The Pub

This is Lincoln. Last night was an interesting night. We had our evening sunday church service. After church I had to take the youth pastor, Martin, home because he had borrowed the Suburban and I needed it today to carry construction material. Martin had a truck load full of youth that we had to drop off at their houses. He just had his first youth service last Friday night. Two of the young people came to church sunday morning, and 8 of them came to church sunday night. The amazing thing that I learned as we drove last night was that none of those youth have families in the church. Martin, who is 24, does school outreaches called "music against drugs" where he goes into the schools and speaks. Through his outreaches he has connected with teengagers. At his first youth service he had 24 young people. I thought that was pretty amazing. I can tell great things are going to happen in the youth group. It was kind of scary driving around Rustenburg at night. Mainly because I had heard from so many people stateside that you don't go out at night, and if you do, you use extreme caution. The people here don't seem to have that same fear. As we were driving around town dropping all the youth off we were going into some not so nice neighborhoods. I saw a lot of the makeshift taverns that I had heard about. They are these little shanty buildings on the side of the road and in neighborhoods, where people congregate to buy alcohol, and probably many other unsavory things. Everywhere we went there were groups of young men just hanging out on the street corners, looking like they were up to no good. Martin had to drop off some bibles at the house of a teenager that hadn't come to church that night and he left me in the car. It was a little scary being the only white guy in that neighborhood, but he came back and I survived. There was a little building across the street from where we were that had music pumping out. Martin told me that it is the most popular "pub" in town. After he explained it to me, it is basically a dance night club. It is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Martin tells me that at 2 in the morning all days of the week, the streets will be lined with cars. All around outside children were playing in the streets. You could tell, and Martin confirmed this, that the children were drunk. The kids as young as probably 8 or 9 go to the pub and are sold alcohol. That image really disturbed me as I tried to go to sleep last night. It's so sad to see kids so young being destroyed like that. It really made me realize how important the job of the youth and children's pastors are here. This was actually a good experience for me. We are kind of in a protected bubble here on the shelter property. It was good to get out and see the need that is out there. Pray for the children of South Africa. Pray for our youth pastor Martin, and our children's pastors, Adrian and Vanessa.