Thursday 21 Oct. in Cape Town

Today was a day off for the Congress, so I went on a little mission excursion to Lentegeur High School.  Celebrate Life has come in to mentor high schoolers and  teach them life skills.  They do not preach at the kids, as it is a public school, but the values they teach are bringing amazing changes!  The gang influences at the school have been driven out and the principal says this is the only teen mentoring program that has really worked there.  

We also visited the township from which Bishop Desmond Tutu led his marches to Cape Town against apartheid.  A mission there called Cross Roads has taught women how to run their own small business and make beaded crafts and other items.  It was the site of a horrible attack against refugees two years ago (around 10% of South Africans are refugees from other countries).  

These dear people live lives so different from mine it is hard to process, hard to understand.  Even after going there personally, it is still hard to grasp that this is a real situation with real danger and real shantys and real poverty.  But many of them will tell you that Jesus has given them hope, and that they are not "poor" in the way we think of it.  You may have heard the quote from Wess Stafford, the head of Compassion International, that poverty is not a lack of money -- it's a lack of hope. I didn't see a lot of wealth today, but I saw a lot of hope.

Tim