Current location:	landing, outside Peter's room
Current mood:	full
Entry tags:	church, dragons, dressing up, food, house hunting, woodlands, work

At home for once
So yes, I'm updating at home while sitting on the landing- this is where I normally end up when I don't want to go downstairs to use the interwebs. I still don't have internet connection in my room and so I end up either downstairs or on the landing. *sigh* Oh well.


House Hunting
At the moment I have seen one place (which was tiny, tiny) and no others. Most places are either too expensive or in the wrong area, which is just annoying. There are two places that I want to see and one of them is in a very good place, but this involves phoning people to ask about arranging a viewing... Don't likesy phones.


Gap Year Worker
At work we get these gap year workers who stay with us on a full time basis, but work voluntarily and just get paid for their living expenses. Since I've been there we've had Dave from the Wirral, who is lovely, but sadly he left today and went home.

Over the last month or so we've been trying to secure a new gap year worker from CareForce, which is the charity which supplied us with David. Just last week we heard from them and said that they had someone who would probably work well for us and sent us her details. Just by chance or coincidence she happens to be a friend of David's who he knew at university! So this girl is going to come in at some point so that we can interview her and see if she would be suitable and let her get an idea of what we're about as well.

Apparently she's really into drama and art and plays the violin- so I'm already putting in a vote to take her on so she'll be able to help me with the crafting things and get the little brats children doing various interesting things.


Dave
Dave Left!!! Waaaaaaa. ;_; Ok, so I only knew him for 3 months, but he was fun and cool and he made the tea in the morning and did the washing up *grin*


Dressing up 1.
One of the girls from club wants to dress me up (her words) in a dress because she thinks that I don't like showing my legs. I explained that actually my reason for not wearing skirts or dresses is more to do with being able to move properly. Also there's the fact that with the lads that I work with in the club I wouldn't want the risk of one of them deciding to do something stupid like flip the back of the skirt up or something like that.


Dressing up 2.
... Actually, I'll do this bit in a minute, let's go back in time a little...

Thursday
We didn't have the club Thursday evening, instead we had a band night!

David has a band that he has been playing with for three years. They play secular and non-secular songs and often do weddings and other functions. So they came and set their stuff up and practised a bit and then we let the kids in!

It was great fun and I got to be a bouncer with Wole, and I served the hotdogs at the interval. I actually didn't eat a single hotdog- I just wasn't hungry, which isn't like me. I think I'm going off canned hotdogs a bit... Hm. Anyway, yeah, everyone had fun and David got given a load of presents from the kids and we were all dancing and having fun and it was a brilliant atmosphere, even though it was a bit sad because we all knew that we were having this fun because it was David's leaving party.

Friday
Friends of Pastor John came to visit. They are a group called OFNC... Overseas Fellowship of Nigerian Christians. (yes, I did just have to look that up!) and they began with the arrangement of an outreach weekend where there would be a prayer meeting that evening, on the Saturday a barbecue and door-to-door evangelism and then on Sunday, a Nigerian style service. We've been aware of this coming for about... I think they first approached us about two or three weeks ago.

So they had the prayer meeting in the evening- I was not there for it because I was asleep. I was really, really tired on Friday and ended up sleeping in the day.

Saturday
Overslept (oops) and then got picked up by John and taken to Woodlands for the Outreach day. One of the first things he asked me was "How many black people have you seen in one place at one time?"
Me: "Well my dad's church is majority black, so..."
John: "Ah right, that's good, because there's a LOT of black people there."

He was right. LOADS of them! *laughs* Oh, by the way, John is also black and Nigerian. Forgot to mention that!

The day was quite mad and hectic, but it was fun as well and it was wonderful to see so many people in the centre and having them all going outside to play football on the grass and people from the community going past and either watching or joining in. And there was a barbeque around the back and I ate rather a lot.

Right at the end Peter passed me a sheet with which to make a banner for David's surprise farewell party. So I waited until everyone was gone, turned all but one of the lights (in the kitchen), spread out the sheet on the kitchen floor, got out the remaining poster paints (Green, blue, yellow and black!), a selection of wide and thin brushes, a pallet and began to paint. The banner ended up looking pretty good, and even the kids that came over to Peter's (where we had the party) said that it looked good, and then began signing their names on it in pen and writing little messages for David, which looked great. (I wish we'd had other colours of pen... oh well)

We had another barbeque set up and waited for David to get back from town. Kids really do not get the idea of a surprise party though. *sigh* When they spotted David getting off the bus down the road one of them yells "DAVID'S COMING!" and dives back into the garden, then they're all hiding, while talking loudly, and peering over the fence so that if David even looked in that direction he would have seen them. I only the other hand simply walked back into the garden from where I was looking out for David, and calmly walked around to the side of the house where I couldn't be seen with the rest of the sensible people.

Anyway, somehow we did actually manage to surprise David, if only by sheer number, and we had a great time with lots of Beach Boys, Michael Jackson and dance music. And then we finished off with some rock, because David is a rocker at heart!

Sunday
Today.

Went to church, dressed in Nigerian dress (I will be putting photos up very shortly), met Peter who was in a Nigerian suit and David who was wearing a Nigerian shirt. Other than the fact that we were white, we blended right in with the 40+ people (majority black!!!! In fact I think that me, Pete and Dave were the only white people there until a couple of the kids from club turned up at the end to say goodbye to Dave!)

It was a good service, long though, and there was good afterwards.
Lots of food.
You know those big blue food coolers that you take on picnics? Well there were three of those filled with rice, and two with chicken! I have three bags of rice. Well, I have two now because me and mum ate some, and Jim ate some chicken. I have eaten WAY too much! Oh I feel so very, very fat!

But it was a good time!

Here we go, a few pictures from today at church. You don't get much of an idea of how many people were there, but take my word that there was a lot!


One of the lads was crying because of Dave leaving. It was nice to see how much they are going to miss Dave and there's a part of me that hopes that when I leave I will have made that much of an effect as well. I know they quite often talk about the other female staff that have been at the centre before me, but they don't seem to have a big as big an influence as Dave has been. I think he's done an awful lot with them and he's a lot of fun as well, so they really got close to him.

Connor did inform me last week that I would be his replacement Dave though. *laugh*


Dragons
I worked out why I've been having problems with getting my dragons on LJ. When I've updated with dragons in the past I was updating on Semagic (as I am right now) and on there I don't have to think about sorting out the html tags, which of course the dragoncodes are. So now I have worked that out I'm a lot happier because I know that it wasn't that I was doing something wrong, it was just that I wasn't using the same software.

Anyway, that said, here they are.
*** *** *** ***