New Kingdom Hall 2

First of all thank you so much my dear sisters for your comments and emails.  Occasionally I feel like we're alone on the other side of the planet (or even another one!) but to hear your personal experiences and words of encouragement remind me of our true united worldwide brotherhood (should be sisterhood in this case).

I'm working late on this tonight because my harddrive in my laptop died (sob!) so I have to use Terry's billion year old computer.  It won't talk to my phone so I had to transfer the photos to his phone then onto the computer, only I can't because he's gone to a meeting.  Also we had no electricity all day so I couldn't do it earlier.   This is Gambia.

I didn't spend so much time on site this week as we had our Circuit Visit.  Our circuit consists of the three English congregations and new group in Gambia and two English congregations in Dakar, Senegal.  Our CO and his wife are missionaries in between visits.  The visit was lovely.  We met on site each morning which was encouraging for us and for the brothers on site.  He was able to take us through the different features of the new Bibles which arrived here just last month.

Lets start with one of our most important volunteers, the night shift dog.  We don't see much of him, he just turns up at meal time.

The site is getting full of blocks.  Someone said they're making 600 a day.  It looks hard work.

This is the block mould, they have 3 moulds.

I haven't been involved in that so far, I've always managed to find something easier to do.  I leave the heavy stuff to the younger sisters like our lovely Yama, one of our 15 regular pioneers.  (We also have two missionaries and two regular auxlliary pioneers, so 19 in full time service.  You'd think we'd be tripping over each on the ministry but there's so much work to do we can't keep up!) 

 The sisters are a large army, here are two cutting wires for the steel fixings.  It's nice work to do in between heavier work like shovelling gravel.

Saturday was Set Setal which is the National Cleaning Day.  No businesses are allowed to open and no transport is allowed on the road.  The whole nation are supposed to clean up the streets of the rubbish they've thrown down all month.  That meant we weren't able to go to site before 1pm (Set Setal lasts 9 till 1).  By that time it was 33 (91.4F) degrees and getting hotter so we couldn't face it.  It's one thing to go in the morning and continue, but to start at that time and temperature was just too much.  Sometimes I feel such a wimp!!

Apparently they made a lot of progress on Friday and Saturday so keep you posted next Monday.