Sunday 12th and Monday 13th

And so it had arrived - our 5th Sunday in Western Africa.
Iain and I awoke with a church service and a day of rest ahead of us. The rain greeted us outside our door and we jogged excitedly over to the Diocesan office to find out from Bishop Lynch where we'd be heading today. After much heated debate, i.e the Bishop decided it was a good idea for us to walk to Holy Trinity, we set off on our merry way as both the rain and our spirits had eased dramatically.
However........
On arrival at Holy Trinity we realised that today's service whould be Matins and an extended celebration of the Holy Trinity Choir's vocal ability.
3 and a half hours, several million hymns and an exuberant sermon later, two unrecognizably haggard figures emerged from Holy Trinity. One, a veteran of the church - feeling bewildered and lost, the other, only a young man - feeling dazed, confused and without a doubt, speechless . Take note Duncan - if you spent Sunday doing anything other than worshiping for 3 and a half hours.......bad bad things are bound to happen to you.
Anyway, after the service these two lost individuals marched with purpose to Cafe de la Rose, much in need, of steak and chips! 3o minutes later they arrived.......it was closed. Needless to say, the younger of the group was less than happy that Iain had suggested such an extravagent plan for lunch. The road home was long, tiring and the conversation muted.....
Parks and Loz arrived back at home and the purchaaase of two loaves of bread had majorly raised spirits. Then something amazing and wonderful happend. Mr Iain Steven Francis Parks, out of nowhere, decided to set up a table tennis court across our dining room table, a mixture of string, a towel, two chairs and our beach bats thus paved the way for an awesome hour of entertainment. Neither, Loz nor Iain could have contemplated such a turn around of events, yet the decision to erect that net across our table was in one word - genius!

Monday 13th

Back to work. We spent the early hours of the morning with the intent of mapping out our journey plan for the next 2 months. With the map before us and the list of schools in Iain's hand it soon became clear this would be much harder than we had originally anticipated. Many of the villages and towns across Sierra Leone have identical names meaning that although we knew which Diocese they were located in, we had no idea if some of the schools were in the North or in the South of Sierra Leone, or both?! Change of plan. We spent the remainder of the morning in the Diocesan office speaking to the Chairman of the Education Board and the Bishop of Freetown. This proved to be a storming success. We established how, and when we would be travelling to each school, including a 10 day trip to Bo from the 10th - 20th of November, and various excursions around the rural schools in the Freetown Diocese. Much of our time in October will now be taken up with various visits to Sierra Leone by firstly, a school group from Holy Trinity - Crawley, then secondly, a church group from West Wittering. Our role in these visits will be that of co-ordinators and alot of work has gone in, particularly by Iain prior to Holy Trinity's arrival, to ensure that thier time in Africa is spent wisely and runs as smoothly as possible.

After this busy morning of preparation, we found time to relax and contemplate the month's work ahead with a few beers on our balcony.