Travel Diary - Day Forty Seven

Day Forty Seven – More of the Same
Thursday 15 Oct 09

We got off to a better start today – four presentations left and a lot less mucking around, although that said there was still a lot of mucking around, it just didn’t hold us up quite the same. All the presentations have been good and the interesting thing, given how widely spread we were through the GCU, Presbyterian Church of Guyana and Guyana Presbyterian Church, is that we have all noted similar points of concern and opportunity.

I feel a bit guilty that I can’t remember particular points of everyone’s presentations, particularly when it seems that everyone I come into contact with is quoting parts of mine. Even the caretaker has come up and asked for a copy of my paper, and had some interesting comments to make about it – and he wasn’t even there for the presentation!! The whole thing has gripped people’s imaginations in a way that I never anticipated. I simply hoped that people would come away with an idea or two. What they have done is come away with a grasp of a potentially life-changing concept. It is what I set out to do, but to see it grab hold of people like it has is mind-blowing. And perhaps the most exciting thing is that it hasn’t just been one group that has ‘got it.’ The young people are excited about it, the older folk are seeing the possibilities and even the ones in-between, often the hardest to stir, are talking about it with enthusiasm. What I am wrestling with is how something I have written can possibly have such a powerful effect on so many people. And it isn’t just Guyanese. David is already talking about using the idea at home, and several others are saying similar things. I have already sold the first 20 books and I haven’t even started.GRIN

Helen, Kateimoa, Zarazaka and Keletso are our four presenters for the day. Helen’s is excellent and makes some good points about the Guyanese Church becoming truly Guyanese in nature rather than a knock-off of the missionaries’ home churches. Unfortunately the discussion about her paper was side-tracked by conversations that had little to do with her main point. The great humour, and irony of the day is that Keletso’s presentation, between her reading, and then the conversation that followed took longer than anyone else’s. She had been the one who had pressed particularly hard for keeping to time and not letting things go on. The rest of us found it quite funny, I’m not so sure that she found it all that funny.

And then we were done. The rest of the day was presumably set aside for packing and relaxing. Instead I set to with my video – this is the link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ96OAqXI14 and having spent several hours on it I still needed quite a bit of work to get it into a viewable state. So it was a late night and all my packing had to be done in the morning. Ah well.