Ruthann and Jan Hall, the facilitators for the I3L program, archived web site and newsletter items from their time as GlobalMinistries volunteers in KZN 2000 to 2002, which can be accessed at their 'Durban Mission Archive' site.

Their further general newsletters to friends in the US during their 2005 visit to KZN, are archived here.

And their newsletters during their 2006 visit to KZN, are archived below:

1.  Letter from Umhlanga No. 1:  A Celebration of the Children of Ubilanti ... March 14, 2006

2.  Letter from Umhlanga 2006 no. 2:  'Hardships,' Leopards, and Espresso Bars ... May 8, 2006

3.  Letter from Umhlanga 2006 no. 3:  Our Trip to Umzumbe, and Why ... July 6, 2006

NEW:  Their general newsletters to friends in the US during their 2007 visit to KZN, AND report letters and photo galleries provided to participating MaCUCC churches concerning several church visits, are archived here.

1.  Letter from Umhlanga 2006 no. 1:  A Celebration of the Children of Ubilanti ... March 14, 2006

Hello, family far and wide:

We are back in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, traveling here for the sixth time in seven years. We have come here mainly to work to further church-to-church relationships between individual Congregational churches here and those in Massachusetts. We hope to start several additional relationships in early 2006, but over our five months here we’ll also be meeting with the fifteen KZN churches that have already begun these relationships over the past two years, to help enhance their links to their counterparts in Massachusetts.

The airline gives us a four suitcase baggage limit for our trip here and back, and we’ve made a habit of using that space not just for our own clothing needs, but as a means of further communication back and forth between the ‘matched’ churches here and back in Massachusetts. So, on this trip over, about half of that volume was filled with Sunday school children’s pen-pal and other letters, and scrapbooks and photo albums describing the Massachusetts churches, and a number of prayer shawls, a commemorative medallion and a plate, bulletins and newsletters, videos and audio tapes, and other greetings and explanatory items, intended both for the introduction of the to-be-matched churches and to foster the relationships with the already participating Massachusetts churches. This is a wondrous collection of personal items that we know will be appreciated here. We even brought one small stuffed Easter toy along with the letter from one of the Massachusetts pen-pals to her friend in a township near Durban.

We had one very special delivery to make this past Saturday afternoon, which we wanted to tell you about:

Saturday, March 11, 2006 was a bright, warm day in late summer. In the early afternoon, we took a route we are pretty familiar with, driving south from Durban on the N2 superhighway until we crossed the broad estuary of the Illovo River, banked by expansive cane fields feeding the namesake sugar mills. We follow a couple of twists and turns after the exit ramp, and then ten kilometers or so along a dirt road to where there’s a paved road from nowhere but through the Imfume community. This road isn’t finished, but there seemed to be more of it than there’d been on our last visit.

Along this road is an American mission church, the mother church of the Imfume Congregational Church, which is one of the circuits (a single congregation with several spread-out regular worship points) of what is now the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa, in its KwaZulu-Natal Region. We’d first visited this church on Palm Sunday of 2005, and then again a few weeks later, to initiate a connection between the Imfume church and one of the Massachusetts Conference UCC churches. We were back this day as representatives of the Congregational Church of Littleton, to make a special delivery of a gift to their ‘matched’ church at Imfume.

The country around the Imfume church is mainly sugar cane fields scattered with small rondavel houses in the traditional Zulu style, but the mission church sits in a small stand of tall trees. We sought to park in one of the spots shaded by the trees, but the best ones were long taken. We knew there’d been a meeting at the church that morning and now, in early afternoon, as we walked from our car over to the church, we saw a large group of folk, many in the white blouse and cap of Isililo, the UCCSA’s Zulu churches’ women’s group, moving together from the church, past the refreshment tents that were set up behind the church, up towards the new manse (the parsonage) as part of the overall dedicatory activities of this day.

