Montego Bay-Sunday

Sunday we got up at 5:30 to get breakfast and go to church at 7:00. We went to Webster Memorial Baptist Church, which is the same church our Fellowship team attended last year on Sunday. It is a good church, but for the early service we only had about ten people. We did the whole service ourselves, with music, puppets, one personal testimony, one skit, and Pastor Jason preaching. After that we had about an hour for meet and greet between services. Jackie and I were talking to one lady named Maudrey, who was explaining a little about the culture of the men to us. Since it was Father's Day, that was the topic we sort of got on. She told us that about 75 percent of the men here in Jamaica don't ever make the commitment to marry and raise their children - they just leave when they feel like it. That's what happened to Maudry's boyfriend, who had three children with her and then left. She had to raise her two sons and daughter all by herself, and she asked us to pray that her sons would not be like their father. She also answered all of our questions about different religions here. There are mainly Christians and Rastafarians, and Mormons, as well as a few Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Rastas believe that the real Jesus is black and that heaven is in Ethiopia, and that smoking marijuana helps one get closer to God. Basically, they are considered holy men, but they don't actually know what they are talking about.

In between services, the church served us cheese and crackers, and bag juice, which is like a melted popsicle in a bag. Second service was really full, and some of the Jamaicans had a part in the service as well, with special music and Father's Day poems. In total, we were at the church for about five and a half hours, which got kind of long.

In the afternoon we played soccer again, this time in a tiny circular field cut hewn from the tall grass. In Jamaica, there are some nice soccer fields open for public use, and we thought we were going to one of those, but we weren't after all. Some men had gotten up early to weed wack the field espcially for us. When we don't play on real soccer fields, we use two stones for a goal. The field was very full of bugs, especially in the shade, and when we weren't playing we were busy dodging spiders who crawled very fast on our legs. We use two vehicles to transport people, a fifteen passenger van and a bigger tour bus. Patrick drives the bus, and Junior drives the van. Junior came down and told us not to kill the spiders because they won't hurt us. To prove his point he picked one up and it sat on his thumb while he held one of the legs with his forefinger. We also caught a millipede. We gave jerseys to the fifteen or twenty men and boys who had come, as well as a few soccer balls.

We now have a new member of the team, Patricia, who is a Jamaican Youth for Christ worker. I call her Trish. She stays in our room, and she is very nice. We were asking her all kinds of questions on the way to the night show. She taught us the right way to say "Ya Mon," which is not actually that, but "Yeh Mon." I asked her what Jamaicans think of Americans, and the first thing she said was that we can't dance. Also, that we are rich. But mainly it depends on what experiences people have had with Americans. She wants to go to America, so we were asking her what she thought America would be like, and she said that she expected it to be very cold, to have fast food places everywhere, and that there would be lots of fun things like amusement parks and movies. I suppose it's a fairly true conception.

Our night show was in a neighborhood. We set up on a pile of rocks. Many kids came and they loved it. There were a few adults towards the back. We were mostly in the road, so whenever a car came through we'd have to move out of the way. Our band equipment was on the rock pile, but we all had to stand in the road. Trish has been working with YFC for a year, but she has not been at any of our shows before. She said that what we were doing was good.