Our first venture into a Bible Bookshop opened in a tiny shop in a small cluster of shops all in one building. It was situated on a main street leading into Alberton from the South. Natalspruit Township, (nicknamed, Murder Township), was farther out and much black traffic passed there every day. Later, the city opened a black taxi and bus depot very near by.
Our first shop was the smallest in a cluster of shops and we nestled on the corner between a thriving butchery and a very popular fruit and vegetable shop. The only apparent problem was its size. A 9’x12’ carpet would have covered it wall to wall, but there was room for my desk and behind it a wall of shelves housing Bibles and Hymnals. Every African Christian considers that these are necessities, and in his own language. Also, each church usually has it’s own hymnal, though the Christian churches used the Methodist Hymnal since it was readily available and most of the songs they used were in it. As long as we stayed with only Bibles and Hymnals, this little shop was big enough, and it was in easy walking distance from our home.
Our shop door faced a huge trash bin across the parking lot, and that is where the Green-Grocer threw a lot of his spoiling vegetables and fruit. One cold winder morning shortly after I arrived at the shop, I glanced up, and there was an African lady looking though those discards for something she could eat. She was a squatter from a near by area, but that morning she was wearing not a stitch of clothing. She soon went to the other side of the parking area and sat down in the comparative warmth of sunshine. I picked up the phone and called Phyllis and asked her to send a sweater and some clothing over to the shop as soon as she could, and soon one of our grandsons arrived with the parcel and I then had the problem of how to get them to her without frightening her away. This was solved for me when two young African women who worked nearby arrived with a cotton maid's dress for her. I was able to get them to take my parcel to her as they had already done with their own contribution.
This shop shared an attic with all of shops in the same building including the awning which extended over the sidewalk. This overhang was used repeatedly by thieves who were attracted by the cigarettes, the cola drinks, and the cash of the Green-Grocery and the small lumber yard and hardware store. They broke though the ceiling outside the wall, then took their choice of shops to break in through the ceiling. We never left cash there, but they still took Bibles which they could sell door to door in the township. They also smashed their way in through the plate glass windows and door at times instead of climbing into the attic first.
We soon outgrew that shop. It was later hired by a key cutter, for a while, and then was the office of a dating bureau, and finally remained with one renter when the butcher took it over as a biltong (smoke dried meat) department for his business. That, of course, made it even more attractive to thieves. We moved to a larger shop in the same building. It was large enough to bring our printing equipment there and to offer a variety of Christian books as well as our own publications. Unfortunately, the burglaries continued, and as the windows were larger they were more costly to replace.
Shop lifters were also a problem. On one occasion the manager of a neighboring shop saw we were in trouble as he passed by and he just stepped in and pretended to be browsing. He wore a large revolver openly in his belt. The group who had come in saw that and they just lost interest in browsing.
At that time, the streets were being altered and a new island was placed in the road at the junction. It interrupted the drainage flow so that a heavy downpour brought the water into the shop flooding us. Blocked drainage in the communal toilets caused them to overflow to the point that one really needed gumboots to get there. The final “straw that broke the camel’s back," was when a cat got up into the attic some how and it’s weight, caused a huge panel of the ceiling to fall in on top of everything. We knew it was a cat, because it left footprints on the panel, and claw marks on the wall where it clung as it scrambled back to the attic. Since we were getting short of space to work, we started looking for a larger shop that would not have these problems. We found it on the other side of the malls in a church building and its attached hall. They were put up for sale. They too, had been broken into as the burglars had started little fires in two or three places where they burned papers for light. The carpets were burned and scorched in those places.
However, God is able to bring good out of even our problems. We eventually were able to buy this complex and because it belonged to us, we could make the improvements that were needed. Better security was one of those. We added security gates on the entrances. Another was that we sold our home and moved to an apartment upstairs over the shop so the building would never be totally empty. Still another blessing was that we had plenty of storage space, guest rooms, plenty of space for our equipment, and the Bible shop had room to expand. We had also gained a very nice church building in the change!
Burglars never gained entry, though I did challenge the occupants of two closed vans just as they were preparing to attach a chain to our burglar door and their vehicle. Our bedroom was directly over the entrance, so I was directly over their heads. When they heard me, they dropped everything, jumped into their cars and fled. They thought I was armed when I opened the window and spoke to them. We were not so fortunate in the case of our car. The Nissan Centra, several years old, was broken into six times. Even coils of razor wire on top of the steel fence did not stop thieves. They never took the car itself, but they damaged it by smashing windows and the interior. They seemed to be after the radio, so I took that out and stored it permanently inside the shop. They did not know, but It did not work in any case.
On one occasion, we returned home after a home Bible study, to find a man standing beside our entrance. As his presence unnerved us and he just stayed near by, we rang the bell, and Roland came from inside and opened our security gate. He then engaged the man in conversation while we opened the car storage gate and put the car behind lock and keys. With three of us there, the fellow soon wandered away.
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