and lung disease on an island of poverty in the middle of the suburbs. I'd wager everything that 95% of the neighbors have no idea how many people are living in horrible conditions down the crumbling road past that old factory. But if your car can make it down that road without the potholes jarring your wheels off, you'll find a little church that prays and sings and teaches about the unending love of Jesus.
