WORK DAY!

June 2, 2007 was a day that I have asked you to pray for. And your prayers were heard. God truly blessed the work day at Katlehong. We arrived at the school around 8:30 and we were ready to work. There were about 10 people from Grace Christian Church and about 10 people from Wytchwood Baptist Church (a church that one of the Lambano workers goes to). So the Lord was faithful to bring people out to work. It always helps with a job like this to have more hands than you know what to do with. Our main objectives were to replace the broken doors (two of them) and replace the door handles that were broken (a lot of them) and replace the broken windows. One of the most important jobs was to patch all the holes in the roof, and it was a good thing that we did because today (6/6/07) there was rain and hail. The patching job was relatively easy because there is a product called Flash Harry, and its basically a drywall patch, but for the tin roof. So I was put on the door duty, and with the help of a few others we got the doors done very quickly. So we moved to replacing windows. The windows are much easier to replace in the states, because of the rubber seal that just needs to be taken out. But, of course, South Africa does things the most difficult ways. The windows here are held in place by a putty of some kind. So, all of the putty needed to be chipped away and cleaned before you could put new putty in and then the window and another layer of putty to hold the piece of glass in place. It was a long process to get the windows in.
And the principle of the school told us a couple weeks ago that the kids were going to do a dance for us (the workers) to show their appreciation. Well, little did I know that a traditional Zulu dance calls for the girls to have their shirts off. Now, I knew that I was coming to Africa, but I didn’t realize that I was going to see half naked girls because we are in an actually big, industrialized city. But the principal told us that this was a sign of the girl’s virginity and purity. There was nothing sexual about it. So when they started dancing, a lot of the community came out to see because of their singing and dancing. And they would have gone all day, but the principal knew that we wanted to keep working and he might have seen all of the surprised looks on our faces when all the girls took off their shirts.
So after the dance we kept on working on the windows, and Conrad started to cut out some of the damaged ceilings in one of the containers. Which was a job suitable for one day alone, but we undertook it then. We ran into some obstacles, but we overcame. The whole day was a success and there was a reporter there, so when the story is in the paper I will transcribe it and post it here. After a long day we finally got out of there about 5:00 and a shower never felt so good back at home. Hopefully we will be going up there again to paint and do some more work in the weeks to come, but until then keep praying for the government here and the principal of the school as he fights to get some things done for his learners.