When we’d visited Imfume in 2005, the manse had been on its way to being finished, after an effort of many years. Today, we looked in on this new house just behind the church. It was impressively large, with a substantial and equipped kitchen, a large sitting room, several bedrooms and a large bathroom, a garage (with an automobile in it), and an office for the minister’s use. Finished ceramic tiles were used as flooring throughout. The electricity was on, though the land line telephone wasn’t installed yet, but to come.

The manse, and the funding to provide for the automobile for transport about the circuit, were prerequisites for the circuit to call its own full-time minister. It has been fifteen years since the circuit has had its own minister. During that time they have made do with an acting minister who generally came once a quarter to lead worship and celebrate communion. Saturday was a day for celebration indeed!

We had come to Imfume this afternoon to attend the special service for the installation of Rev. Psycology Lindokuhle Perfect Gumede as the minister of the Imfume Circuit. Rev. Gumede was one of a group of seven newly-ordained ministers of the UCCSA who were being installed in their churches over the past several months since their collective ordination back in November. This was a tremendous step forward for the denomination in KZN. When we first came to know them they’d had 65 congregations (and 275 or so churches within those congregations) served by 27 ministers. There hadn’t been many new ministers, especially in the Zulu churches, over the past couple of decades, and the need for ministers was acute. So this day at Imfume was part of a joyous succession of such installation days through which a new and vibrant phase in these churches is anticipated, as a new, young group of ministers begins their service.

Mandla Msweli, a leader in the Imfume church who’s been serving as a main contact point for the Littleton relationship, told us how they see the joinder of the minister and the congregation as if it were a wedding, a covenant and commitment for a long time. And the ‘wedding’ theme was an interesting note – it was seen in the white suit with a flower spray in the lapel that Psycology was wearing from the morning’s events, and in the decorations in the church itself, with the white-and-powder-blue (the UCCSA colors) cloth forming an arch at the front of the main aisle of the church, and a type of bunting spread about the area holding the pulpit, altar and lectern. Near a table at which the new minister and his wife sat during the service, there was a small self-circulating waterfall and pool placement, which gurgled throughout.

Psycology’s wife, Zanele, was dressed in her Isililo uniform, but with a special cape draped over her shoulders. This, we’ve learned, is indicative that she is a minister’s wife. We know that this makes her in effect the ‘mother of the church,’ and much is expected of her in the running of its affairs, and especially in regard to the activities of Isililo.

Sometime after the designated 2:00 p.m. starting time, but not inordinately so in our experience here, we were asked to join in the procession into the church for the installation service. This is the Region’s affair, so the service is led by its Moderator and Chairman, and other officers and ministers from around the Region participate. There are also representatives of other churches, and of the Regional bodies of the Isililo women’s and Amabutho (substantially) men’s groups, and of their respective younger affiliate groups; and friends of the family and of the minister’s home church. Many of the officials from churches and groups are in the procession as well.

The denomination in KZN has white and Coloured churches as well as Zulu ones, but on this occasion it was an all-Zulu affair, led by Rev. Armstrong Makhanya of the Umlazi-Lamont Circuit, the presiding minister for the day in his role as Chairman of the KZN Region, and by Rev. B.R. Dlamini of the Inanda Circuit, the Moderator of the Region, who was the day’s preacher. They and others came in their black ministerial robes and the red stoles with various versions of the UCCSA’s dove and cross logo prominent. We were the only non-Zulu faces in evidence this day.

The installation portion of the service followed a liturgy prepared by the Region, and was largely in English. But the music was in Zulu, and there was tremendous and vibrant congregational singing of hymns and choruses. There was a formal choir, which somewhat unusually wore robes for the occasion. But the real action was when the congregation got going. We recalled that Imfume has the reputation as the best-singing of the KZN churches, and even on this day when the Imfume congregants didn’t make up most of the assembly inside the church, they were much in evidence when it was time to sing, and the music here was assured, and forceful, and soared with joy and purpose. It was truly wonderful.

We had made arrangements with the Region’s officers to allow us to make a brief presentation on behalf of the Littleton church, as part of the service. Our time came after the formal installation, and before the latter, mainly Zulu language, portion of the service which included Holy Communion and the sermon. So we came next after Rev. Armstrong Makhanya, having led Psycology and the congregation through the liturgy emphasizing the minister’s role and the relationship between the congregation, and the minister, and broader church, pronounced Rev. Gumede, under the authority of the KZN Regional Council of the UCCSA, to be installed as the minister of the Imfume Congregational Church.

