eligama jesu hallelujah, amen!

Today I was taking the bus with two of my fellow volunteers. This is not terribly out of the ordinary. And outside of a couple of differences in protocol from busses in the US (for example, here it is okay for somebody to stand in the stairwell talking to the driver with the doors open as the bus whizzes along at 120 km/hour. In the US...not so much). So we're hanging out, doing the sardine thing on the morning commuter to Malelane and slowly everybody starts to sing. Which is also fairly par for the course and pretty neat. Its like being in a musical -- one person busts out in song and before you know it everybody else is singing along. I've wished that would happen in the US any number of times, it really spices things up. So we're driving and we're sardin-ing and we're singing, and life is good, and then the woman who had started to sing stands up. She continues to sing, so maybe she just wanted to stretch her legs, right? The singing dies down, and she calls out, "Hallelujah!" and the whole bus echoes back, "Hallelujah, Amen!" Now there's going to be a sermon. Sweet. This has happened once or twice before, and mostly its fun to see how many words I can pick out and a good way to pass a long bus ride. She greets the bus. Still standard, and then...then she turns to me. Apparently I know this woman, or she knows me.
She points me out to the entire bus, tells them all where I am living, what I am doing, and then proceeds to preach or witness or testify, or whatever the right term is for the next 15-20 minutes. Punctuated frequently by very fervent "Hallelujah!"s. I know at the very least that the first 5 minutes were about me. My assumption was that it was all good, but I don't really speak enough siSwati to be sure. For all I know she was exhorting the entire bus to beware the white devil-woman. But I sort of doubt it. The preaching goes on. Everybody is into it, not too many people are staring -- which is nice. She's swaying, she's yelling, she's stop mentioning my name so maybe I'm in the clear. Finally we get the closing Amen and I hear one more "make Sambo." This might be a reference to me. I'm not sure, there's a lot of Sambos in the area and people never refer to me as make (mother) though it is a polite form of address for a woman when you're using her surname.
The gogo finishes, and we all bow our heads and pray (out loud of course) and then shake the hand of the person sitting next to us. Gogo has a seat, and everybody looks satisfied at a piece of mobile evangelizing well done. I steal a glance at my friend sitting next to me, and feel like I would give anything to be fluent in siSwati not just soon, but 5 minutes ago.