I speant the last week on a mission team in Galway, with the Covenant Fellowship which is a part of the Western presbytry of the church. And you don't get much farther west than Galway. It's a nice city, although the houses are apparently very expensive, even more so than here. They look pretty swish too. We only were in one estate with any houses that looked poverty-stricken. It's very multi-cultural too. Lots of the people we met weren't actually native English speakers (and not native Irish speakers either, because they all speak perfect English too), they were recent immigrants. And the university is more impressive than Queens. It's mostly on a cohesive campus, unlike QUB, but it's bang in the centre of the city, because it's older than most of it, which is what I love about Queens. Galway in race week is absolutely insane. The traffic was chockablock going out to the racecourse. Some people with more money than sense took a helicopter ride from their hotels to the course. The money that went on betting alone was ridiculous. There must have been millions and millions of euros came into the city. Down in the city centre in the evenings was like Belfast on a Thursday night times about 15. On Ladies' Day the women were out on the town still in their hats and stilletto heels. There were loads of buskers and street entertainers around. We saw a couple of fire jugglers, a small boy who rode a unicycle, a bagpiper (with a repetoire of 7 tunes, and I've never heard 'Happy Birthday' played on the pipes before, either), a group of drummer, and a guy in red greasepaint pretending to be the devil. We talked to him on the Thursday night, and he said people were always trying to convert him. Mad. But I'm glad I saw the Galway races were like, even though I'd never go purposely to see them.
Typical day was: get up, collect at the minister's house, Bible study and prayer, leaflet distribution, lunch, door-to-door questionnaires, dinner, open-air in Shop Street, possibly coffee, bed. It didn't happen that way every day, though. One night was the congregational barbecue, at one of the members houses away out in the country to the north, and the Friday night was the children's club in the hall in the back garden. A couple of afternoons some of the girls would stay in and help get the tea or look after the kids. The minister's kids are Eiléanóir and Labhaoise. Eíléanóir is four and is a real handful. She wrestled with the boys and her favourite word is 'no!'. It was hilarious when she came to the children's club, because there wasn't a peep out of her all night. She had gone all shy and was the best behaved child there. Labhaoise is two and is the exact opposite of Eiléanóir. She likes to come up to you and smile and give you a shell or something she's found. The other church worker and his wife have three little boys, and the eldest, Caleb, is quite severely autistic. He runs away every time he can get outside on his own so they have to keep the outside doors locked all the time he's in the house. The other two are great little kids. They like football and comic books. It was Michael's 11th birthday so the boys on the team bought him a new football (the one he had deflated all the time and had to be blown up with a bicycle pump before use) and went to his party and played football with him.
The responses we got were the usual mixed bag. There were one or two who seemed genuinely interested in learning more, and one woman from South Africa had been looking for a Christian fellowship, and, when she got the Word Today, drove around to the minister's house in a taxi! She's woried about her daughter who had been in Ireland for a few years, and apparently has an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. Galway is strange when it comes to beliefs. Apart from the usual background of lapsed Catholic and general irreligious, there are some people thinking a lot of weird things. There's much less consciousness of the Gospel than there is in nominal Protestant Dromore and round about. Also a lot of Mormons and JWs. Some of the team were afraid to meet them in case they started trying to convert them. I didn't mind any of it very much. The door-to-door is most nerve-wracking, of course, but at least there were no holiday Bible clubs, which I hate doing because the kids will never sit still or listen for two seconds together. It was a bit depressing to talk to so many people with no interest in the Gospel, but the church is growing now, which is so good. We had brilliant weather all week, a real answer to prayer, because it's the west coast of Ireland and constant downpour would have been more likely. Also no car accidents in which our cars were involved, another minor miracle considering the way they drive down south. God really was looking after us.
The teem was great too. Phil, the leader, said as were were driving home that we had been great, that we had respected him, and that he really appreciated that. It was lovely seeing Gillian again too. There was a boy called Alistair on the team, aged 16, who out-geeked us both. It was starting to turn into geeks and mundanes towards the end of the week, after the three of us spent hours in a coffee shop taking about binary and hex numbers and computer operating systems. The other mocked us severely, so we mocked them for being so silly as to not be able to convert decimal to binary even with a piece of paper. :-P Talking of coffee shops, Phil told us about this on ecalled Bananaphoblacht which makes the best hot chocolate in the world. Unfortunately it was away over on the other side of the river, so we were trailing along on our sore feet, going, 'This had better be worth it!'. But it was. They took a lump of dark chocolate and poured hot milk over it and cream on top, so that the chocolate melted into it and it was lovely. Fairtrade, too, which is cool.
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