Soweto Stake Institute Activity

For the past couple of Saturdays we have been helping with an activity in the Soweto Stake. First of all, if you've never heard of Soweto, you should Google it; it's a place with an amazing history, especially during apartheid. The activity was organized by some friends of ours, the Clowards, who are Seminary and Institute missionaries like we are, but they work in the Soweto Stake while we are in the Johannesburg stake. Twenty or so kids from each institute program competed as teams against the clock to try to move the entire group across the cultural hall while only touching eight small carpet squares. You can read the rules on one of the included pictures, but the analogy was to try to get to "zion" all together without losing anyone. The participants tried many kinds of approaches before they all came to the conclusion that they had to share space and cooperate completely to get across. (for example, piggy backing was hard on feet and legs and did't work) Each of the teams took at least a couple of hours to finally get everyone across the hall. After the activity, we fed the hungry participants an American breakfast with pancakes, egg and fruit, so we have flipped a lot of pancakes in the past couple of weeks! We found that Africans don't like syrup much--too sweet, and they like their fruit room temperature, not refrigerated :)