High School Ministry

For some Tuesdays, my day would include catching the 10 or 11 am Life Orientation (Life Skills) class for grade 8’s in J. G. Zuma High School in Ntuzuma (a township North of the Durban Metropolis). Ntuzuma in itself has a rich background for me ever since I began living in KwaZulu-Natal doing my studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. During the week, the Smart Choices team would go regularly to different school to teach a curriculum to two classes or more in leading a smart and healthy lifestyle. This curriculum encompassed a variety of units/topics importantly those which would educate the teenagers on how to make smart choices regarding several concerns that they unquestionably face.

Besides having to wait in a taxi for more than 30 minutes every time I went to the school, it was a delighting experience for me. My primary focus making my decision to intern was so I could be involved in such school based projects but not only to get there and teach from a textbook, but to lead high school students to Christ. Walking inside that school, I would think of the socio-economic struggles which face these kids and how these push them towards a lifestyle that could ravish them, holding them captive. Drugs! Alcohol! Teenage pregnancy! Peer pressure! Misinformation! Poverty! Low education! Gangs! Violence! That’s the struggle. For them, that’s the struggle they wake up to every morning. Every kid in that classroom has a story, a story that will undoubtedly show you how broken, hurt, disconnected our world is from the Father. That struggle for me transcends into such stories. Image a Coca-cola class bottle, with the base taken off. Take that bottle with no base and turn in upside down. Imagine simultaneously pouring liquids of different colours through it into a bucket (like a funnel). The colour which would come out is totally different to the colour which would go in. That green, red, yellow, white, black, pink, purple, blue liquid going in there represent all these struggles these kids face. That single colour that comes out is definitive for me of the brokenness of those students, of the world.

Those two J. G. Zuma High School classes taught me something. I didn’t teach them for a long period unfortunately but I cannot help but to think there lurked numerous teaching moments for me from them, I the student, them the teacher but I just can’t put a finger on it. It made more aware of the importance of being commissioned by God to reach them. The desire and passion. I saw that in our CrossRoads Staff leader, Mpumi Mthembu, every time she would speak about them, about her class, about her kids, about her bible study.