Jesus Came to Earth...

A few weeks before Christmas I asked my Sunday School class if they knew what holiday we were going to celebrate soon. After guessing 'school holidays' and 'planting season' the third guess was Christmas. I then asked if they knew what happened on Christmas... there were a lot of blank stares. After rephrasing my question in a couple different ways, one of the older kids said, 'We don't know. What happened?'

I tried to give them a brief explanation of what happened and why it is so exciting, but without a translator my Setswana fell a little short. My fallback in these situations is to start acting so I grabbed a couple of the kids and directed them/narrated as we acted out a brief Nativity play. When we finished a light went on in one of the kids' face - 'I saw this on TV,' she said, 'but I didn't know what it was.' It didn't take much discussion before it was decided that we would put on a Nativity Play at church.

One of the sheep

After coordinating with the priest and church warden, we settled on Dec 21 as the day of the play. Because attendance for all the kids is so irregular, I was a little unsure about how to format the play. Eventually I wrote up a narrator based script with simple supplementary lines for the kids that even a new person could learn the day of the play. To end the narrative the kids recited a paraphrased version of John 3:16 together with lots of physical actions. I had hoped to close by singing a few Christmas songs in Setswana but the kids didn't know any so I wrote a simple one with lots of dancing and clapping (the kids really like it and are still singing it months later):

Jeso o tsile mo lefatseng, - Jesus came to earth
Jeso o tsile mo lefatseng - Jesus came to earth
Ka gore o a nthata. - because he loves me.
Alleluia, Alleluia, o a nthata - Alleluia, Alleluia, he loves me.

The day of the play we arranged to meet 45 minutes before church started to run through the play one or two last times (and to redistribute the lines depending on who was absent)... I was a little nervous when only 5 kids showed up. I should have known not to worry, by the time church started and we were ready to go there were 26 kids carrying staffs, stars, donkeys, treasures, halos, or sporting ears.

Fortunately, my parents were here visiting that Sunday and they took several pictures of the morning. It was a fun day!

Walking to church with some helpers (in case you can't tell, they are carrying baby Jesus in a basket, the wisemen's star and a donkey for Mary and Joseph)

Our head angel, Bertha

A flock of sheep and goats baaa-ing as they are led to the front

Kneeling before baby Jesus (the bear)

Reciting John 3:16

Jeso o tsile mo lefatseng...

One of our goats

Another goat
The kids REALLY loved their ears and costumes - for the next three or four days in Mmopane you'd occasionally run into one of them playing outside their house with ears still on