10 August 2006

Dear Friends,

A new owner for our car is lined up; most of our furniture has found different homes; our airline tickets for 1 September are safely hidden. We have built stacks in our spare bedroom: things to give away, things to take back to the United States, and the largest pile—things yet undecided, depending on space in our suitcases. Our assignment as mission co-workers in South Africa is about to come to an end. We will be on Interpretation Assignment in the U.S. for the rest of this calendar year and look forward to connecting with many of you in person as we travel, preach, and teach in California, Minnesota, Michigan and certainly our home region of northeast Ohio.

This scenario invites us to look back over our time here. As we do so, certain concepts and phrases are becoming increasingly significant. One of them is “accompaniment”, a word central to the vision of the Joining Hands program under which we have served as Companionship Facilitators. Accompaniment is different from a donor-recipient relationship, different from a partnership, even different from the concept of solidarity. Accompaniment requires an invitation from the person(s) to be accompanied and a mutual desire to share the journey, through smooth as well as rough territory.

During our first 18 months here, we accompanied the previous JH-South Africa network on the confusing and painful road toward its decision to dissolve. Since January 2006, we have accompanied the newly emerging Sisonke Masilwe Indlala (“together let us fight hunger”) network aiming to address poverty through land justice. Here and there we have had opportunities to accompany overseas visitors on their journeys of discovery and learning in the South African context.

A particular story of accompaniment might illustrate the concept.

As we gradually became involved in the work of the Samaritan Care Centre, a local AIDS hospice in East London, we, the fortunate owners of a digital camera and a laptop computer, were asked to “profile” the lives of the volunteer staff. One by one, we spent time with these young people, mostly women, listened to their stories and accompanied them to their homes.

On September 22, 2005 Ntombifikile invited us to come along to the place were she lives. An English translation of her Xhosa name would be: “A Girl Has Arrived”. We drove through the narrow mud roads of Duncan Village, with Ntombifikile proudly waving from the car to friends with whom she usually walks this route. We found a wider place in the road, pulled over to park and then walked to Ntombifikile’s home, a shack of about 12 by 15 feet, which she shares with her aunt and uncle, both of them domestic workers, and their two sons. The double bed, we learned, sleeps the adult couple and their 11-year-old son. Ntombifikile and her 26-year-old cousin Thanduxolo (“Lover of Peace”) stretch out at night on separate sections of the remaining bare floor space.

Ntombifikile came to Duncan Village in 2001, after she had finished high school in a rural area in the Transkei and had graduated from a three-month course in home-based care. Like so many of her contemporaries, she was hoping to find employment. Four years later, at age 25, she still has not secured a paying job. We asked her how she feeds herself. “By whatever people put in front of me”, she responded. How she keeps the white blouses of her nurse’s outfit so spotlessly clean is beyond us—water is only available from a tap up the road, near the place where the communal toilet facilities are.

For home entertainment, Thanduxolo has hooked up a radio and a small TV to a car battery, the only source of electricity in the shack. The haircut he was getting when we showed up happened strictly by manpower, with a double-edged razor blade in the hands of one of his buddies, while other friends looked on and didn’t dare to sneeze so that the blade wouldn’t cut into Thanduxolo’s scalp.

As we prepared to leave, Thanduxolo remarked that never before had white people visited his home. He seemed somewhat in awe of this encounter. He flashed an extra wide smile when he heard that these white folks felt equally honored to spend this afternoon with him and his cousin Ntombifikile, two exceptional young people with many gifts to share.

That night the two of us had a hard time falling asleep. Ntombifikile and Thanduxolo were very much on our minds as we stretched out in our comfortable bed. Accompaniment has consequences. We were unable to change the living conditions of these two young people, yet something else might have been changed that afternoon, something within us.

When we dropped off the finished “profile” a couple of days later, Ntombifikile looked at it with a big smile; she knew too that we could not find her the employment she needs, but she seemed really glad that we came along, looked and listened.

We never considered it our task to find easy solutions to the monumental problems of poverty nor has it been our assignment to broker resources from abroad in efforts to develop local projects. Our job, as we have understood it, has been to accompany South African sisters and brothers as best as we could, and to interpret what we have seen and heard and felt to you our neighbors in the northern hemisphere.

We pray that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will soon be able to find the funding and the right person to appoint as the new Companionship Facilitator for the Joining Hands network in South Africa. If you can help, please do.

Peace,

Ken and Susanne

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 339