It was an interesting day today. I (Dan) was up all night with a stomach bug... my first bout with sickness in the three years I have been here. But the team rallied and we were out the door by 8:45, heading for the Church Planting School in our A-Team van. Elizabeth gave the first talk to the church planters about abstinence. She did an amazing job, rousing the best discussion that we have had thus far. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with this intake of church planters...it is the best group that I've experienced so far. They are passionate about HIV/AIDS and seem to have a lot of wisdom to relate to it. It is constantly giving me more and more hope for the future leadership in Africa (which has been such a plaguing problem for the last 60 years on this continent). After tea time (10:30), I talked about abstinence (particularly in respect to men) and then we got into a pretty intense discussion about judgmental attitudes, their origins, and the damage that they inflict on the church and in relationships.
After this teaching session, our team was pretty spent. As we arrived at Kantanshi High, we all just looked into each other's tired eyes and realized that we needed to pray. It seems we have already hit that place where we are tapped out of our own strength. So we took a seat under this beautiful African canopy tree in the courtyard and asked God for strength, for confidence, and for Him to show up. Then we went in and began to dance to our accompanying African choir. As we were doing our opening skit, a lot of the students (the 11th and 12th graders) began to leave because lunch break was over and we were supposed to be working with the 10th graders today. It has definitely been a constant frustration because they will begin to exit as our talks are beginning to start (please pray for us about this!). Once they were all cleared out, it went really well as Stef and Elizabeth delivered some solid talks. Then we had a dance contest that really showed our whiteness in pure embarrassment. I got out on stage and commenced in using the 5 worst and most botched dance moves Zambians have ever seen. It was purely pitiful. Then Stefanie got out there and everything was going okay until about 3 minutes in when she started doing these frightful hippy dances and our whole team was rolling (literally) on the ground. It was really good for us to laugh...laughter has not been sparse among the team and has served as therapy for all of us. Elizabeth danced next and she brought a shred of dignity to the "mazungus" (white people) with dance moves that were actually dance moves.
From there we split up into guys and girls to talk about standards and abstinence. The guys group went really well. We had a handful of the 8th and 9th graders from the day before, but we had a good group of 10th graders as well. Both talks went well and I think it is really challenging them to think about how they look at women. It has been really good to break the silence about these guys' struggle with masturbation and pornography. I get the feeling that these are topics that are very taboo in Africa, but are things that all Zambian youth struggle with (similar to American youth). We are challenging them to stop looking for girlfriends and start looking for wives... to stop just messing around and start treating the girls as sisters, rather than just something to use for their pleasure. Afterwards this group of guys approached and had some really good questions. God continues to work here... He continues to be faithful to a group of Americans who are in over our head. I guess that makes sense... God tends to never use those who garner their own strength... praise God!
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