Partner Plan Letter - FEBRUARY 2009

56 Daphne Road, Maroelana, Pretoria 0081, South Africa
email: sduncan [at] mweb.co.za

Dear Friends,

We can hardly believe that it is February already! It is a true saying that as you get older the time seems to go faster; it only seems five minutes ago we were celebrating Christmas.

Graham was invited to preach at the licensing of Sibusiso Zungu whom many of you will have met on his recent trip to Scotland. The service was held in Durban where Sibusiso is to serve his probationary period. We drove to Durban and it took us 7 hours to drive there so we decided to stay for a few days. The service was wonderful with about 500 people present. It is very hot in Durban and, with so many people in the church, the temperature had risen so high it almost seemed to be cool outside! The service lasted for almost 6 hours which is not unusual in the black context but it is so full of joy with wonderful singing and dancing that you hardly notice the time.

The one disappointment of the whole affair was that none of the white members of Presbytery attended this service although it was a presbytery service and it was the annual Covenant Service too! We always feel very sad that whites do not attend these special services when they are held in the black context because they are missing out in a vital element of worship, friendship and a rich cultural experience which we always feel is a great privilege for us to have shared.

We were able to spend some time with Zwai and Thandi Mthyobile. Many of you will remember Zwai from his visit to Scotland several years ago and also from the street children’s project which some of you financed. We were able to see this project and he took us around the area where he has been working. It was such a sad experience to see so many children sleeping on the streets, offering themselves sexually for money to eat and sniffing glue or getting high on other drugs. The problem seems to be so immense and we felt a sense of admiration and pride in Zwai to be working in such a difficult and depressing situation. It was also uplifting to see what he had achieved with so little funding at his disposal and the level of trust and respect he has built up with these young people, they crowd into his services every Sunday. He said that he does not fool himself that he has converted many of them and he is aware that for many of them it is a place of shelter from the heat of the sun and they know that they will get something to eat at the church. Nevertheless there are seeds that are planted and they are experiencing the face of God in their miserable lives.

Sandra has resigned from Sedibeng. It was a very painful decision for her to make but after much prayer and thought we feel that it was the correct decision. She has struggled over the past 18 months to work with the management committee which was set up just under two years ago to support and assist her.

When the committee was set up all the members were white and this was her first conflict with them as she felt that since Sedibeng housed black students then there should be at least half of the committee black? They didn’t agree and as time went on it became clear that they really did not know a great deal about African culture and how black people live.

And so issues developed into one conflict after another between Sandra and the committee until latterly it felt that they were instructing her to do things which were against her conscience. When she tried to discuss this with them they simply sent her a warning letter! Of course all this tension overflowed on to the community and the result was a very difficult year with a lot of unhappiness for both Sandra and the students. We hope that they can find the right person for a replacement so that stability and harmony can be found once again for the residents of Sedibeng.

However she will continue to work with students; as the saying goes, “one door closes and another opens”. She has been requested by the university to assist post-graduate students whose English is a second or third language with their Masters and PhD theses. She will proof-read and assist them with corrections. This takes her into contact with Korean students as well as African students and already she has assisted a couple of PhD’s who were very happy with this help.

Graham’s work at St Andrew’s finishes at the end of February as the congregation is calling Zwai Mthyobile to be its first black minister – a bit of a culture shock for this rapidly transforming though traditionally white congregation! Zwai is keen to form a team of ministers - two black, one English-speaking and one Afrikaans speaking so this is an exciting prospect which Graham has been invited to join. The vacancy has been quite demanding but also rewarding.

Work at the Faculty of Theology continues with another large intake of students – 85 at the last count. One interesting development is the increase in students in the English-speaking stream which means that we are attracting more black students. Never one to sit around, he has also registered for the university’s Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education which is a teaching qualification for university teachers. He began this weekend and discovered it is based on an ‘out of the box’ thinking approach with few formal lectures. He thinks he may be getting a bit old for all this innovation as he approaches his sixtieth birthday! Apart from that, everything continues pretty much as usual with lots of boring administration which is relieved by the joy of teaching and working with the Presbyterian students’ Tiyo Soga Community which attends to their spiritual formation.

Nicole our grand daughter has started school and is enjoying it very much. It was a bit of a hit or miss in the beginning because when we asked her after her first day how was it she said, “Well it was a very long day and it was all work, work, work!” We need to add that she has gone from finishing at 1pm to finishing at 2pm! Already she is reading and she is very proud of this achievement instead of us reading her a bedtime story she now wants to read to us! It is a very good school with children from all over the world and the school tends to promote this diversity in the most healthy and positive way.

They have so many extra curricular activities and Nicole wants to do them all! So far she is doing horse-riding, piano lessons, drama and computer skills; as a result we see much less of her but are pleased that she is having a very active and fun-filled life. We took her to the circus last weekend and I don’t know who enjoyed it more – her or the grandparents?

We had a lot of sadness over Christmas because two very dear and close friends died. One was more than a friend, Effie Farrar; to us she was like a mother for both of us, from Cumbernauld when Graham was minister there. The other was Joe Ncevu from here in South Africa who died suddenly on Christmas Day. We miss them both very much and hope that they have some peace.

We hope that the New Year has brought all of you many blessings already and will continue to do so. We love to hear from you and what is happening in your congregations in Scotland so please keep the emails and letters coming.


With lots of love,
Sandra and Graham