Travel Diary - Day Twenty Four

Day Twenty Four – Power to the People
Tuesday 22 Sep 09

The morning went well. Aunt Patsy had made me sausages and eggs as usual for breakfast – this morning it was two boiled eggs, three sausages, bread and juice and water. I am drinking around 1.5 litres of water and juice before the day gets started. The nights are so hot that I am quite dehydrated when I wake up in the morning. Mostly I am drinking between 4 and 5 litres a day. Seems never ending at times, but better that than dry headaches eh!

The first meeting of the week was with IS/IVCF or Inter-School/Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. It was an interesting meeting, not least of all because of the combination of school and university. Guyana doesn’t have anything like Bible in Schools and IS/IVCF do a lot of this work. The way it is done is that regional co-ordinators work with Christian teachers in the schools to resource and assist in the creation of Bible Study groups in each school. I found it interesting that the accusation was made that churches weren’t doing a very good job because teachers weren’t showing the kind of commitment they once did to supporting these groups. To be honest, from my very uneducated perspective I actually think the biggest problem is teacher workload and class size – teachers simply don’t have the time or energy to add one more extra-curricular item to their agenda (doesn’t that sound familiar) – more on that tomorrow.

From IS/IVCF we caught a bus closer to town in order to begin pricing generators. I have been talking to Peter, my brother in the US about the possibility of his church supporting the purchase of a generator for the church. I was really only asking him to look out some details about the sort of generator we would need and at the end of the email, as an afterthought tossed in the idea that his church might like to sponsor the generator. He got back to me and suggested that could be a possibility but I would need to put together a proper proposal. So Keith and I went looking for generators. We found a couple that were worth pursuing, both of which were much more expensive than I had realised. But that’s part of the process.

Along the way I bought some pegs for some games at the leaders training on Wednesday and introduced Keith to the joys of wandering around a hardware store. I’m not sure he really got it, but that’s OK. A bit more wandering and we were heading back home. We got off the bus close to home and went to a local store to pick up lunch – roti and peas with curry chicken. Nice enough but I have been finding that my appetite has been slowly declining as the week has progressed. So I ate some and we left the rest for later.

I spend most of the afternoon chilling out and reading a book – it’s historical fiction following the development of the American navy through the eyes of a couple of families. I have been quite enjoying it but taking it slowly. After dinner Felissa and I watched a movie – Iron Man – not bad although the constant endeavour to justify sequels kind of spoils it toward the end.