Finding Momentum

So life here has been a whirl­wind of activity:

Mercy Min­istries

Last Thurs­day, I shad­owed Zhie, a social worker and com­mu­nity orga­nizer, as we drove on dirt roads from bor­ough to bor­ough and deliv­ered food. It gave me a great per­spec­tive on life out­side the mis­sion. Zhie really inspires me as some­body who pours her heart out into what she does. She’s run­ning a wom­ens’ empow­er­ment pro­gram, mobi­liz­ing women to cre­ate crafts at home and sell­ing their prod­ucts on the mar­ket. Sarah will keep us updated on more details.

IT Sup­port

 

Some­times I help Owen out in the IT room. I run around to dif­fer­ent peo­ples’ offices and houses, ping­ing servers, run­ning antivirus scans, plug­ging in switches and con­fig­ur­ing net­work adapters.

Stu­dio 7

Some­times you can find me in Stu­dio 7, the radio sta­tion stu­dio of LBOM, work­ing with producer/manager Kelvin Kaonga on a mix. We’re learn­ing some new micro­phone and mas­ter­ing tech­niques, and are apply­ing it to his cur­rent projects. I really like how I get a chance to hear African music and be a part of its pro­duc­tion. We’re cur­rently work­ing on a politically-minded free­dom song by a Zim­bab­wean reg­gae artist… way cool.

Mag­a­zine Design

I’m start­ing the gist of my main project: edit­ing and man­ag­ing a newsletter-ish mag­a­zine for the mis­sion. I’ll be work­ing with another mis­sion­ary intern on this project, which will involve inter­view­ing folks and get­ting their sto­ries into print. I’ll be doing the pro­duc­tion work for the mag­a­zine as well, which is cool because I get to relive my Ver­tigo days, doing writ­ing, design and layout.

Meals

I’ll usu­ally share a meal on the porch with Sarah (either break­fast or lunch), all whilst being eaten alive by mos­qui­tos. Speak­ing of mos­qui­tos… I’m being feasted upon but things have got­ten bet­ter. I’m def­i­nitely going with the jeans, even if its 90 degrees outside.

Food-wise, I’m glad I weaned myself off of the meal point sys­tem my last year of col­lege. I’m get­ting a decent amount of cook­ing done, but as you can see from the pic­ture above, I like to stick with the basics.

Hang­ing out

Some­times in the after­noon I’ll shoot hoops with the stu­dents. They all think I’m really good. They’re all still in puberty.

Chi­nese people

Walk­ing about town, I real­ized that many of the shopown­ers were Chi­nese, prov­ing that Chi­nese peo­ple really are every­where. There’s even a Chi­nese kid at school that I’m get­ting to know. Because he doesn’t know Eng­lish (or Setswana) very well, our con­ver­sa­tions in Man­darin are really good. How funny that my Chi­nese iden­tity is still rel­e­vant here.

An even cooler note: I’m find­ing that many African dialects have phonemes very sim­i­lar to Man­darin which helps me when I think of cer­tain Setswana phrases in their Chi­nese equiv­a­lents. Awesome!

House­mates

I’ll catch a convo here and there with my house­mate, Lawrence. He’s cur­rently pay­ing the lobopo, or bride price, so he can marry his fiancee. To do so, he’s started up a local fumi­ga­tion busi­ness which will give him a side income on top of his grave­yard shifts as the secu­rity man­ager for LBOM. I’m try­ing to see if an Inter­net pres­ence will help his business.

Oh yeah, here’s my buddy and house­mate Chris­ti­aan. He’s from South Africa and a fel­low IT guy in the mis­sion. He’s also an all-around Mac fanatic.

Church

In the evenings, I’ll attend the mid­week church ser­vice, or the youth group ser­vice. Last week I was asked to lead wor­ship for the youth, some­thing I haven’t con­sis­tently done in five years. It was fun.

Sun­days I’ll be run­ning the sound board in the back. Some things never change