Wednesday 16 Sep 09
Most of today just kind of faded away. I spent some time in prayer and thinking. I did some prep for the youth training thing tonight. I began to rearrange some of my thinking about practice of mission and maintenance of mission. And then I went out for a while – enough thinking already!!
I set out to go to the zoo. We’ve been past it a few times and I decided it might be my best chance to get to see an anaconda and boa constrictor since it has become very clear that we won’t be venturing into the hinterland at all L. Anyway I got on the bus and by the time we had been through three stops I was in the far back corner. To explain…the minivans mostly have four rows of seats. The back one is standard and then the next three rows have one of those fold-up seats on the end so that they can fit the prescribed 15 people (3 in the front), keeping in mind that there are often up to 20 in these buses. Anyway, as you can imagine people get on and off, you often have to get out of the bus to allow someone else to get off and everyone shuffles around. By the third shuffle I was as far from the door as you can get. To add to my woes (not really, but it sounds good in the story) I had no idea the name of the street where I wanted to get off the bus. I wasn’t too worried when someone sitting nearer the front indicated they wanted to get off. I thought it would be close to where I wanted to go. Unfortunately I was about 2km out in my guesstimate.
The good thing was that we were right outside a hardware store, so after getting half the bus to alight so I could get off (these rides cost $G60 = NZ42c to pretty much anywhere in the city) I wandered into the store to do some shopping. I wanted to get some wire that I could make into hooks to hold up my giant pad that I would be using for my talk. Now shopping in Guyana is not what we are used to. With few exceptions, most of the shops you go into have this bizarre system at work. First you tell an assistant what you want. They then go off to find it, or at least what they think you meant – Guyanese might speak English, but the accent just about does me in on occasion. In this case the wire she brought back was the right sort but not heavy enough for my needs and apparently they didn’t have anything heavier – add that to the fact that she would only sell me 5m of the stuff when I only wanted about 1m and, well, she took it back. Instead I opted for a long bungy cord with hooks, it cost me a whole $NZ2.10c. She then rang up the sale on her computer. But no! I cannot give her the money. I take the money to the cashier along with the tiny piece of paper that has the amount I am supposed to hand over. I go to the cashier and hand over the money and my ticket where I am handed a receipt. I turn to go, but I am not finished yet. I have to go to another counter where I hand over my receipt where it is stamped and handed back to me. Finally I retrieve the bungy cord from the original counter (I think I could probably have had it with me the whole time) and leave. So there were at least three people involved in the encounter, two of whom appeared to fulfil no real purpose beyond receiving a wage.
Outside the shop I proceeded to catch another bus back to the zoo and went to look at the animals. It was kind of a sad experience to be honest. They had several giant Harpy eagles sitting on perches with no more space than our lounge to move around in. There was a lioness in a cage that including the lair out the back would have been no more than 4m x 5m. A couple of weasels in round cages about 1.2m in diameter and about 1.8m high. Anyway, you get the picture. About the only animal that appeared to have any reasonable space was the manatee – I only saw the snout and a short glimpse of its tail. So yeah…cool to see a giant anaconda – the thing was huge, and a boa constrictor – not so huge. I saw a jaguar and an ocelot and a bunch of other animals but mostly it was just sad.
I got back to the house in time to get ready to go to church to do my thing on running a youth programme. At the moment the church doesn’t have a youth programme and so I am trying to give them some ideas to play with. I talked about how we run a programme in NZ and some of the things that work for us. We played Pictionary to their delight – they had never heard of it before and thoroughly enjoyed it. I told them about ‘One good, one bad,’ and a TSP of prayer. And I gave them an example of how they could run a Bible study for themselves, even with limited literacy and help from others. Everyone seemed to connect with something, so that was cool.
It took 2 buses to get back to the house and then Keith, Felicia and I sat around the table eating some dinner (at about 10pm) and talking about all sorts of things. A good way to finish the evening!
No comments:
Post a Comment