The First Weekend

See the first three days blog for Saturday 5th. Sunday 6th - up early (about 6am), during the night there was a big fight outside my hostel window so didn’t sleep well. Nevertheless, I got ready and walked to Church. From earlier enquires, I was given directions to the nearest Baptist Church, which apparently, was only ten minutes walk from the YMCA. But what I failed to ask was whether this was normal walking distance or for someone on crutches? Of course as I set off, I soon realised this was no ten minutes walk but rather a 40mins sweating walk, constantly checking the rubber tips on my crutches, which were wearing off pretty rapidly. But on the positive side, I am sure I lost a few kilos that day so not bad!

Got to the church 20mins before the start of the service. The church is an old American Baptist but the service was pretty traditional, with a small congregation, about ten adults and eleven children. The service started on time. The Minister had asked me before the service if I could do Old Testament reading. This was Ezekiel 37:1-14 - the valley of dried bones, on which he also preached on. The dried bones was an appropriate theme for this small congregation as I soon became aware that many people had left for other churches or had stopped coming altogether. In fact, his key message was how can the church be revived, how can life be breathed back into this congregation. The service ended on time about 11.30am and after a brief chat, I walked down to the other side of the road to get a taxi.

Took the taxi to the town centre to change some money as I had run out of Leones and back at the hostel to relax, watched a bit of live UK premiership football. After some thoughts about my accommodation, I decided to move from the single room with shared shower and bathroom to a self-contained room which was still significantly cheaper than Hotel 5.10. I had even started thinking that I could stay here for 12 months - it has 24hrs electricity, fans in rooms and it is centrally located. But this is still a whopping £7500 for one year - the need for that part-time work to support myself is becoming clear and urgent! The move itself was completed in less than five minutes, unpacked my stuff, did a bit of reading and then a bit of surfing the web - by now I had acquired a mobile Internet dongle which I had topped up with 2GB credit, which should last for a good month. Back to old habits, stayed up late drafting text and planning the agenda for the coming week. Finally got to bed about 1.30am