Sunday Crusade

The Service Sunday night went very well, and I was very blessed by the preaching. Pastor Hunter preached on Ephesians 1, and the title was 7 benefits of being a Christian. There was a lot of special music, probably 10 total, and also congregational singing. I loved the spirit.




The people singing "His Banner Over Me Is Love"




Us singing "Who Am I"


Brother Terry with Pastor Steve(an employee from the Centre) and Troy.


The Hunter's special song.


Troy leading in the reading of God's word.


The #57 girl's group song, "Thy Mercy My God". They sang 2 part harmony for this one and did a very nice job- they have come such a long way!




The #68 Roadside Baptist special: Troy, Moti, Terry, Pastor John, Hemdath, and Andrew.


A girl from #68's special.


Emily from Corriverton sang "Word of God Speak", and I played it for her.


Ellen and I sang 3 specials that night, 2 with accompaniment and 1 accapella.


Us singing our closing song, "How Deep the Father's Love for Us".

Crusade

These are some pictures from the Crusade tonight. It is going really well so far, we've had a good turnout and the messages have been simple, yet powerful, about humans, who they are, where they've headed, and what God has done for them and why. It is the gospel message so clear! I love listening to Mr. Hunter.


Emily and her daughter Shannon talking to Ellen. We spend a good bit of time with them. They are from Corriverton. Fat man is standing behind them- He is great! He sits and directs traffic when needed near the train tracks by the post office. Big buckets of cane and sugar get shipped from the factory across the road, and to the ocean to get put on a boat. They use the train to transport. Anyway. He has a little hut and sits there most days. We always wave at him, and if we walk by we talk to him. He came last night and tonight to the crusade, and I am very excited about that!

Talking afterwards...Terry is the guy in the white shirt in the middle. Cynthia is in the yellow top directly in the middle. Priscilla is in red directly behind her. Abigail is to the right in green, and Troy is on the very right in the tan shirt.

This is the "stage" where the services were conducted from.

Some members of the churches singing. Dian is towards the front sitting down holding her son, Isaac. Her other son is in the blue shirt sitting in the front.

We set up chairs on the concrete "driveway" at Ronald's house, one of the members at Roadside, and that is where we are holding the crusade. Some people stand at the road there in the back, and just listen.


This was the Corriverton ladies' special. Mrs. Hunter, me, Andrea (the piano player), Ellen, and Dian (our housekeeper).


Mr. Hunter leading the group in "My God is so BIG" before his message. I think he was at the "Strong and so mighty..." part.



Ellen and I singing "My Jesus Fair"



The Hunter's special song. (Moti and Hemdath behind)


The girls from #57's special song- "By Grace Alone". From left to right: Priscilla, me, Abigail, Cynthia, Ellen, Ravinee, Christina, and Sara.


The girls picked out my outfit because I told them I was bored with my selection of clothes (which is very lame because I have 14 shirts and skirts). This is what they came up with.

Anyway, the singing has gone well, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the preaching. Pray for tomorrow night as they expect more then. We so want God to work here, to change people's hearts as only he can do. We patiently wait on him, and have faith that he will not let our labours be in vain.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Please Pray!

The Crusade is scheduled to begin tonight at six o'clock. I'm looking forward to it. It will be held at Ronald's house, one of the members from Roadside. Tonight and tomorrow night will be at his place. Sunday we'll go to Roadside and go under the tent. I'm looking forward to it, but really praying and wanting God to use this in people's lives here. I'd love to see people really stirred up, genuinely seeking to live for Him and love each other as we ought.

Can you join us specifically in prayer for this today and as you think of it this weekend? I would really appreciate it. If you enjoy praying for specifics, here are a few.

**Katie and I are to sing three specials, as well as leading and participating in a 6 or 7 others.
**Pastor Hunter is striving to prepare simple Gospel messages that will be easy to understand, yet impact the people.
**This is an evangelistic sort of a thing, so pray that we would know how to interact with the people who come from surrounding areas.
**Pray that it won't just be a formality and a showing up of people for some event, but that the Spirit really would work and move.
**Pray that travel to and from the Crusade would be safe and uneventful.

Hmm. That's all I can think of for specifics at the moment. Thank you so much!
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Eating Cane

Could there be a more appropriate follow up post than this? I can't think of one. This is the day Katie and I got first hand experience of what extraction of cane juice and left over bagasse and all that other stuff really means.

