Last weekend I got out of Joburg for my very first South African roadtrip. It was amazing.
Five friends from church piled into a car for a 12-hour drive to a 6000 hectare farm in the Eastern Cape. We spent 2 days riding around in the bed of a pick-up truck, sitting on hay bales with the wind blowing in our hair, catching gorgeous sunsets and sunrises from the hills, and even spending a morning herding over 700 sheep across a field!
We named this sheep Persuasion, and he was awfully cute...
One of the most priceless moments for me was the drive up to the guest house the first night.
Situation: sunset over the African plains. Two of us hopped in the back of the truck for the hour-long drive up a dirt road. Catching a ride with us were 2 children of the local farm workers: a 10 year-old boy and his 6 year-old sister. They spoke primarily Africaans, so as much as we tried to interact with them there wasn't much getting through.
But since, after all, I'm in South Africa to play music with kids, I figured it was worth trying to sing one of the Zulu songs I know to see if they recognized it. With one word -- Jalo! -- their precious little faces lit up and they started singing along to the whole song! It turned out they knew almost all of the same praise songs that the kids at Sparrow Village know, even the ones in English. We spent the rest of the drive laughing and singing every song we could think of with the kids, seeing them smile when we made fools of ourselves singing songs from 'The Lion King' (because when you are driving along the plains at sunset in Africa it is very difficult not to sing 'The Lion King'), watching the sun sink over the horizon and loving the awesomeness of a joy that can overcome any language barrier.
Africa, what a song you write in my heart!
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