Back to Tembisa

Africa. It's never quite what you expect. I arrived in Jozi Tuesday evening exhausted from two long flights. Wednesday afternoon I headed to Tembisa. I knew my way. I've been to Tembisa Baptist Church dozens of times. But that place by the train station where I always leave the asphalt to follow the dirt road along the tracks to the church--they're paving it, and there is no way through.

Paving is good.

No way through is bad.

Of course, there must be a way around, but I haven't been that way before. Try this street. No. They're paving there too. That one? More construction. The streets don't go in straight lines and form predictable squares like back home in the American Midwest. They twist and turn, and there is no point in looking at the street signs, because no one uses their names anyway. They use landmarks like the BP station I'm looking for. Except they have closed the BP station, and the sign is no longer there.

"That must have been it," I realize when I come to where the road goes under the railroad tracks that I wish I had been able to follow. I turn around for the fourth time.

When I arrive at the church, I get what I am expecting--an enthusiastic welcome. Kids spot me through the fence when I get out of the car and come running. We have a round of hugs and hand shakes. (Even the smallest African child knows how to shake hands politely.) They flutter after me as I greet the adults who cook their hot meal and keep things running at the center. They show me the cement slab and brick walls of the new church. And when I pull out the books sent by one of my friends at Solid Word Bible Church, they pounce like kittens on a ball of yarn. Fortunately there aren't a lot of children today probably due to the rain. There are enough new books to go around and soon a row of children, each engrossed in a new book, sits on the steel girder that waits on the floor of the new sanctuary for the engineer to raise it to hold the roof.

"Let me read to you," one girl says. So I listen to part of The Wild and then to a whole lot about sharks and some of another book.

We read until the raindrops begin to splatter on the pages, and we start home. The children scatter on foot. I get back in my borrowed mission car.

"If I turn left at the former BP station," I reason, "I should come to the road that passes near the library."

Bad idea. Did I mention that the streets don't make straight lines and right angles like they do in the Midwest? Twenty minutes later I have no idea how to find either the library or the Baptist Church, much less the road home.

A lot of my white friends would be nervous about coming to an African town like Thembisa alone. I'm not, but "Lord, please get me out of here before dark."

By the time I find the library, it is closing time--too late to visit my librarian friend, Poppy--but it IS still daylight, and from here I know my way home.