Negombo News –
March ’04
Back again J
The Mission Matters
Ari
and Ange and the Youth Program
A great day was had on 29th February.
Rajah and his boys, and their cousin, arrived in from Nuwara Eliya on
Saturday the 28th and then on Sunday we had a number of other
youngies turn up for the first ever Christadelphian youth program in Sri
Lanka – or certainly as far as we are aware.
The theme for
the day was “The Young Man - David" and was attended by seven
teenagers who are contacts or are the children of Christadelphians. In addition there was Ari and Ange, Rajah and his five year
old and us. Invitations had also been issued to seven others but
due to unexpected work commitments, ill health and too great a distance to
travel they were sadly unable to participate.
It was a
remarkably successful day. Everything went simply beautifully with
studies, some spiritual song singing in the afternoon and then finally a
visit to the beach where activities were enjoyed by all. The cricket
bats and frisbees all came into use and while the lads enjoyed some physical
exercise, the girls seemed to enjoy getting wet at the water's edge.
It was a
wonderful time and provided opportunity for all of them to meet each other
for the very first time, to enjoy each other's company and at the same time
to learn and develop in the ways of God. Anton (one of the contacts) rang
us after he arrived home that evening to say how much he’d enjoyed himself
and to express his thanks; the girls talked about meeting up again, said
they wanted to have another similar program and were trying to work out when
it would best be held! Rajah
was profuse with his thanks (which for the quiet man he is, is
a significant statement) and he said his boys and their cousin had enjoyed
themselves immensely.
So the first SL
Christadelphian (and friends) youth program was abundantly blessed.
Ari and Ange
were a big hit with the youngies, one of whom described them as “cool”,
which left us feeling decidedly old and not so “cool”.
We said good-bye to Ari and Ange on 18th March as they
headed back to India with renewed visas.
God willing they will have another 4-6 months there until they head
home in September.
It was great having familiar faces from home here with
us for two weeks and we certainly shared a few laughs.
Bible
Truth Study Day – March
The BTSD program continues to be successful and on
Saturday March 6th with ten people here (including us).
Unfortunately Duncan and Therese had to leave after the first session
as Duncan wasn’t feeling well – 24 hours later he ended up in hospital
for a couple of days – but he’s back home and “okay” now.
Initial diagnosis had been high blood pressure but his
hospitalisation was due to a stomach ulcer.
The day’s topics were:
ü
The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth
ü
The Bible Satan Exposed
ü
Holiness and Obedience
ü
What did they mean?
- “get
behind me satan”
- “the
angels that sinned” and
- “war
in heaven”.
There is always quite a big lead up for BTSD for us.
There is a fair bit of preparation involved and we only just seem to
have recovered from one program and we need to be getting our act together
for the following one – determining the program, sending out invitations,
preparing notes and overheads, etc.
The
Big Catch Up
We got way behind with admin ever since our
series of visits on the south side of Colombo before the trip south in the
last week of January. When we
arrived home from that trip February’s BTSD was looming large, followed by
quite a number of visits to people who live in the Colombo and surrounding
areas; followed by Ari and Ange’s arrival, a Nuwara Eliya/Badulla trip,
bi-weekly translation sessions, the Youth Program and then March’s BTSD.
The first opportunity we had to really get stuck into things like the
data base update, lots of correspondence, etc was in the second week of
March and we found ourselves with days and days of admin – but we’re
back on top of it now, for the time being anyway.
This week (15th March) there was a further
booklet offer (The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth) made to about 180 people so
that will again generate a further round of activity.
New
Correspondence Course Students
About a month ago a circular letter was sent to about
150 people who are regularly in contact inviting them to hand out Bible
Correspondence Course registration forms to their friends.
The response to date has been slow and steady.
There is an average of five new registrations a week which of course
means that in the last month there have been about 20 new correspondence
students. So the brethren and
sisters in Perth who are course tutors will now be gearing up to work with
these new contacts. Hopefully
the registrations will continue to come in for some time yet and hopefully
the students will follow through with their courses rather than showing an
initial interest only.
Back
on Track
The translation program is again up and running and
great progress has been made over the last few weeks. Last year Bro Indra translated about 20 booklets on a wide
range of Bible topics from English into Sinhala.
A number of these were then type-set by a business just down the
street here in Negombo and then Ken and two of the local brethren (Dunstan
and Vernon) started the time-consuming, pain-staking work of checking them.
They managed to get one completed before we headed home last
September. By the time we
arrived back here in November Dunstan had found full-time employment.
