Beat the Drum in Somerset East went off really well and God was definitely working in the town. The team of about 120 people was split into 6 different teams; 4 went to high schools, 1 went to a neighbouring town, and one went out into the community and worked at farms and jails. I got put on the Cookhouse team and we went to the small town of Cookhouse to teach in the high school. It is actually the town in South Africa with the highest rate of HIV/AIDS per capita and South Africa has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. Think about it.
Monday was the first day of teaching so we went to the school after praying a lot and got the community hall ready to show the movie. This consisted of getting the windows covered with garbage bags and the projector set up. After a bit everything was ready and all we had to do was wait for the students…and wait… Apparently they were told to go drop off their bags at their houses and then meet us at the hall which made the ones that showed up(only half) really late. But oh well all was good so we introduced ourselves and started the movie. The students seemed really into it and it was great to watch their reactions at different parts of the movie. They were reactions that I would never have expected or that would not have happened if the movie was watched in Canada. Once we got to about 20 minutes left the movie started skipping and we couldn’t fix it! Only half the students saw the movie and they didn’t even see the whole thing. Our whole Cookhouse team was really worried after that but God’s glory always shines through every situation! Our prayer was that God stopped the movie so that we could show it the next day to all the students and guess what happened!
For the next three days we taught out classes for about an hour each day and honestly it was hard. I taught a grade nine class of about 26 people with my partner Notomboxolo, a Xhosa lady from Somerset. Try to picture little white me standing in front of 26 big black grade nines preaching about abstaining. It’s funny as I look back on it because I realise that I truly did enjoy the week even though I was wondering the whole time why God put me there. It was great by the end to see how much they leaned about AIDS and that they realised a bit of how bad this pandemic is. As Beat the Drum says “There is a killer among us.” You would be shocked at how little they know about a disease that is killing their people so it felt really good for me to be able to fight it first hand.
On the last day we gave the students the option of going to get tested for HIV/AIDS at the Somerset Youth Centre and about 120 of them decided to go. Every student in every school we taught at in Somerset was given the option so there were hundreds of them waiting in the hall to find out their status. I think out of the whole time I’ve been here that was one of the most overwhelming moments for me. It was so hard to see all of them waiting nervously to get tested and knowing that many of them would probably find out that they were infected with something that would probably kill them within 7-9 years. It’s crazy to think about.
Overall it was an extremely hard week but a very good week. You could feel Gods hand upon Somerset East and see the changes he was causing. The week definitely brought our team closer together and all if us closer to God.
