From darkness into light

Good afternoon all ye in England,

I have escaped the heat of the afternoon (it's 26 degrees here) and into the office for a while. I have 25mins before we have a meeting about the history of South Africa. Whilst I would normally be excited about that, we had a 5 hours meeting this morning and most of us are mentally decapitated and another few hours of listening might see my body follow. By choice if needs be! But for some respite I shall tell you a bit about the place we're in the philosophy and ethos of it.

Project Gateway, where I am, was opening in 1992 by a local church who bought what was a diralect political jail. Some 16 years on it is now an amazing place of community action and social care. Local legend says that Ghandi was once imprisoned here, although due to the hangings and apartheid nature of the prison, there are no records of anything so it is very hard to know for sure. Either way, the prison has a lot of history. One of the project leaders here was imprisoned here himself for 26 years. He managed to escape by climbing a 20 ft pipe, jumping about 10ft and falling another 10ft. They did however catch him 6 months later and put him back but in high security. A lot of this is very real to me because before I left I read 'a long walk to freedom'and Nelson Mandela talks a lot about his prison experience and so I can put the two bits of information together and see, a bit anyway, how it must've been like.

Where we eat as a team used to be a gallows, and where we cook used to be the postmortem room. That's information we didn't need!

I tell you this simply by way of contrast to the amazing stuff that happens here now. Due to the historial significance, the project is going to launch itself as a tourist attraction next year. It's slogon will be 'from darkness to light'. Obviously as a Christian centre it has more than one meaning, but on a local level it intends to envelope the amazing contrast of what has happened here.

I can't say I've had much time to reflect on things and I'm already way behind with trying to write this stuff down in my own journal, but when we do get time to sit and think a lot comes to the surface.

Before I close I'll just mention a few other things that have happened recently:

The meal with our future cell leader was a very mixed bag! On the one hand we got on very well because they are white South African so have a bit more in common with us in terms of culture. So I had a great chat about the Rugby World Cup and the Premiership season and champions league with Dean! They also understand sarcasm which was great for me. Cultural confusion lends itself to great comic material I tell you!

Unfortunately the meal itself wasn't so good! We tried to play it safe with Tuna Pasta Bake, however because we were cooking for 10 people, we got pretty much all the aspects wrong and what came out of the oven would be generously described as food. I amusingly noticed one of the guys doing husband duty with his wife as she was struggling desperately to eat some of it and not leave all of it! Thankfully as we all got on well it was not too big a problem!

Anyways, best be off.

If you do have questions, then leave them as comments and I'll try to answer those that I can!