The Day I was Ruined!

Cape Town is a beautiful city. It is really not that different than a city in the States. The Waterfront in Cape Town is a beautiful attraction with nice restaurants, lots of stores, ice cream, sailing excursions, outdoor concerts and shows, and the lone musician here and there blessing the air and nearby ears with a wonderful melody. It reminds me of Baltimore’s waterfront. They both even have aquariums.

Surrounding the city is a scattering of beautiful little towns with nice suburban houses complete with pools and wrap around decks to over look the beautiful beaches. The towns have small tourist shops, nice restaurants, surf schools, and scenic drives. However scattered in-between these small towns are the poor townships. These townships tend to be separated by race, either black or colored. There are 3 main races; black (native African), white (from Europe), and colored (mix of white and black). You don’t find many white people in most of these townships. The townships usually consist of several thousand inhabitants; some can be up to 12,000. Each township is a little bit different. Some are worse than others. A better name for these townships would be “Shanty towns”. Most of the houses are a conglomerate of concrete, tin, and wire. They look like a field of forts that would be a 5th graders only club house. But they are houses that families live in, sometimes families of 10 or 12 in a little house. There is also a scattering of converted shipping containers turned into a hair salon or a home for 6+. Every township is full of alcohol, drugs, broken families, gangs, starvation, HIV, etc. They are hurting townships.

We have only visited 4 or 5 of these townships, but there are many more. Most of them are next to or are surrounded by a nice neighborhood. They only thing that separates the two neighborhoods is a wall. The only thing that separates poverty and wealth is a wall. The only thing that separates starvation and too much food is a wall. It is like people didn’t want to look at these ugly shanty towns so they put up a wall and forgot about them.

I had a conversation with one of the local people here in Cape Town. He's a younger Christian guy just out of college. He was saying that even a lot of Christian Churches here on the Cape have this build a wall and forget it syndrome. We were talking about how people can live like this and not feel guilty. He said that he thinks people need to step into these communities and have their hearts broken. He called it being ruined. With broken hearts then people will begin to see these hurting communities and feel compelled to have compassion and love for those who are on the other side of the wall. Then they might just start to take action to do something about it and make it part of their lifestyle to give back to these hurting communities.

I prayed for our team to be ruined. I prayed for our team’s hearts to be broken and for them to be compelled to have compassion and love for these hurting communities. And I prayed for our team to develop a lifestyle of giving back and loving those in need.

It is happening. Our team is being ruined. They want to spend all day with the kids. They want to help kids pay for cloths and school dues. They want to take kids home with them. They want to do so much. This is the first step.

Please pray for our team as we begin to process and talk more about how we will develop lifestyles of loving, caring, and giving back to those in need around us.

- Captin Ryan