Step 1: try to rip the woody outside parts off with your teeth.

Step 2: when you fail, call Mr. Hunter to use his trusty machete to do the job

Step 3: bite hunks off and start sucking

Step 4: swallow the juice, spit out the sawdust

Step 5: repeat the process (if you even enjoyed it to begin with)

Katie was great. We laughed a lot this night.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

"Sugar..uh uh uh uh uh uh uh, honey honey.."

Back in February the electrical students from the Centre were scheduled to go on a field trip to the Sugar Estate, specifically the factory, especially to check out the electrical equipment. Extra chaperones were needed and the Centre thought we may enjoy the tour. They were right and I was more than happy to help out and get to learn a few things in the process. I'm going to do my best here to walk you through the process step by step. The pictures are almost exactly in the order of the way the tour was conducted, so they should follow the process fairly well. I was very intrigued by the entire process.

This is the group I helped watch. The boys were split into two groups: one group went with Katie and Terry on Wednesday, the other group went with myself and Hemdath on Friday. The guys really behaved themselves well. I didn't have to do too much chasing or correcting.

This is right before we entered. Basically a snapshot of the shell of the factory.

Employee parking. Guess they've figured out that bikes=good exercise and less air polution.

This picture shows the punts. The punts are those large, numbered barge looking things floating in the canal. The process reminds me of a water ride in some ways. The punts go into the fields (the canals are all connected in a network/grid that leads right back to the factory), are filled up with raw cane, the punts travel back to the factory and get dumped onto a feeding bed, then they move back out to the fields. In the fields there are somewhere around 2400 men cutting the cane with cutlasses. From there a tractor hauls it to the canal's edge and dumps the load into the punt. Unless it's been raining and it's too muddy that is. In that case the workers just carry bundles to the punt and fill it up.

This is a view of the feeding bed from underneath. You can see the chains that keep the cane moving, it's conveyor belt style. We walked directly underneath this. It was a good thing we had our hard hats on--one of the boys had a large piece of cane fall directly onto his head. This feeder dumps the raw cane into a cane carrier, which then starts feeding the cane into three sets of knives or blades which start to cut, rip, and shred the cane in order to extract everything.

These are the second and third sets of blades it travels through. Check out the left side of the picture, the wooden loong box is where the cane continues on. One interesting fact I learned is that 12 tons of raw cane yields about 1 ton of sugar.

This looked like a picture Dad or Uncle Marty (or anyone who has half a clue about that kind of stuff) might enjoy. It was the motor and shaft for the blades that chop up the cane. No safety restrictions in this place. It's pretty free in there...and dangerous for some I suppose. We lived, nobody was hurt.

The reason we even came.

Again, the boys learning a lot about their field of interest.

Okay, from the chopping up of the cane the small pieces go into mill #1 and eventually pass through 4 seperate mills. I think this is the third mill. Hot water is mixed with the cane to loosen the juices and separate the cane juice from the "bagasse" (left over saw dust stuff). The factory goes through 2000 tons of cane juice daily. Also, 94% of the cane juice is extracted from the bagasse in the end.

Another view of the mills, this is the fourth, obviously. Third directly behind it, etc.

This is just what I thought was a cool picture of some of the machinery.

After the juice is extracted and the bagasse cannot be used any further for sugar, it is dumped from the fourth mill onto another conveyor belt that proceeds to an elevator. The elevator sends it on its way to the furnaces. There are three furnaces with two shoots to feed bagasse into for each one. The furnace boils water and the plant is pretty much run on steam. I was able to peer into one of these furnaces. I'm glad I'm not going to hell.

Excess bagasse is obviously dumped here. It's saved for problem times when the company needs to keep operating, but has no new bagasse coming in to burn. There is a tractor lift I didn't take a picture of, but you get the idea. Pretty much a reverse back to the furnaces.

Back to the sweet stuff. The juice heads to these large drums to be clarified. Think mini swimming pool in your yard. Okay, not too mini. Interesting note: all signs in the factory are hand painted. I liked this sign especially. I encourage you to read through their checklist, I found it interesting. The limed juice is added to the mixture along with a settling agent (can't remember the name of it) to draw out impurities. I was told the juice is the heated to 320 degrees C.

And now testing the clarity of the juice.

