Africablog: Operation Classroom '07

After another half-day of workshops on Saturday, the group spent some time in downtown Freetown, visiting local favorite Crown Bakery for lunch and then doing some shopping. Some of our team members proved more attractive to the local vendors than others...Rick was a real hit with the ladies selling stuff!

When the group got back from that excursion, there was a wedding reception taking place in the courtyard at the Hotel 5:10. The guests were dressed in their finest clothes and there were all kinds of colorful decorations and celebratory stuff. They had music and toasts and speeches and more music and then -- just like that -- it ended right at 7:00 and everyone left! My brother's wedding reception went on until the wee hours of the morning -- I don't think we'd have been able to get everyone to leave the premises at exactly 7:00 the way they did here!

We attended church on Sunday morning at Bishop Baughman UMC, home church of Operation Classroom's Sierra Leone Coordinator, Saffa Koroma. The service was more similar to our own style of worship than the worship last week at New Georgia UMC in Liberia. And we got a great lesson in church fundraising from a man who went up and down the aisle in church soliciting support for a rural congregation. ("Who will give one bag of rice?" etc.) Many members of our team were moved to support this effort, and we have it on good authority that two cows, one named Bonnie and one named Randy, are on their way to the rural church as we speak.

After church we engaged in the time-honored, solemn, and faith-focused mission tradition of Beach Day. :) Sierra Leone has a beautiful and (unlike Liberia's) clean coastline, so we headed out to the beach for the afternoon. We had a great lunch and played pool at The Atlantic, a Lebanese-owned restaurant on the beach and then we picked up and headed to Check Point Kona, a beach bar. Some of us took a leisurely beach stroll while others spent time relaxing in the sun or did some shopping once the local merchants heard the Americans had arrived. Marchusa got a really cool wood carving, and others picked up some nice postcards.

We spent last night back at the hotel, doing some pre-return debriefing, since part of the team is returning home today. Eight of us will continue on to Jaiama, but five of us are flying home this afternoon, getting into Indianapolis on Tuesday afternoon. We'll miss the part of the group that's leaving, for sure. A big chunk of our medical folks are taking off, and our most seasoned international traveler (Jan) is also in the group that's returning!

This morning, we've already ventured into Freetown and had breakfast at the Crown Bakery; then we visited the super-crowded United Methodist Secondary School for Girls in Freetown. The UMSSG is the academic home of 1,406 girls and they're all crammed into about a dozen classrooms. They have a morning session and an afternoon session, but still, my calculations put that at an average of about 50 per classroom...and those classrooms are not big. We'll have more to report when we return about ways the UMC in Indiana might work to help support the UMSSG in Freetown!

We'll spend the rest of today helping the returners make their way to the airport and then prepare for our own long, bumpy trip up to Jaiama, leaving early Tuesday morning. We'll spend a few days up in Jaiama, then head back down to Freetown for the weekend and head back to the U.S. one week from today.

Love and prayers from the whole team to our friends and family. Those who are returning today will have many stories to tell...those who are returning next week will miss you just a little bit longer and be home soon.