But we were not asked to rise to speak until a couple of points were emphasized by Rev. Makhanya – that our speaking at this time was an unusual circumstance, a special dispensation, and not one that anyone should assume was granted lightly (in other words, that the fact that we were getting to speak even though we weren’t included in the printed program, was not going to open the floodgates at this or other installation services! … though on this day, what seems to have been a similar request for a presentation from the nkhosi, the chief or local traditional leader, was to be honored as well); and second, which was emphasized several times, we had promised to be brief.

So we stood to address the gathering, and brought greetings from the more than 400 churches of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ -- Congregational churches of Massachusetts – 15 of whom were now building direct one-to-one relationships with churches of the UCCSA in KZN. We explained that we were back in KZN this year in order to work on beginning more of those relationships, but also to visit and work with the already participating churches here.

The people at Imfume would know that theirs is one of those 15 KZN churches, and that their relationship is with the Congregational Church of Littleton. And it was at the request of the Littleton church that we’d come to Imfume this day, to make a special presentation on their behalf on the occasion of Rev. Gumede’s installation.

Before making the presentation, we needed to provide some background. The Imfume members would recall, but others in attendance might not know, that the ‘match’ between Imfume and Littleton is a special one also because of a particular shared history. The founding minister of the Littleton church in 1840 was James Bryant, who left there after a few years to join the American Board’s mission to the Zulus. And in 1849, it was James Bryant who was the founding minister when a church was formed at Imfume; a short while later, he died. Rev. Bryant had written home to America that his parishioners here called him ‘Ubilanti.’ And we have taken to referring to the people of the Littleton church, and the people of the Imfume church, together as the ‘children of Ubilanti.’

So, when they learned of the installation this day, and that we would be back in KZN in time to attend, the Littleton church sent with us two very special items which we wished to present on their behalf. The first was a card of greeting, to Rev. Gumede and the Imfume congregation from the Littleton church, signed with special notes by a number of the Littleton members and including appreciation of your growing relationship, and closing with a reference to this being from the other ‘children of Ubilanti.’ This card we gave to Rev. and Mrs. Gumede, but with the hope that it could be seen and read by others in the Imfume congregation later.

The Littleton church had also sent with us a beautiful hand-made stole, which Ruthann unpackaged and displayed. There were murmurs and applause of appreciation from the assembly. We mentioned the dedicatory language inked on the reverse of the stole, including especially the note about ‘Children of Ubilanti’. Ruthann and Zanele helped Psycology remove the red UCCSA stole he’d been wearing through the service, and to don the new stole from Littleton. And Jan read the enclosed dedicatory note from Vern Swett, the senior minister, Gail Wright, the associate minister, and Debra LeBrun, the minister of music, and on behalf of the Littleton church, which explained that the stole had been made by a woman in Massachusetts and purchased at the bookstore at what is now called Andover-Newton Seminary, where James Bryant had trained ‘before he became our minister, and then became your minister.’

Upon hearing this additional significance of the stole, there was an even louder murmured ‘aah’ of approval. And then, as the closing portion of the note was read expressing the hope that as the stole was worn in the service of the Imfume church, it would constitute a reminder of the connection to the Littleton church and as a symbol of their common bond as ‘Children of Ubilanti,’ there was general applause and laughter. It was great fun to be part of this.

Rev. Makhanya was most gracious as he re-claimed direction of the service, explaining the ongoing effort to form church-to-church connections through the “Ibandla lami linge lakho / My church is your church” program in more detail than we’d sought to do under our time limitation.

The local nKhosi gave a brief speech and presented a quilt or duvet. In our experience there seems to be a tendency for these items to be given on hot days, and then the recipients, here Psycology and Zanele, have to wrap themselves up in it to demonstrate!

