Easter trip...

All is steady on the home front. We've had a normal kind of week here except that things are a little busy with Easter coming up.

The church which we attend is sending a group to Su'u school for the weekend to do some tiling in the chapel floor and organise some activities and services. So, we decided to join them for the weekend. We've never really been out of Honiara so we're a bit nervous about the trip, but excited about getting out and seeing a new place. Su'u is on Malaita island whereas we live on Guadalcanal island. We're also keen to spend time with some of the young adults from our trip who are going there too.

Su'u school is a boarding school run kind of like a state-integrated school in NZ. This means that the government funds it but it is run under the umbrella of the SSEC church group. Jair's dad went to Su'u quite a few times in the 90s for mission trips doing building works. So there's a bit of a connection there for us.

Unfortunately, we have heard that Su'u is somewhat dilapidated. Apparently there are rats everywhere, food shortages, run down buildings. This all makes for a very interesting weekend I'm sure! Everyone tells us that the river there is very nice to swim in.

We're organising a bit of an Easter drama; it's fairly low key, we're probably having our one and only practise this evening. But it will be spectacular in a Lauretta sort of way. Well, what I mean by that is that this is a country of limited resources, but I've got some tricks up my sleeve (well, actually I'm wearing a singlet because even though it's only 9am it's already very warm). So hopefully the drama will get the message across. Even more, we pray that God may use the drama, and our witness and work there for the whole weekend, to work in the hearts of the students and teachers.

We need to be at the wharf around 5am tomorrow morning. The ship leaves at 6:30. Hopefully the water is calm and we have a pleasant swift 2-3 hour boat ride. We get to Su'u on Good Friday and I think the plan is to get straight to work. We'll have a Good Friday service with the school on Friday (duh...) evening and work on Saturday, play sports Saturday afternoon (so the plan goes...), have two church services on Sunday, including one where we do this second drama, and I've got no idea what we're doing on Monday. Probably more work. We need to be at the wharf I think again at 5am on Tuesday morning so that we can be back in Honiara at 7:30am just in the nick of time to go to work!

So those are our Easter plans... We'll let you know next week what actually happened!! Please pray for us, for safety, for blessing on the ministry there and for the relationships that will be formed and built in the group.

Parting photo? We have a pet crab. Or rather, we had a pet crab. I haven't seen him for a while, but at one stage he had made his home in Laki's water bowl... I think someone might have eaten him...

This is Karen, the less than skillful hairdresser I mentioned last week. She is photographed with her "pet rat". As you can see she's a little vicious to her pets... She bought this glue stuff, put it on cardboard with some bait and the rat came to eat it, got stuck and died. So she's happy that her leaf house is rat free!

As far as I'm aware, there are no rats in our house although there are things that creep around on top of the roof. Sometimes it's this bird (the security men tell us). It sounds like a jolly pelican or something, something big. In any case, we'll see plenty of rats this weekend! Maybe I should get out my flute, do the old pied piper trick...