Travel Diary - Day Fourteen

Day Fourteen – Placement

An early start for some of us. We were asked if 5 or 6 of us would be prepared to appear on a TV programme run by the GCU. I said that I was happy to take part and then left for the Youth Training, leaving the others to decide who would go and who wouldn’t. In the end I think it was a bit of a struggle to get 5 who were willing to do it, but we did.

We had been told that we would be picked up by taxi at 7:30am for an 8am start at the studio. We arrived at the studio at 7:45 and were eventually let into the building about 8:10am where we waited another 20min for the producer to arrive. He was quite a young guy working with not very much and doing, I think, a pretty good job with what he had. They had an old VHS camera they were feeding straight into an Apple Mac running Final Cut Pro. Apparently they use that to record the material but do a lot of the editing in Premiere Pro. Intriguing!

Anyway, we were eventually seated in the studio, something of a squash I have to say, given mics – 4 between the six of us including Rev Stuart who was the presenter. He gave a brief intro and then in turn we each spoke about an issue facing the church in our country and something of what we were doing about it. I spoke about the greying of our congregations and the work of Presbyterian Youth Ministries to help reverse that trend. We only had 5min each so I didn’t get much in, but that was OK. Others spoke about losses through brain drain and emigration, working with immigrant communities, HIV/AIDS, and youth crime. The programme was supposed to be on TV that afternoon but I wasn’t on when I looked. We might manage to get a copy before we leave Guyana.

Back at the hotel we grabbed our bags and come down for our placement pickups. The family I am staying with lives in a part of town that is supposedly a little more dangerous than some of the others. Can’t say that I’m terribly worried at this point in time. Rev Keith Haynes is a Presbyterian minister who is running, as best I can tell, the only mainline church plant in Guyana. The whole story is quite sad in some ways. It is only there by accident really, and the willingness of one man to risk picking up a vision that made no sense to anyone.

To put it simply, Sophia is a very poor outlying suburb of Georgetown, only recently integrated into the city. The few paved roads in the area have been put in since the beginning of 2009. Before that there were only dirt roads, taxis wouldn’t go to the church and even the buses would stop half a kilometre away. Even now it can be difficult to get a taxi that is prepared to make the journey as it remains a dirty, very potholed piece of road. In the rainy season I am told the mud often came nearly to people’s knees in places.

In 2004 a South Korean missionary arrived and offered his services to start a small mission in the area. He began with one church, who turned him down before turning to the Presbyterian church (Who have a grand total of 7 ministers in the entire country including retired ministers. When Keith began counting on his fingers I thought he was doing multiplication or something.) Keith saw a small possibility and helped the missionary to set up a tent Sunday School on a piece of land designated by the city as a church site. It was a large, blue tent and over some time a Sunday School was built up. Then in short order the missionary left, an anonymous Guyanese donor built a church building, and Keith was left with deciding whether it was possible to continue the mission. He decided that it was something God was doing and he wanted to be a part of that and so he added the mission to the other 3 churches he was pastoring at the time. With the help of a volunteer he worked with what he had and now there is something here that I sense is rather special, and I am excited to have the opportunity to have a close look at what is happening. In December 2008 the church celebrated its first intake of members and followed this year with a second intake.

It was incredibly hot today, and by the time we had discussed my timetable – a very relaxed time (large sigh of relief) that will give me plenty of opportunity to be involved while still having lots of time to think and just be – and my dietary needs (required by CWM. I said as long as it doesn’t involve shellfish I’ll try anything once) I was beginning to wilt. I went into the room I had been given, and despite it being unbelievably hot, promptly fell asleep. I emerged about 4:30pm and we sat and talked a little while before going for a walk around the area, finding internet, phones, laundry, supermarket before stopping for dinner at a local restaurant. (We had Pizza Hut for lunch – was uncomfortably like what we have in NZ).

On getting back it was back to bed for me – although it’s nice to be warm this day was somewhat over the top!