The service moved on to a communion service. We want especially to note that at this, the first communion officiated by Psycology Gumede as the new minister of the Imfume church, he wore the stole that had just been presented on behalf of the Littleton church. That was a special moment indeed.

After the long in the absolute but relatively brief charge-sermon, in Zulu, from B.R. Dlamini, the service concluded. We recessed with the ministerial and officialdom group. We then had to take our leave, to return to Durban in preparation for our next day when we were to travel to another church at Impaphala in southern Zululand. We couldn’t stay for the meal which was on offer in the tents.

But it was a very good day, a special opportunity to feel a crossing of a bridge between church friends who, while a third of the way around the world from each other, and experiencing opposite seasons, yet are remembering that they are family, and are forging a relationship which speaks of the oneness of the church and of God’s world.

Our thanks and congratulations to all of the Children of Ubilanti, and our greetings and best wishes to you all from KwaZulu-Natal! -- Ruthann and Jan.
 

2.  Letter from Umhlanga 2006 no. 2:  'Hardships,' leopards and espresso bars... May 8, 2006

Hello, family far and wide:

We have come here to South Africa, to KwaZulu-Natal, for all or part of six out of the past seven years, so have begun to be reminded of earlier experiences as present events unfold. It is as close to feeling like old missionary hands, as we may allow ourselves.

A few days ago, the never very sealed windows of the half-cottage we rent in Umhlanga (north of Durban just a bit) were shaking with the high wind, a reminder that the Indian Ocean is only a short ride down the hill. We can see the water, when looking out the front of the cottage, through the roofs of the places near around us, and can see the large cargo ships at anchor lined up waiting for their turns to enter the shipping harbor not quite 10 miles south of here. It wouldn’t have been much fun out there, these days; even a large ship would have been buffeted a bit by these winds, white caps showing. But the point was that this reminded us of something.

Our first year of coming here, when we arrived as volunteers with Global Ministries, we’d come with no prior information about where we might be staying, and indeed at whose expense, which made it quite a pleasant surprise, when we got to Durban, that the Technikon where we were to work was providing housing. That was an apartment on the beachfront in Durban, right downtown, across the street and just steps away from the wonderful promenade of the ‘Golden Mile.’ A bit further up the beach were the tourist hotels that gave us the first impression that we’d come to South Africa’s version of Miami Beach. So there we were, six floors up and across the street from the ocean, and when the winds started coming, you felt them, with glass shaking and doors rattling, and in the mornings little dunes of sand on the sills and in the corners of the doors like the opening scene of some movie about a Pharaoh’s tomb. Well, anyway …

The winds signal the coming of winter, and remind us that we’re about half way through this year’s visit.

We haven’t written one of these ‘general’ letters for some weeks, but it’s been rather on the busy side. We wrote you in the middle of our first month here, just after we’d been to Imfume for the minister’s installation, bearing the gift stole from the Massachusetts church. This took place in the middle of our run of consecutive ‘preach and present’ sessions with KZN churches looking to commence relationships with Massachusetts churches, the effort we’re here again to work on.

In the time since we arrived the first part of March, we’ve been to visit a number of churches and church people here in the province. For the geographically and historically inclined, we can mention that from our base here in greater Durban – Ethekwini, as it is officially, now – we have traveled north of the Tugela River, and hence into Zululand proper, on five occasions; south of the Illovo River four times; beyond the Thousand Hills to Pietermaritzburg and the Midlands twice; and around the center and outskirts of metropolitan Durban to the north and south and west more times than we can count. We’re flirting with the kilometer-age allowance provided by our rental car agreement.

We enjoy the opportunities to visit the churches and meet the church people here, but it was good to get a break, just before Easter, to take a couple of days off for a run up to the Drakensberg Mountains – uKhahlamba – for some hiking and clear mountain air. Those incredible peaks and plateaus are probably our favorite place in KZN. We discovered them as an escape from the city, when we were living downtown the first year here, but it is the place itself that draws us back. We try to get back there as often as we can, while we’re here. The sense of the place is not quite of endless plains in the Serengeti wildlife video or Russian steppes sense, but it does have a sense of vastness, of the big sky, akin to what one can get in the American mountain west; but it is very much Africa that one feels, that and the expanse of mountain, and plain below, and sky above, that are so very different from the tamer and busier places down by the coast and the big city.

