Today, for the second time, I read the Bible with one of the male group leaders. I liked doing this a lot, I want to find a person or group that I can do this with at college. It helps to get someone else's opinion and views and knowledge and experience on a particular passage. As an added bonus, if you've committed to meet someone to study the Bible, you can't postpone or neglect it.
After this, I went with the Boston group to the Mamelodi campus again. While there myself and another girl talked to a security guard about her faith, and tried to witness to her. The testimony she gave was a testament to how powerful and gripping spiritualism and ancestor worship is in Africa. I won't go into the details here, but some of her beliefs were unerving, if not downright creepy. There were some students at the campus, but not many. In fact, next year it will be shut down or used only for science classes as an extension of the Praetoria campus. For these reasons, and because the students' schedules have minimal free time, we decided to focus much of our efforts at the main University of Praetoria campus. We drove there in the afternoon.
The main campus was intimidating; it was huge and packed with people. Here's a photo of one of the quieter parts of the quad, and the admin building:
At the campus we talked with a couple groups of people and tried to "decode" the campus. This involved learning where students hung out; what the religious atmosphere was like; how students liked their school; etc. The conversations we had were good, and with some groups we discussed heavy religious issues. I was amazed, however at the amount of racial separation there was. Particular parts of the quad were almost exclusively black or white; some of the students pointed out to us which sections the races generally occupied. It was rare to see a group of blacks and whites together. Nevertheless, there was no awkwardness for us to approach a black group; so the separation seemed passive and almost a matter of habit more than anything else. Hopefully this will change over time as the apartheid-era mindset expires.
