The lights are going out all over
Went to Mamelodi for the Hours and Reader's service, but first went in the opposite direction into town to the taxi rank because we were expecting some people from Soshanguve to come, but no one had. On the way we stopped for Mary Nthite, who was walking down the road with a little girl of about 6 or 7, whom we had not seen before; a grandchild, presumably.
We arrived at the Zakhele Primary School just after 9:00, when the service was supposed to start. Only old Alinah Malahlela was there, and explained that her daughter Grace had gone to Pholokwane to see her mother, and her granddaughter Hellen had gone to Cape Town on a school trip. She had arranged the chairs and desks in the classroom for the service, but there were no cloths, no ikons. We were expecting Audrey Barei, the bishop's secretary, and waited a while, but there was no sign of her. At 9:30 we decided to start, with just the five of us, and had got through the first Trisagion prayers when Johannah and Thabitha Malahlela, our teenagers, arrived with the cloths and the ikons. They draped the cloths over a desk at the back of the classroom (the east side), set the ikons on them, and began reading the psalms for the third hour. And so we were seven, going through the hours and Obednitsa on the first Sunday of Great Lent.
At the end Johannah and Thabitha began singing "Holy God" as people came to venerate the ikons, but I handed them the ikons instead, and we went in procession round the school yard, all seven of us, singing "Holy God, holy Mighty" in Northern Sotho, under the curious gaze of Zionists and others waiting for services in the other classrooms.
Back in the classroom I tried to teach about the meaning of ikons and how central they were to Orthodoxy, and Audrey Barei arrived, brought by John Madisu, the driver of the High Commissioner of Cyprus. They were too late for the service and catechising, but joined in the singing practice for our visit to Soshanguve next Sunday.
Then we went home, bought the Sunday paper and a large box of chips for lunch from the Casbah roadhouse -- our standard Sunday lenten fare.
The newspaper had a 12-page supplement, a souvenir of the US-Iraqi war. It was a bit like the ones the British press brought out after the relief of Mafeking during the Anglo-Boer War over a century ago. I brought it home and read it, in the hope that it would help me to understand the issues, because I still have no idea why US President George Bush seems so determined to go to war for such unconvincing reasons. And the more I read, the more it seemed like deja vu, going back 100 years or more to when Alfred Lord Milner was trying to browbeat President Paul Kruger into submitting to the imperial might of Britain, and surrender control of his country and its mineral wealth.
I read in a newsgroup an alarmist message from someone that this was the last weekend on earth. Exaggerated, no doubt, but perhaps next weekend we will live in a very different world. And that fast-forwards me to another war, "The lights are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our generation." And that war too has features of this -- Bethman-Hollweg, however, at least had doubts but his war machine was driven by railway timetables, and once mobilisation had started, it could not be stopped. And in the supplement there is a cartoon of the US war machine, bristling with the latest technology - smart bombs, cluster bombs, stealth bombers and all the rest - the only thing they forgot were the brakes. And the headline asks, "How did it come to this?" But after reading through 12 pages, they still could not tell me.
The other big news was the sacking of Shaun Pollock as South Africa's cricket captain after the disastrous performance in the World Cup, and his replacement by Graeme Smith, who is one of the youngest in the team, and wasn't even in the World Cup squad until Jonty Rhodes was injured. So everyone is asking, why him? But that is a much simpler question to answer than the other one - why Iraq?
We arrived at the Zakhele Primary School just after 9:00, when the service was supposed to start. Only old Alinah Malahlela was there, and explained that her daughter Grace had gone to Pholokwane to see her mother, and her granddaughter Hellen had gone to Cape Town on a school trip. She had arranged the chairs and desks in the classroom for the service, but there were no cloths, no ikons. We were expecting Audrey Barei, the bishop's secretary, and waited a while, but there was no sign of her. At 9:30 we decided to start, with just the five of us, and had got through the first Trisagion prayers when Johannah and Thabitha Malahlela, our teenagers, arrived with the cloths and the ikons. They draped the cloths over a desk at the back of the classroom (the east side), set the ikons on them, and began reading the psalms for the third hour. And so we were seven, going through the hours and Obednitsa on the first Sunday of Great Lent.
At the end Johannah and Thabitha began singing "Holy God" as people came to venerate the ikons, but I handed them the ikons instead, and we went in procession round the school yard, all seven of us, singing "Holy God, holy Mighty" in Northern Sotho, under the curious gaze of Zionists and others waiting for services in the other classrooms.
Back in the classroom I tried to teach about the meaning of ikons and how central they were to Orthodoxy, and Audrey Barei arrived, brought by John Madisu, the driver of the High Commissioner of Cyprus. They were too late for the service and catechising, but joined in the singing practice for our visit to Soshanguve next Sunday.
Then we went home, bought the Sunday paper and a large box of chips for lunch from the Casbah roadhouse -- our standard Sunday lenten fare.
The newspaper had a 12-page supplement, a souvenir of the US-Iraqi war. It was a bit like the ones the British press brought out after the relief of Mafeking during the Anglo-Boer War over a century ago. I brought it home and read it, in the hope that it would help me to understand the issues, because I still have no idea why US President George Bush seems so determined to go to war for such unconvincing reasons. And the more I read, the more it seemed like deja vu, going back 100 years or more to when Alfred Lord Milner was trying to browbeat President Paul Kruger into submitting to the imperial might of Britain, and surrender control of his country and its mineral wealth.
I read in a newsgroup an alarmist message from someone that this was the last weekend on earth. Exaggerated, no doubt, but perhaps next weekend we will live in a very different world. And that fast-forwards me to another war, "The lights are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our generation." And that war too has features of this -- Bethman-Hollweg, however, at least had doubts but his war machine was driven by railway timetables, and once mobilisation had started, it could not be stopped. And in the supplement there is a cartoon of the US war machine, bristling with the latest technology - smart bombs, cluster bombs, stealth bombers and all the rest - the only thing they forgot were the brakes. And the headline asks, "How did it come to this?" But after reading through 12 pages, they still could not tell me.
The other big news was the sacking of Shaun Pollock as South Africa's cricket captain after the disastrous performance in the World Cup, and his replacement by Graeme Smith, who is one of the youngest in the team, and wasn't even in the World Cup squad until Jonty Rhodes was injured. So everyone is asking, why him? But that is a much simpler question to answer than the other one - why Iraq?