While we were pleased for him that he had a job it effectively put
the translation program on hold as Vernon who can speak Sinhala cannot read
it.
“What to do?” as the locals would say.
Well now Bro Tissa is “between jobs” and it is unlikely that he
will get a job before the election on 2nd April - - - he can read
and speak both English and Sinhala - - - and he is happily involved in the
translation programJ.
Tissa currently comes here two days a week, arriving at 9.00am and
leaving at about 4.00pm and he and Ken sit and work through the drafts.
At times Indra has not been able to correctly translate the
English into Sinhala as it may involve the use idioms or be poorly worded.
Ken and Tissa discuss what Indra has suggested in his
translation and consider alternatives before Tissa decides how it can best
be expressed in Sinhala. The progress
has been remarkable and a real relief and answer to prayer. Tissa’s commitment involves him in travelling three
hours each way twice a week!
On Tissa’s days here we alternate lunch between local
fare (string-hoppers and curry) which Tissa quite enjoys and salad
sandwiches – which for Tissa are a new (and we suspect not particularly
enjoyable) experience! Apparently
his family laughs at him when he reports he ate salad sandwiches yet again.
It really is remarkable how limited the locals’ appreciation is of
various food types. At home all
of us (or maybe just most of us) enjoy such a variety of meals; Italian,
Thai, English, Greek, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, etc, etc.
While we really enjoy a nice spicy curry, the taste of a good old
lamb roast or salad sandwich is also great.
But it seems that most of the Sri Lankan and Indian peoples have
their taste buds attuned to “heat” and “spice” from an early age and
if the meal isn’t dominated by chilli, curry and any other burning spice
then they don’t enjoy it! J
The Tamil translation program seems to be gearing up as
well. Bro Rajah in Nuwara Eliya
is Tamil and available to undertake some Tamil translation work.
Rajah’s work will be done in conjunction with Tamil translation
work occurring in India – so we are hopeful that in a few months time
there will also be a number of quality Tamil booklets available that will be
used in both India and Sri Lanka.
New
York, Dubai and Kuwait
In August last year we were really sad to see a husband
and wife and their two teenage children migrate to New York.
Sritheran and Thanalaksmi are keen Bible students and we were quietly
confident that they would ask to be baptised; which they did, not long after
arriving in New York. Advice received from New York this week is that Thamalaksmi
is doing weekly Bible studies with one of the sisters in New York.
Unfortunately Sritheran’s working hours don’t leave him any free
time at all, from what we understand he works seven days a week, but he
still wants to continue with his Bible studies as soon as time allows.
This year, in fact only about a month ago, Neil –
another keen contact – left for Dubai for two years.
He had been unemployed for some time and was relieved to have an
offer of work even though it means he is overseas and away from his family.
After a few e-mails to and fro we managed to make contact with bro
Colin and sis Wendy Wallace (from Melbourne) who are often in Dubai.
They and bro Alexander Varghese (India) – who is also living in
Dubai – have made contact with Neil and we understand will have met up
with him last week.
As many of you will know sis Pathma (Rajah’s wife) is
also overseas in Kuwait. Unfortunately
there are no Christadelphians there, or none of which we are aware.
We are writing to Pathma on a monthly basis just to keep in touch.
Pathma is likely to be there for the next 2½ years having left here
in September 2003 for a three-year period.
Both she and Rajah have had no employment (or not enough to feed the
family) in SL for a number of years so Pathma took employment in Kuwait as a
housemaid and sends her salary home to support the family.
If anyone
reading this knows of any Christadelphians in Kuwait please let us know.
Contact us at [email protected]
or write to us at Christadelphians Worldwide, PO Box 60, Negombo 11500, Sri
Lanka.
Other Things
R&R
Nothing to report here – it just hasn’t happenedL.
February was over and done with before we had a chance to blink and
March is looking much the same. We
think we’ll be staying pretty close to home towards the end of March and
early April because of the elections. Elections
in SL are not necessarily as peaceful and orderly as in Oz.
The build up and aftermath of the election may involve a bomb or two,
curfews, etc so we’d rather remain a bit closer to home between Colombo
and Negombo in areas that we are familiar with.
In fact we’ve been advised to have supplies in the house that will
keep us going for a little while in case there is trouble and we can’t get
to the shops etc following the election on 2nd April.
Tissa, who is one of the most gentle and considered people you could
wish to meet, said to us the other day that “April 1st is April
Fool’s Day, on the April 2nd the
fools will vote and on the 3rd April the fools will kill one
another”!
