Church activities and Carnival

On Saturday, we had the first youth group meeting at Diego Martin Mennonite Church for the term. My parents led it. They will lead it every second Saturday of the month, and someone else will lead it every fourth Saturday of the month. Six youths came, as well as six adults. People were pretty quiet, and didn't talk a lot, but I still thought overall, it went pretty well. We had no idea how many people would show up, so we were glad at least some came. We started out with a prayer and some singing. Then, we had a little bible study and spent most of the time discussing the story. Although, the adults had more to say about it than the youths. And then people talked about what they had done previously during youth group and what they liked and didn't like and all that. For the first one, not knowing who would come or how it would work exactly, I was pleased.
~Olivia

As I write this, the Carnival holiday is winding down. For the past week, there have been events televised every evening. We watched some of the calypso, steel pan and costume competitions. For the past two days, the TV has been showing the constant streams of people parading through the streets of Port of Spain--some in very elaborate costume, and many wearing hardly anything at all. There are smaller celebrations in many other places as well. Many Christians stay away from the celebrations on Carnival Monday and Tuesday because of the heavy drinking, lewd behavior and violence that sometimes breaks out. We are told that the beaches are packed as people who don't want to be involved in that sort of thing head there to get away from the reveling. In fact, a number of churches schedule youth camps over Carnival weekend as a way of providing alternative entertainment. Tomorrow it's back to school for all of us, although we've been warned that there may be very few students who show up.
While Carnival has been on full display, it has been very difficult to keep up with the Winter Olympics here. Not surprisingly, Trinidad and Tobago has no team competing in Vancouver--although there has been a 2-man bobsled team at a couple of winter games. I guess they figured that since Jamaica had one, there ought to be a Trini team, too. None of the local stations are broadcasting any of the competition. We have managed to find some streaming video online, but it is inconsistent. Also, since we are four hours later than Vancouver, the event finals often go late into the night.
~Richard

Because our work happens mostly at home and because we still have classes tomorrow, most of our carnival has been spent working at home. That's been fine with us as the roads and crowds are generally deemed unsafe. With the girls home we have managed to find time for family fun here. Today we finished our preparations in time for a cricket game on the concrete slab between the church and the preschool. We bought the girls a cricket set for Christmas. Of course theirs is really a children's set, not what real cricketers would use and our version of the game with only 4 people and limited space was quite scaled down. But since we are all new to the game (not to mention my lack of depth perception and general inability to see flying balls), scaled down was just right for us. This is what Carnival Tuesday looked like for us.
Most of the Mennonite churches here do not really observe lent. We are introducing it at Diego Martin. But since it is a new concept to digest, we are not planning to observe Ash Wednesday tomorrow. Still, we are teaching our music group at church the song From the Depths.
~Barb