SixTen,
Thank you for your prayers for our trip. I will be posting one more time. The next post will be from the United States, Lord-willing. The post for Sunday will not go on most likely until we return home. The post for Saturday will go up around 5:00 pm (U.S. time). Thanks for your prayers and we hope that you will lift us up in prayer as we travel and please also continue to pray for the hearts of those in Roubaix.
Today was a good day. We started off the day with our normal morning routine. We woke up sometime around 8:00-8:30 am. After we had all rolled our aching bodies out of bed we had a light breakfast of French baguettes, cereal, yogurt and/or Clif bars. After breakfast the three brothers met us at our apartment and walked us down to the church. We had devotions with Pastor P and spent some time praying and talking through Acts 8. The time was good, the discussion was good and the prayer was good. It will be tough to not have these devotion times in the morning as a group when we return to the states.
After devotions we spent the next few hours in our morning routine, playing games with the youth, drinking coffee and helping Francois prepare the lunchtime meal. I had the opportunity to peel potatoes that had already been boiled so I had to flake the skin off with my fingers (Krista I will never complain about peeling potatoes again). A couple of the other guys used the time to teach Clement and Caleb the American game of Pickle…For those of you who don’t know what Pickle is you can try looking it up on Wikipedia, may also be called run-down…think Sandlot and Benny “The Jet” Santiago. After a delicious lunch that consisted of fresh mozzarella cheese on tomatoes, garlic potatoes, baguettes and cold cut sandwiches we started to get ready for the soccer field.
We had told Billel and Areski that we would be down at the fields around 2:30 pm. Both of them were there at 2:30 (which is a rarity for them to be on time in North African culture) and may have been there before 2:30. Unfortunately when we arrived they were the only two that really wanted to have a game with us. So we hung around and played another game on our own, World Cup (similar to half-court basketball with teams). After about 20-30 minutes a group of guys decided that they were ready to play against us so we started playing with them. They were probably the best “team” that we played all week. That coupled with the fact that we gave them Brock made it the first game that we actually were playing harder than normal. They ended up whooping us. As that game continued some of the other guys that we had been playing with during the week started to show up. They started to integrate themselves into the game, however they brought the game to a screeching halt because they are such individual players. There were a number of times that players from the original game (not our group) threatened to walk off the field because the guys they were playing with were not passing. In the end we called that game after about 20 minutes, all in all we probably played for around 2.5 hours.
That evening we were scheduled to visit Pastor P’s house for dinner so we were unable to stay with Billel and Ariske. Before we left we got their contact information and also took a photo
Our Group with Billel and Areski
with them. Our hope is that we can hang out with them a bit on Sunday and at least offer to pray with them. When we left for Pastor P’s house we went by three different methods. Brock, Dan and Hun got a ride with Carey and Pastor P straight to his house. Rich, Ryan and myself took the metro to the end of France with Geoffrey and Caleb. When we got to the end of the metro station Pastor P met us and offered to drive a few of us to his house which according to Geoffrey was only about 5-10 minutes away. Since there were only 4 seats Rich, Ryan and Caleb went with Pastor P in his car while Geoffrey and I walked. I’m not sure if the French 5-10 minutes is different than the U.S. 5-10 minutes but I can assure you that it was more than a 5-10 minute walk. The one positive of the experience is that I can say I walked from France to Belgium!
When we arrived at the house we were served an excellent meal. The meal consisted of pork with an apple, onion and other delicious ingredients sauce, potatoes, salad, corn salad and some various Belgian beers. In Belgium the legal drinking age is 16, so Carey was actually more knowledgeable than us on the subject matter because it is more a part of their culture. At the meal were two of Carey’s friends Laurita and Florine who are both the same year as Carey at school. We were also joined by Elsie and Molly who are Carey’s younger sisters, Pastor P and his wife, Pastor A, and Mark who is the overseer of the church here in Roubaix. It was a wonderful group and much to my delight we were able to play a card game called “Jungle Speed”. It was actually not a bad game, I just wasn’t very good at it/didn’t really understand the rules. Fortunately Elsie was telling me what to do the whole time. After dinner Pastor A and Mark drove us back to our apartment and we headed off to bed around 12:30 am.
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