We’ve also planned a number of office holidays over
the last few weeks but each of these has fallen in a heap too other than
half a day off on Friday 19th when we had a nice time reading
books by a pool down on the tourist strip.
We left here a bit after 1.00pm, enjoyed lunch at one of the hotels
and then used their pool, watched the sunset over the ocean at about 6.45pm
and arrived back home a little after 7.00pm.
“Enjoyed lunch” is a bit of an exaggeration – the food is
rather ordinary but the pool’s nice J.
In order to be allowed to use the pool we each have to buy their
buffet lunch.
Maybe mid April will see us out and about again as
tourists having a good old relaxJ.
Post
Script.
It now looks like we’ll take two or three days off (24th
– 26th March). Unfortunately
we won’t have the opportunity to see some new sights but it’ll be good
to stop for a bit.
Good-Bye
to the Neighbours L
Our newsletters to date have made reference to Enoch
and Enosh, the 2½ year old twins from next door.
Sadly for us they’ve now moved house.
While they have only moved half way down the lane (and are living
with grandma while their house is being built next door to grandma’s
house) we don’t see nearly as much of them or their parents as we used
too. Enoch and Enosh, if they
were in the mood for a round of cricket or some other game when living next
door, would bang on the gate and in their little sing-songy voices call out
“arrntee, unnkl” in the hope that we’d make an appearance and spend
some time with them. We enjoyed
having them around, playing “cricket”, admiring their trikes or the
latest bug they had found. Sangeewa
and Inoka their parents are also a very friendly couple and have been very
helpful to us and have made us very welcome.
So even though we still see them as we walk past their
grandma’s house we do miss not having them next door; it’s just not the
same.
Feathers
and Fur, Fear and Revenge
Squirrels are agile little critters; they can leap
quite long distances and land on the most insecure objects. We
often see them leap from a power line to the wobbly leaf of a banana palm.
Several weeks ago Dorothy saw a squirrel in a tree
being harassed by a crow. The squirrel was darting up and down,
jumping from branch to branch and ducking under the foliage. The crow
was hopping around trying to chase the squirrel away and give it a clip
behind the ear. The squirrel was relatively safe while it was in
the tree because the crow could only hop around, it couldn't swoop.
But then the squirrel made a dramatic tactical mistake. It took off
along a power line trying to get right away from the crow and of course that
gave the crow the opportunity to swoop while the squirrel was out in the
open. The squirrel realising what danger it was in suddenly flipped itself
over so that it was hanging from the power line and then continued its
journey to the next tree running as fast as it could while upside down!
Unfortunately Dorothy didn't see the event through to its completion as both
characters moved out of her line of vision. But it gave her a chuckle.
A week or two after the drama
in the tree tops we were both out on the balcony where we spied what
appeared to be the sequel. On a
horizontal frond of a very tall palm about 200m from our house there was a
squirrel and a crow again in combat with one another.
The crow was about half way between the palm trunk and the frond tip.
The squirrel was having none of this and came shooting out of the centre of
the palm to chase the crow away. The crow would run towards the tip of
the frond and take off; the squirrel then returned to its preferred spot
where the frond grows out from the trunk.
The crow would then land in the middle of the frond and the squirrel
would make another dash at the crow. This went on for about five
minutes or so before the crow took of for “greener palms’. He’d
certainly worn out his welcome in this particular one.
But as it turned out this wasn’t the tail end of the matter ……
It was followed up a few days later with another
funny sight – again watched by us from the balcony.
A squirrel was traversing the overhead wires that run parallel
to and above one of our side fences. It
stopped near the overhanging leaf of banana palm and hung from the wire
while munching into the leaves and stalks of the sprawling grapevine.
All that was visible amidst the banana leaves and grapevine was a
cute furry tail poking straight up in the air.
Unfortunately for the squirrel we weren’t the only ones to see it.
A nearby crow spotted it too and just couldn’t pass up this
tempting sight and swooped on the squirrel’s tail.
We’re not sure if it pulled on the fur, pecked the flesh or what
but the squirrel was certainly not a happy chappie and quickly took refuge
in the nearby mango tree.
Don’t know whether or not
this was the grand finale to a
three part play. We’ll have
to wait and watch.
Watch
this Space
However this is the grand
finale to this edition of NN so “watch this space” folks – we’ll
be back again later.
Love to you all and thanks to
those of you who have been in contact in the last few weeks either via the
message board or by e-mail direct or letter.
It’s been lovely to hear from a few people and we are now busy
trying to reply to everyone. So
if you’re one of the ones who have written or sent an email and haven’t
heard back from us … we will be replying asap.
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