Named and shamed in Public

This week was a bit of a shocker to me as I experience the local culture of naming and shaming in public. The week started with the 2 new student librarians reporting for duty which is a big help to me as they will take the library forward once, I leave. The other student librarians just keep on waiting on me to tell them what to do, and this is still a problem for me as I try to get them to work without me having to tell them what to you. A lot of my free time at the start of the week was to look at NGO on the internet, the type of work they do and then if any jobs were available on their websites. I have pretty much accepted and come to realize that I will never work in the secular world as that is not where God wants me to serve him, I am His servant, and He needs me in the field. By Wednesday I asked myself “ what are you doing? Looking for jobs when God has already mapped out your future, from that moment on wards I stopped looking at the website and felt pretty much at ease for the rest of the week, knowing that my future is in God’s hands, I also don’t worry about how many books I put on the system during the week, as I just go in and do the best I can giving 100%, not even the power failures this week could upset me. I start of slowly during the day and then just pick up the workload as the day progress, normally leaving here between 17h30 and 18h30.

On Thursday we had our normal weekly staff meeting and what a meeting it turned out to be, the meeting started around 16h00 and finished just before 19h00, at one stage I thought I was going to miss movie night with the girls as the meeting just dragged on and on, fortunately it finished in time for me to go and enjoy the movie as I certainly needed it after what happened in the meeting. During the meeting one of the 3rd students were brought in to explain charges off plagiarism against him, and then apologize to the staff etc for his behaviour, this took place in Swahili to enable the student to better express himself and this actions, afterwards it was all translated into English for the English speaking staff, just a pity we were not told before the meeting what was going to happen, as it turned out the student is a repeat offender and was therefore suspended with immediate effect from the campus for a full year, he also has to leave the school accommodation with his family by the end of the school term in March, this was the second incident his family was involved in two weeks as just the week before his wife was suspended from the English school for more or less the same thing all be it under different circumstances.

What happened on Friday at chapel however shook most of us. The principal of the school informed the student that he was suspended from the school, this however was not told to the student before chapel started and in fact he heard the news at the same time as the other students, in fact his letter of dismissal was read to him by another student in front of everybody, plagiarism is a problem and I guess the principle used the latest case to make an example of someone. This I have heard seems to the local culture of naming and shaming someone in public. Please remember this family in your prayers as the future does not look good for them. Money as also another issue at the school and most off the staff meeting were spend talking about money.

As the new week starts, please remember me in your prayers, I would like to see this project through to the end and if it is God’s will then I would like to stay or come back next year to finish the work and to ensure that the library run as efficiently as possible before returning to Cape Town. On a later note in chapel this week we were praying for the 3rd year student who are going on term out and the 4th year students who will be assigned churches where they have to pastor, during one of these sessions one of the students asked for prayer for the single pastors, that God would sent them a life partner to share their life with, this caused quite a few chuckles in the room, I am still single…… nuff said.