Next step: evaporation process. And they keep on boiling it down and condensing, moving to three different huge drums for this process, until....
Pay dirt! This was awesome! See all that brown stuff? It's the chute of freshly produced brown sugar. Everyone got to taste it, as much as they wanted actually. Grandma, you would have loved the sanitation codes: dip hand in and take as much as you please. Didn't wash? Eh, it's okay. The vat this sugar is dumped into holds 80 tons of the sweet stuff.
This was a further step in the process. This company doesn't produce refined sugar or even very white sugar, but this spinning drum was removing molasses from some of the sugar. It was pretty cool to watch.
The group at the end of the tour.
This is the brand new factory that hasn't started production as of yet. The old one we got to tour is basically history. This one should be running soon, but there are some hang-ups with financing, etc. Apparently the one in charge of all of this is in some hot water with the new plant. I don't know details. Anyway, I hope this was as enjoyable for you to walk through in pictures as it was for me in person!

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Priscilla's birthday and the weekend

Last Friday we went to Priscilla's house for a belated birthday party, and we played games, talked, and just had a good time. Then we spent the night at her house so that the Hunters wouldn't have to pick us up. We actually enjoyed staying the night a lot, it let us really get to know them better. We took off Saturday morning and went to the market before returning home.

This is Sunday afternoon when Priscilla, me, and a group of people walked to the water plant where they purify water near Priscilla's house. This is Ellen and I the morning after we spent the night at Priscilla's. We looked rough.

Marty- this is me sleeping under the mosquito net with Priscilla. I didn't get 1 bite! Anthony got up pretty early and started snapping pictures of sleeping bodies...that child and my camera. They are like attached.

This is Shirley, Priscilla, Abigail, and Anthony's mom.

At Priscilla's belated birthday party, Abigail, Cynthia, Christina, and Ellen!

Drivers License

Our last week has been packed with things to do, which is awesome! We are loving how much God is giving us to do and be a part of here. This week has gone exceptionally well, and we have humbled our hearts before God, and felt like dirt, and for some reason, he's blessing us and our efforts here and giving us great opportunities and times of sharing our faith with others.

We have a crusade coming up this weekend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There is much work and preparation going into it, and we are begging God to work in some hearts- even our own, and change us for his glory. Ellen and I are heading up much of the special music, which has been time consuming but fun. I am playing piano for a few different things, and I need practice time! Ellen and I also need to get our final songs picked out that we will sing together along with working on all of the other songs that we are involved with doing with others. It is fun when God works in your life, and we have definitely seen that lately.

Monday we kind of felt like failures because we didn't proclaim the name of Christ as we ought. Yesterday and today God gave us amazing grace and allowed us to be bold in proclaiming our love for him and what he's done for us and who he is for us. People think we're crazy. Especially on the bus ride tonight when we had prayed for a bus to come and pick us up within the next 2 minutes (because we were pretty far out in a place that doesn't have buses all that often) and low and behold...exactly 2minutes, Ellen was counting, and a bus picks us up. We were on highs. We were so happy that God ANSWERS prayer. We have to pray in faith, and he is FAITHFUL! We felt like shouting "OUR GOD IS REAL" because we could feel him, see him, knew he was real.

We were so happy and singing on the bus, and the guy in front of us (along with many others on the bus) turned around and asked Ellen something like "did you have a good day?" and Ellen told him that she had an AWESOME day and that she loves God more than anything. He thought we were both a little coo-coo I think, and we just looked at each other and laughed that only we seemed to understand what the other one was experiencing about the person of God.

We went to New Amsterdam to get our drivers license again today because we went Monday, but the head police officer guy wasn't there to sign our papers because the President was coming through, so we had to go back today to get it all finished. So we officially have Guyanese permits to drive here! Ellen drove tonight, and I'll try it out tomorrow.

I am so happy that even though I can go through times when I don't feel like God is very near, if I keep seeking, keep reading, keep praying, he WILL be found. The joy and happiness that comes from a relationship with him is incredible- the most exciting thing I've ever experienced, and the funny thing is, it doesn't end. A great movie is really exciting, but there's an ending to it, and then you have to move back into real life. This ongoing exquisite relationship with my Creator, Jesus Christ, the maker of the Universe, I AM. Now that never ends, and it seems to get more pleasurable, more fulfilling, more engrossing. We serve such an amazing God. Tomorrow Ellen and I will be teaching singing at the Centre, and going out and inviting people to the Crusade, so pray that God will be glorified and that he will see fit to bring people, and change them.

We love everyone back home, and miss you all.

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