The atmosphere in the village has really improved. After our first meeting with the elders we had several follow-up meetings every Monday afternoon. At each meeting we concluded we had another subject important enough to have a meeting next week. The people are not accustomed to regular meetings. But if there is a good reason to meet you can have a meeting the same day.
Last year we were able to improve the children’s work in the church. The new workers help joyfully every Sunday. Now we emphasized the need of youth work in the church. More than 100 youth (from 13 – 25 years old) live in the village. In church there is no special attention to these young people. We learned that in the past youth work was there, but during the past years it sort of faded out of the system. Now we have 4 men and 4 women who will start with youth meetings on every Wednesday and Saturday evening. We pray and hope this will continue after we leave at the end of September. Important aspect is that in a few weeks more youth will come from the city because of summer holidays.
The situation with the youth came up because of a recent suicide attempt by one of the young people. While everyone was still in shock we asked the elders to call the church members for two prayer evenings. A lot of people attended! We also visited the young fellow in the clinic with the elders and prayed for him. We see Gods work in how he recovered until now, that he did not need to be flown into the hospital in the city and walked around only a week later finding new strength and hope in life again. It seems that this was a turning point for the church and her leaders to stand firm in Christ and not let the flow of events push them down anymore.
Marco started weekly meetings with the young man offering pastoral care. This is also something the elders do not seem to be familiar with.
A big job was getting all the new inhabitants of the bible storeroom out of there again. A number of bats found a nice place to live between the boxes. We had to clean out the storeroom and fill up all the holes between the planks and cover the larger area’s with iron fence. It took us 3 days but right now it seems we won this battle (for now…). In the mean time we see bat droppings in the church, so part of the problem was just moved, not yet finished.
End of September we plan to meet at the annual Bible conference in Tepoe. We expect this year a lot of people to attend since Tepoe is central in the country and both Trio and Wajana Indians want to come. As usual people start thinking how to travel rather late in time. Two deacons came over asking if we could offer a barrel (200 liter) of gasoline. We asked how this would serve the process of getting as many people over as possible. It appears that one canoe will use 150 liter to go up and return back again after the conference. So if more than 50 people would like to go 150 liter is far too little since usually one canoe can take 10 – 20 people.
We now hired MAF to bring 3 barrels of gasoline that we will sell for 10 SRD per liter. Doing this we subsidize 17% of the costs and hope a large number of people will be able to attend the conference. If needed we will buy another 3 barrels to enable more people to attend.
Greetings,
Marco and Marjolein