We were picked up by Meto at about 9am. He had his wife Eileen, and their eldest grandson Jordan with him. Jordan piled into the boot and gave Margaret and I plenty of room in the back seat. He had excellent English skills and enjoys playing tennis.
We got to the village church at Mele about 9:30am, and had a bit of a tour around. They're preparing for the General assembly of the PCV and they've just built a massive hall. I'm trying to think of a comparison … the inside of it would be at least as big as the hall at Wesley, I'd probably say double the width and double the length as well. The conference is next month and they've just got the roof up last weekend, so it still looks a bit cement-y, but they're on track to get it finished. They've also got a school on the premises, and then you can't quite tell where the school ends and the village houses begin, but we had Eileen with us so she filled us in.
Then at about five to ten we went into the church building. It's a lovely large building, with coloured glass in the windows. Along the left hand side of the church were drawings of Moses, David, the garden of Eden and Noah's Ark. Along the right hand side was a focus on Jesus, as a baby, at his baptism, healing Jairus' daughter, on the cross and as the lion of Judah. (And for those who have been doing the ELM centre course with me, yes – I was definitely thinking about the Christology of it all.)
The absolute highlight was the singing. Oh my goodness I nearly cried during the doxology. There were a couple of led songs at the beginning, but I think my favourite was trying to sing along with some of the songs. I read the hymn book and it really was as easy as reading the words. For instance, try and sing this bit to the first verse of “O for a thousand tongues”
Oltaem mi glad tumas blong sing
Blong prasem Jisas Kraes (x2)
Mi glad blong talem nem blong hem
Long fes blong evri man (x however many times you sing it)
We listened to the preacher, and he was making jokes, and a couple of them I even understood, or at least I thought I did. Then we came to the Lord's supper, which was served with Raspberry cordial. Mmmm. There were about 250-300 people at the service, and I think it ended up going for about 2 and a half hours. Towards the end we had announcements and Margaret and I were asked to stand up and we waved.
We then went on a mini-tour of the village, Meto showed us a place where we could go snorkelling, and then took us to see the other churches in the area which have been built for communities of people who have moved up from the island of Tanna. It was lovely to see that the churches are really the most beautiful and well kept buildings in the villages.
On the way back we went to the supermarket and picked up some water, then we were back at the hotel, where Ian and Jenni had just arrived. I was so awful, I thought they were arriving later! We could have picked them up from the airport. Anyway, at that point it was an opportune time to hand over the netball uniforms, so we handed them over and took some photos, and then we gave Jordan some tennis balls as a gift.
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OK – I'm writing a bit later now. The four of us went off to church, but on the way we went past a rally for National Bible Week, anyway, apparently because of that, the Presbyterian service wasn't on, so we went back to the rally where there was an awesome mosh pit and this guy who was leading the worship was doing some rather impressive energetic moves on stage.
So now we've come back to the hotel, we had some dinner (and my plans for a holiday to Peru are taking shape based on our conversations), and we're now back in the hotel room and about to go to bed. It's been a big awesome day.
Tomorrow we're meeting up with some people from the PCV to talk about what we're going to be doing during the week – wish us luck!
Katherine
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