We have five new relationships underway between KZN and Massachusetts churches of the Congregational tradition, with some more under consideration and to be explored over the rest of our time here. These new relationships, and contacts regarding the fifteen earlier established linkages, have kept us quite busy and, as we noted, on the road over the weeks here.

But we’ll be taking a bit of a break from this sort of activity over the next little while, as we shift into ‘tour guide mode,’ with the anticipated arrival in a few days’ time of the first of our American visitors for this year. We’ll go along with them for a game viewing safari in the big reserve up at Hluhluwe, and for a short jaunt up to the Royal Natal park, in the northern Drakensberg. And we’ll have the fun of negotiating for the couple of days here at the cottage, how the four of us will share the single bathroom. So there’ll be much excitement.

Worrying about our car rental kilometer allowances and the usage precedence of modern plumbing facilities are part of the ‘hardship’ of our volunteer missionary life here. Oh, and whether the satellite dish at the cottage is aimed correctly. As you read this e-mailed account, it does all rather pale by comparison to the first American missionaries here, a century and two-thirds ago, when they got around by ox cart without roads, and could reasonably depend upon it taking no more than six months, or maybe a bit more, to send and receive the response to a letter back home. But we seek inspiration from their resilience and perseverance …

And we do experience wonder and frequent surprise at not so much the strangeness of some of the things we experience here, but the variety of things that are very much the same, and things that are ever so different, from what we’d anticipate were we back in Massachusetts. Many of you – especially if you’ve heard us give our presentation about the church-to-church connection effort,– may recall a story we tell which we use to illustrate the answer to the question ‘how different are things there?’ This is a story with a number of punch lines, including our realization that ‘we’re not in Massachusetts anymore’. We have had a number of moments when that sort of reaction is followed with breathtaking speed by the impression that maybe we are in the same sort of place after all. And just to show that the ‘déjà vu’ theme of this letter does have some relevance to what we wanted to tell you, we wanted to relate another such moment:

In the effort to initiate direct relationships between KZN and Massachusetts churches, we have been going to worship with, and preach and present to, a number of the KZN churches, and to ‘kick off’ the relationships we try to meet again with the designated ‘contact persons’ in the KZN church before they and the American church’s ‘contact persons’ begin to talk directly. In these encounters, we are very much reminded that there is considerable variation in the circumstances of the churches and the people here.

Just after Easter, we had a set of these ‘on the one hand / on the other hand’ experiences, once more.

So, on the one hand: We attended Sunday services at a church to the south, across the Illovo and inland a fair distance. It is the inland part of that that suggests a very rural environment, one of the original American Board mission stations in the old Natal colony, the church sitting by a gravel road running through ‘glebe’ land (granted by the colonial administration to the missionaries, usually within larger ‘native locations’ – reservations, in effect) with extensive commercial sugar cane and tree farming operations as far as the eye can see. The church is one of the mid-1800’s mission churches, a very nice but spare building with some leaks in the roof. We had agreed in advance with the minister that, as we try to do when we visit the churches here, we’d be showing a video to show what the some of the Massachusetts churches are like. We bring the TV and video playing capacity with us. That would be fine.

But, when we get there, it turns out there is no electricity in the church. We usually bring along an extension cord, and this day something had led us to bring two cords. The deacons rounded up a third cord, and the video was viewed as part of the service, once the cords were strung up behind the pulpit, out through a window, across a small yard, through an unoccupied building next door and out its back window, through some bushes past the nearest power pole and into a neighbor’s house, perhaps 250 feet in all. Well, it’s not the worst or strangest event, but it’s indicative.

