February 13th, 2011
I need to correct what I’ve written in previous posts about when I wake up. I actually first wake up to roosters crowing in the morning, at about 4am. With each passing morning I become more convinced that roosters are tools of the devil because when they wake me up at 4am the first thing I usually think about is how much I want to kill them. Such thoughts are definitely not from Jesus! Fortunately the snooze button on a rooster is easy to find: right on top of their head. Now I just gotta catch one! Grr!
Yesterday (the date of this blog) was Sunday, and we had responsibility for the youth service again. Last Sunday I didn’t fare too well in keeping their attention, but this Sunday was much better. After some Q&A, Jesus gave me the idea of a fun game to play with them (cause I have a hard time thinking up random games). It was a simple “follow the leader” style game where one kids stomps or claps or jumps or makes some sort of percussive sound with his body, and the other kids mimic. The leader starts off with just one action then adds another and another, kind of also like a memory game that adds an additional step each time. It was simple and they liked it.
After church we had lunch, I had my quiet time, and then went out to play with kids again for most of the day. We’ve come up with a few more “suggestions” about daily ministry activities, one of them being not reading, studying, or journaling inside the house (because we don’t want to give the appearance of being bums), and the other is to stay closer to our church/house location to be with the local community more, i.e. not doing beach ministry most days. I mean, beach ministry was going well and many people were being touched by it, but our reason and focus for being here is the Threads of Hope ministry, so we want to give them the lion’s share of our energy.
So the day consisted of more games with kids, more throwing kids around and stuff. We guys also spent a good chunk of the day brainstorming about how to enable the Threads of Hope ministry run more smoothly. We noticed that, twice a week, when the bracelet makers come to get thread, there are so many of them coming to get so many balls of thread out of one big box of assorted colors that the whole process becomes congested and is beginning to take more than one day for everyone to come, find the colors they need, and have their thread balls counted and recorded. So we spent a good hour throwing around some ideas that started out serious, then went into the humorous (such as having monkeys working in an underground thread warehouse who feed thread up through those suction tube things you find at motorbanks, but only if you deposit a banana first) and finally worked our way back around to ideas that were actually feasible, cost-effective, scalable and flexible systems. Unfortunately, the gentleman whom we need to run these ideas through will be gone until the end of the week.
On a pitiful note, I am now legitimately without footwear. Yes, that’s right. I’m goin’ around on my bare dogs. (It’s actually kind of fun.) Slowly, over the course of the race, the number of footwear items I’ve been carrying has dwindled down. I used to have boots, but those things were so clunky I conveniently forgot about them in favor of tennis shoes. I also had a pair of vibram five-fingers but they became more trouble to keep non-stinky than they were worth, so I gave them to Caleb Galloway. All of my sandals have broken. I got new shoes in Ireland from our contact but practically the whole squad voted for their destruction when I wore them for 3 days straight on our amazing 70-something hour bus ride through Africa. They were already trashed, though, and eventually they mysteriously disappeared. I was down to a pair of flip flops until earlier today when I took them off at the beach, nearly forgot about them as we were leaving, and then returned to get them only to find that they were no longer there. So now I have no footwear! If you would like to sypathize with my cause, you can help by donating a few bucks to my support account through the “Support James” link in the left column. 😉
Then I can go buy some shoes at the beach market!
