What a week!

On Sunday I attended a peaceful 5am Easter service, half as long as the nearly 4-hour Good Friday service -I'm glad I had participated in some songs and a skit with the youth group, which broke up the time and gave me a chance to connect with the youth again. The church was packed!

Easter Monday was spent flying kites at the ballfield with my delightful neighbours Sindy and Rondey. This is probably my favourite day in Guyana as the perfect blue sky is adorned with kites of all shapes, colours and sizes. Kids had been picking gamma cherries (to make glue to put together their kites) in our yard all week. Other than yelling at a drunk man to “go away!” it was a pleasant experience -always a joy to spend time with these young friends of mine.

Monday night was spent puking my guts out and by now a good majority of us have hosted this nasty stomach bug. Poor Karen and Steve barely made it through their journey to Trinidad with the DTS team!
On Tuesday I was recovering from having been violently ill all night – I managed to wash my sheets and that's about all I had energy to do. The next day, Tim (Beeno's son who lives and works with us) needed an unexpected surgery on his foot for a deep infection. Since then, I've been playing nurse, dressing his foot everyday. It's a good thing I still remember how to use sterile technique – though there's nothing sterile about our environment right now!

On Thursday we woke to torrential showers and over-flowing trenches. The waters quickly rose in our yard and soon enough the guys were paddling around it in our canoe. Some of us hurried next door to help our neighbour bail water out of her house. We were having our 3rd black-out of the week so our generator and water pump were a huge blessing in preventing her downstairs from turning into an aquarium.

Others rushed to fill any bags we could find with sand (left over from construction) to place at our various entry ways and on top of our shower drain. Though it seemed a little futile while the rains kept coming by the early afternoon the tide was returning to the Atlantic, the river damns were opened and things were under control. Thank God it wasn't worse!

Winston and some of the guys took the canoe up the distended canal to help another neighbour rescue his plantain crop.

Sloshing around in trench water and septic-tank overflow (mostly gray water, I hope) sure made me regret studying microbiology. With everyone tracking the mud in the house and having our shower drain back up in the bathroom, I feel like we could mop 8000 times before the floor feels clean again. The DTS left for Trinidad that night.

Friday was Beeno's birthday, which Kim was mainly planning but she had the honors with the stomach bug that day so we made plan B in the midst of still cleaning, and celebrated with fried chicken (I stuck to rice and bananas), which torpedoed its way out of Beeno's body about 18 hours later.

On Saturday I broke down thinking about all that entails leaving Guyana in a few months but I had good talk with Kim, she prayed for me and I felt better. That night the Andersons and I hosted the "youth group" -ages 4 -18 at the church down the road and visited a boy from our neighbourhood who's in a cast from waist to ankle for 7 weeks. His brothers and sisters and I decorated his cast with stickers and drawings. It made my day to see him smile again.

I've been reading Jeremiah these days and I was thinking about how God asked him to do some strange things...bury a loin cloth, dig it up again, break some clay pots...I wonder how many people we shrug off as odd or "out there" when actually, they have a pretty intimate connection with the Lord. Just a thought.

And a new week has started again. Thanks for keeping yourself posted. God bless you. -eM

ps. i'm sorry the pics don't line up so well with the wording -I feel like I"ll be waisting time if I keep trying! =0)