But, on the other hand: The day prior to this, we’d been holding a ‘contact persons’ meeting at one of the churches to the north, across the Tugela but along the coast and near to the other major port city in the province so perhaps we should have been ready for our counter-lesson. As part of the introductions of the churches to each other, we caution against the assumption that e-mail will necessarily be available to most parishioners here – it’s not. The particular church that we were visiting is a bit unusual in that it has quite a few folks with such capacity; the group we were addressing nodded. But, of course, the day-to-day use of e-mail wasn’t so big a part of the lives of folks here, even when they have it; more nods. So the American churches should take this into account, as they begin and seek to enhance their contacts and relationships with folks in the KZN church; and we are be-nodded some more.

During this discourse, one of the ladies present had been fiddling with her cell phone. (Cell phones don’t count any more, here, as signs of ‘western-ness,’ since just about everyone has one; there’s even an advertisement that we’ve seen in past trips, that centers on a panhandler’s cell phone ringing to interrupt his asking a motorist for money at an intersection, which is funny because it’s plausible. Land line telephones are another matter …) Anyway, she interrupted to show her phone, turning it around to display the name, address, and number of the Massachusetts church with which they were beginning a relationship. Well, we were quite impressed, she’d already entered the ‘sister’ church into her cell phone’s address book.

No, no, we didn’t understand: She’d used her phone to surf the internet over to the Massachusetts church’s internet web site. Here, see, we can look at the driving directions to their church!

Well, okay …

And so it continues, and we send you greetings from this land of “leopards in the woods and espresso bars in the shopping malls.’  Stay well.  -- Jan and Ruthann.
 

3.  Letter from Umhlanga 2006 no. 3:  Our Trip to Umzumbe, and Why... July 6, 2006

Hello, family far and wide:

It has been some weeks since we last sent one of these 'letters from Umhlanga,' and it is only a matter of weeks until our time in South Africa for this year will come to an end. Experience tells us that the less than four weeks until our departure will be a pretty frantic time with the 'Ibandla lami linge lakho / My church is your church' church-to-church connection effort, as we wrap up our five months in KZN for this year. This time will involve further visits with the participating churches here -- whether for worship or a briefer visit -- as well as a meeting for an initial discussion with the leadership of two newly interested churches south of the city, and one substantial 'road trip' for a last, for this year, 'preach and present' session with the congregation of a new prospective church here. That trip will take us deeper into Zululand than we've been before, so we're especially looking forward to that.

But it's also a good time to reflect a bit on the time here, and to share a memory that we think we will treasure for a long time:

A few weeks back, we traveled to Umzumbe, down on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, to the old Mission church there, to pick up some pen pal letters for dispatch to their 'matched' church at Athol, Massachusetts. Okay, this trip was probably not necessary in any direct sense, but it is a nice if longish drive, and we do like to seize such opportunities to remove smaller barriers to the relationships between the churches.

We had made arrangements for this visit when on an earlier trip to Umzumbe we had met with Claudia Cele, the Sunday school teacher at this church. On that earlier visit, Claudia had been in deep mourning for the death of her son in a car accident. We talked with her then about the possibility that as she began again her work with the Sunday school, as she emerged from her mourning period, she might help to get the Umzumbe Sunday school kids to write letters in response to letters they'd received from the Athol kids. We promised we would come back down to pick up the letters. Okay, Claudia could send them airmail as well, but our offer seemed helpful. And we do want to take these chances to see, and encourage, the 'i3L' participants when we can, whether in Massachusetts or in KZN.

When the day for the pick-up arrived, it was a beautiful day, not cloudless exactly but nice and bright, a little cool as autumn was certainly here. It takes perhaps 1-3/4 hours to get to Umzumbe from Umhlanga, given time for a quick 'pit stop' at the last One-Stop petrol (gas) service plaza on the N2 [interstate-like] highway southward. Umzumbe is 30 km or so inland off this major highway, most of this on a dirt road. This off-tarmac portion of the trip is pretty long, we forget how long sometimes. It’s really beautiful country, poor but not destitute, with the hills framing the Umzumbe Valley lovely in the distance, and the river and the broad valley down below you, as the road follows the ridges.

