18 August 2009

At the end of yesterday's conference we finally got all packed up and sorted out the luggage and headed up the coast to our next conference. We arrived late - around 8pm and dinner was provided straight away. Most of us were not very hungry and ended up heading quickly to bed.

Our accommodation is in a Catholic boarding house, it is a fairly spartan set up but we all fell gratefully into bed...the next conference beginning first thing next morning. There is an abundance of wildlife - ranging from frogs, squirrels, geckos, cockroaches the size of buses and mosquitos not much smaller. We made full use of the mosquito nets, coils, and repellant.

Breakfast rolled round, simple but yummy with lots of fresh fruit and big fat slices of fresh white bread. Sri Lankan bread is so good! We've already bought our own supplies of jam and vegemite to have with it.

The local team left for the conference venue first, to get everything set up and we followed in the next trip. We are meeting in a Lighthouse church called Bethlehem church in a town called Chillaw...about 30km south of Puttalam.

The church slowly filled up...a good mixture of older and younger people...probably more men than the previous conference. David began by figuring out the oldest and the youngest serving person there in kids ministry and awarding a prize...but making the point that we all fell somewhere between them. His first session was to introduce the importance of ministry to children and also a couple of well chosen stories to help people feel at home.

We felt so welcome from the very beginning...the Sri Lankan people have such beautiful smiles. We were spoilt with a glass of cold Coke for morning tea and a lovely rice and vegetable packet each for lunch with plates of fresh fruit to share.

Bethany started us off again with the balloon stuffing game which was again very funny and then David spoke about the conference theme and issued the challenge for afterwards. We were due to have a concert and each team was to come up with a skit that would describe how NOT to run a Sunday School class. Sri Lankans are such good actors and storytellers and we knew that they would not let us down. The Anzac performance might not be so good...but we knew they would more than make up for it.

So with afternoon tea done, we all sat ready to be entertained...and we didn't need to understand the language to see the humour in each skit. We had a teacher who kept getting phonecalls from her boyfriend and who ended up showing up with a rose in his teeth. Another team had a man dressed as a lady teacher complete with clip on earrings. They were very good...and great examples of what not to do with a Sunday School class....gotta go for now but more again soon...with photos I promise!