What a Week! (Christmas party, Cool Conversations, Package Stress, and Drugs & Drunkenness)

Last week was a busy week - so sorry not to post. Here's a couple of interesting things that happened:

Light up Belfast party - joined thousands around City Hall on Tuesday for their Christmas light festival (I know, it's really early! :-). It was a blast - including kids choirs singing carols and Euro-pop groups singing a myriad of songs. Pictures are at the top of this post. :-)

Really Cool Conversations - it's been a really great week of conversations. Wed. night at Int'l bible study we had several new people, so that stirred new relationships and friends. Thur. afternoon I had coffee with a professor, Dr. Eric Mourier-Genoud, who studies missions in Mozambique - really, really good time and really helpful. Then Thur. night I had a really good conversation with Dale about a Protestant/Christian perspective on special needs persons in relation to care and church services. Really interesting - sparked by a curiosity in a Catholic Bishop and a "care home" (for lack of a better term) in Southern Ireland at the turn of the 20th century. Then, Fri, got to have coffee with Jude, which was great. I always enjoy hanging out with him and learn a lot - this week it was about Lebanon and the Druze, Christians, Shiites, and Sunni's. Also met a guy from Aman at Starbucks who's doing his PhD here and is from Northern Jordan, prior to Amman.

Stress with a Package - I ordered a portable scanner (so I don't have to hold on to the endless pieces of paper I'm accumulating) about three weeks ago. After three days of frustration with the parcel delivery service, I ended up spending 3 hours, two bus rides, and a £10 taxi ride to find their warehouse and pick up the package. Ugh! (although the scanner is a huge blessing)

SOS - Drugs & Drunkenness - went back out yesterday with SOS's afternoon reach to the teenagers. Really good, really crazy cold, and very busy. It was a good day but a really weird day, in the sense that it was unlike any of the other days I'd been out. Around 350 teens probably came through - one of which was a young girl who was so drunk she was throwing up, so several of the staff took care of her on the bus. On top of that, I haven't seen so many kids drunk or high since I got here. It was really sad. There have been reports recently that the presence of cocaine is at the highest it's been in a long time in Belfast. I hate to think that it's found it's way into the teens lives - but at the same time, I'd be nieve to think it hasn't. I was once again reminded that these kids have experienced more of what is typically called "life" - sex, drugs, alcohol, death, abortion, rape, etc. - in their 14, 15, 17 years of life then I have in my 25. I find myself wishing that, for their sake and because of the emptiness you see in many of their eyes, they could have been spared some of what life has brought their way.

A busy week - meaning I didn't get much work done (and have a 3,000 paper due a week from tomorrow - although, I'm practially done with a 1,000 word essay due on Jan 13 - I know, priorities....oops!) - but it was a great, memorable week!

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As a random endnote, check out this really cool article on Dr. Chip Pollard, JBU's current president and my former boss (kind of...meaning it was his signature on my paycheck, but he was three "boss levels" above me...sounds like some kind of Nintendo game. :-)