Our drive up the dirt road was highlighted by following and being chased by a bus – an actual route bus, rather than the mini-taxis that one usually sees. And as we approached the church, and hence the old Morrisons general store, we were following a Coca-Cola delivery truck, a large one. That allowed us a moment of discussion on the oddities of globalization.

When we got to the Umzumbe Mission, the gate for the rutted driveway up the little hill to the church building was unlocked, and a small red car was parked at the bottom of the drive. The car seemed familiar, and it turned out to be Claudia’s. She was waiting for us, having come for her afternoon runs that she performs to ferry 17 small children, she tells us, to and from a creche (day care center) and a primary school which is located up there next to the church. Claudia explained her concern that the main road through the valley, which per usual serves as a highway and a sidewalk and a cattle or goat herding venue, all at once, is very busy and dangerous for the kids, in the morning especially. There are cars on the road, yes, but more so the always rushing mini-taxis, and also the large route buses including one that leaves at 5 a.m. and comes back at 7 p.m. with workers who commute to, for instance, the nearest city of Port Shepstone. We commented on the mid-day bus we’d followed on our journey in. And we mentioned the Coca-Cola truck; ‘we have those at home,’ we told her – she laughed at that.

There were many green-uniformed little primary school kids swarming about on the driveway throughout our brief, quarter hour or so, visit with Claudia outside the church building. Jan took some photos of them, with the turn-the-digital-camera-around-to-see-their-photo-on-the-LCD technique that is such a hit with kids. (A small file version of a photo of these kids is attached to this e-mail. )

Claudia was waiting at the church with a gentleman who’s a member of the church, who was working with a weed whacker to spruce up the area around the church, which had gotten a bit scruffy. But the flowers along the up side of the church were very nice, blooming yellow and such, and tended.

Claudia was dressed in a sort of black tunic and scarf, a variation on, but less severe than, the mourning garb we’d seen her in a few weeks back. She seemed to look much better, less drawn; she smiled readily, but with a sadness still in her eyes. We talked with her a while, telling her how we understood it had been a bad time for her, but we were glad to see her smiling a bit, now again; and she smiled. (A small file version of a photo of Claudia and Ruthann outside the Umzumbe church, with the river and valley beyond, is attached to this e-mail. )

We received from her two envelopes, one with over a dozen letters from Umzumbe kids to Athol ones, all but two or three identified as responses to named recipients. The other was a letter and a thank you card with a photo of the Sunday school kids, from Claudia to Judy Wirth, the contact at the Athol church. We promised to get all of these right off to the US. It’s nice that this manner of linking these churches has taken hold.

These are simple things, these openings of people of the churches to each other. But the worth of all of this was highlighted to us as we were about to leave. We had been exchanging thanks for involvement in this whole thing, with Claudia noting that we’d come a far way to pick up the letters, and so on. But as we were turning towards our car to load up to go, maybe she was following on the discussion she'd been having with Ruthann still -- Claudia said, softly, talking about the appreciation she felt for the connection effort, and such, that ‘it makes us feel like people.’ In those words is vindication enough for what the relationship churches have been trying to do, and a validation of the effort that many people have been putting into these connections.

This was said within just a few feet of where Rev. P.S. Dlamini, who died last August, had stood a year earlier when he'd explained his interest in the Umzumbe church's participation in a relationship with an American church, because (he said) it would be a chance to connect that church and its people with those far away, but in which perhaps for the first time 'you will truly see us' -- not their different-ness, not their problems, but the people themselves. Would that all the people involved in the i3L connections between churches at home and here on the edge of Africa would experience for themselves, and believe, how significant these small things, these relationships, really are and can be. A new thing, indeed, and a good thing.

As we left the area near the Umzumbe Mission church, and drove down to the one-lane bridge over the Umzumbe River, to begin our climb back along the ridge towards the sea, we passed another, yet larger, Coca-Cola delivery truck. Whatever that might mean.

It was a happy ride back to Durban.

This will be our last scheduled 'letter from Umhlanga' for this trip. Our best wishes to you all. Salani kahle -- stay well!  -- Ruthann and Jan.
 

Page updated: August 22, 2006.