The Preparation

Hello from Essex in London!

We are now at our host home in a part of London known as Essex. Our host is named Hillary. She is originally from Surinam, in South America by way of Holland, and has been living in England for the past five years. She has hosted the past three Tri-S groups that have come from Anderson. She has opened her lovely home to us and has found enough room for 9 people! It is quite the task but we all have a bed to sleep on. You may be wondering why 9 people when there were 7 to start out the trip. Debbie has a friend from school, Zach, who has been biking around Europe for the past two months with his cousin Jacob, who also attends AU and will be a sophomore. Zach's mom works for Mr. Leak, our trip leader, so they connected and decided to spend their last few days on the continent helping us with VBS and sightseeing. We met up with Zach and Jacob this morning at the church. Zach looked pretty excited to see some familiar faces.

We discovered yesterday that trying to manage our luggage on the underground, in our church clothes would be a disaster so the church graciously offered to pick us up from our hotel this morning. It took two vans but we did it. Driving through London is quite the experience. It would probably take months of practice and short drives for one to be comfortable and aggressive enough to drive in this city. We didn't feel unsafe with our drivers, we just weren't sure about the drivers of the other cars. We made it to the church in one piece and spent the remainder of the day there worshiping, eating, and preparing for VBS.

The people of Community Church of God are so warm and welcoming. They had a hug for us right away. And WOW can they cook! It was great to share a meal with them and get to know them and some of there backgrounds. Many of the members are from Jamaica or Barbados. This makes for interesting conversation and some GREAT music.

We spent a lot of time with Sister Theresa yesterday and today. She is leading the opening and closing assemblies and is a wonderful woman with a huge heart for service. We visited her "flat" and helped her bring back some props to use during the week. We are glad to be working with someone so enthusiastic and committed.

Tomorrow at 9:30 the kids begin arriving for registration. Please pray that it will be a calm day and that everything will be very exciting but that it will run smoothly.

We can't wait to share more experiences with all of you!

Love you all!

Debbie and Jennie

Some of the prep work. Jennie is making power point slides of the song lyrics.