Day 8 - Brazzaville, Congo - Monday, May 4, 2009

Monday! Another day, wow! Thank you very much for your prayers. They are needed, felt and give us the strength to continue and persevere.

At 10:00 AM I was supposed to meet with Shepherd Doriand Malanda and some other choir leaders to discuss the Brazzaville choir scene and also the sheet music project we gave to this group last year and where they are on it. I’ve noticed some improvement over time, 10 o’clock in the past may have been 12 noon. It’s getting closer and closer to “real time” that, with some, 10 o’clock is 10 o’clock. With morning traffic in Brazzaville, this wasn’t going to happen. I went down to the restaurant (Hippocampe) to work on my computer as the signal (wifi) was very weak in my room. Two brothers showed up, after a while, but I soon found out that they weren’t there for the Music Meeting but for something else.

I listened to them for a while then they left and eventually the Apostles and brothers showed up for lunch (guess what? Soup again + beer!) As I said before, we’ve gone from Baguette to Soup.

Prepared eventually for Ministers’ Meeting in Kinsoundi (this is the 2nd of 3 churches in Brazzaville). There were 300-400 brothers there. An interesting service as well as an interesting way of getting there. Of course the choir was a male choir as only brothers were there. These roads are worse than the other ones I’ve seen, up and down, wet and dry, hard and soft. The word for the service was Mark 13:37 and something from 2 Chronicles 29:5. When we left after the 1 ½ hour service, I wanted to make it easy on the Apostle Kalala and went on his side to get into the back seat of his car. What I didn’t realize is that there was quicksand (OK, just kidding), mud, water, that it almost seemed like I was set-up to fall. I didn’t fall but I got nice and wet and dirty. So in this condition we left back to Olympic Hotel and three of us (without Apostle Kalala) went up to Apostle Dzur’s room for the evening. Before leaving Apostle Kalala I left him some clothes for laundry for his wife to arrange, as I usually do while here (more on that later).