Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Getting ready to return





We have gone ahead and made our reservations for returning to Guyana. We leave Buffalo about 6 PM on September 14th. We will spend about five hours at JFK and then fly on to Georgetown, arriving about 7 AM on the 15th. Rather than try to cut things too close, we will plan on flying into the Ridge on the 18th. We would appreciate all the prayers for our admittance back into the country.

I had recently gotten an email from Gary Fischer. I thought I share some of that as well.

“We cannot believe the convention is over already! I know we say this every year, but, this was the best ever. The convention experience has been ever so encouraging to us. There was a peak attendance of 5,262 with 64 baptized including 3 or 4 from the deaf group. One announcement that is exciting for us in the interior is that the translation into Carib of the God's Friend brochure and the tract You Can Know the Truth has been completed. We will have some more questions to ask about that when we visit the branch tomorrow (such as, can we get some today?). We enjoyed meeting other need greaters as well as many of the locals here. The response we got when they learned where we were serving was quite amusing. "Wow!"; "Really!"; "Oh my goodness!" It was very encouraging to hear the locals at the convention express many heartfelt thanks for coming to Guyana to help. We really needed that!”

Just to put things in perspective, there are only two District Conventions in Guyana. The other one had a peak attendance of about 2000. So a total attendance of over 7000 isn’t bad in a country with about 2000 witnesses.

Gary also sent along a few pictures. One is of Marion in the ministry, another is of a service group including the newest publisher, Sheneza, she’s fourth from left. Then there a couple from the school with newest students Danika and Sheneza (note microphone being used!)

Sunday, August 2, 2009

From Stephan 8/2

Thursday we went to Black Banana. We left about 5am from here with our bikes, then got to Black Banana Junction around 6. There we parked our bikes and walked about 3 hours to Black Banana. I had walked through Black Banana before on the way to Baramita, and it hardly gets preached to so i thought it would be a good place to take Gary, the new brother here, the one from Canada that’s here with his wife. She didn’t come with us, but he really wanted to go.

We preached to a couple of hours and met some super nice people. most of them are there from other parts of Guyana, several from Brazil and several from Venezuela. I think for the first time since i was in Guyana I heard a worldly person thanking us for leaving our families and friends and homes to come and preach to them. Although I’m sure many others feel that way, it was nice to actually hear it. I went to one house and there was a couple people there that i had met in Kaituma and in Ridge, and they set up buckets and benches to sit on and I gave a little talk and they were super good listeners and were asking great questions.

When I was done, Roland (another brother here) and Gary were sitting beside me since it was the last house to preach at. We were about to get up to go and the guys told us "just now, just now." and motioned for us to stay seated. About 10 minutes later we were invited into the other room where there were 3 plates of steaming rice and a big bowl of Labba Curry. Labba is a really good tasting animal. It’s basically a big rodent, but really good. We could barely finish the food cause there was so much, but we all cleaned our plates. We had only planned on eating the bread we had brought, but the rice and curry was a nice surprise. We walked back to our bikes with a full stomachs, and good memories from Black Banana. We got back home around 2:30 and took naps, it was a good day.