A Tale of Two Towns: Visits to and from Print and Oral Cultures

This is part of a series of blog posts written by our Student.Go intern Songz Nkolombe. He serves as children's minister in his home church in Cape Town South Africa. He does that in person. He currently works with us and studies at Truett Seminary in Texas via the Internet (photo from online meeting with Mary).

The on-going series, A Tale of Two Towns, can be read in English or Romanian on the Romany Education Blogspot.

Hello friends.

We continue the story of A Tale of Two Towns. The story presents the differences between people from oral and written cultures. Two strangers—Aule Songz & Tim Wright—from two different yet adjacent worlds share their towns’ stories. Now we are travelling with Tim as he enters my town—the print culture.

Previously, I told a story of a native who had to learn to see his land through the eyes and heart of a foreigner. This is my story, how I had to come out of comforts of the words, paragraphs and pages of my life to walk, live and play among strangers only to come back questioning my view of what learning means.

To prepare for Tim’s visit to my town, I’ve had to imagine how it must be for one to enter a world with
foreign concepts which he must learn as he navigates his way through life. I spoke with one of the elders in his town to find out what to look out for when Tim arrives—the red flags. For now, I’ll focus on one of those red flags: the stillness and quietness of my town. This, I was told, comes as a shock for someone from the oral town.

Since drama, speech and melody are vital to pass on information, their town is always alive whether people are at home, on the street corner, or in the marketplace. The land of print seems dead to this elder because our information is passed on mostly silently from the pages to the reader’s mind. Even when the reader would be overcome with great emotions because of the material he or she had read, these experiences would explode within them, while their outward countenance would appear as if they were not affected by what he had read.

I would never have considered my town to be dead or silent. For we write to preserve wisdom and knowledge in order to continue on living. What is written, no matter how old it may be, comes alive in my mind and expands my world.

Until we read again,

Songz