The 2023 Seminar is now history! It was a grand time had by all! The total number of people that were registered remains at 555. The cooks reported feeding 595 people. The discrepancy in the numbers is because we do not register toddlers but they have to be fed. Matthew does a great job of keeping track of the number of people that are in each group. He divides the groups by congregations and records the number in each congregation. It is the job of the church leaders to let him know when more people from their congregation arrive. The largest group was from the congregation of Nakpa, 60 of their members attended this year. Hot on their heels was the congregation of Figmado with 47 and Attado with 43. This year people came from 36 congregations. This is the largest seminar that we have had to date.
We were looking back over our files and the first seminar was in 2007. Several of the key players in that seminar are no longer with us. Samuel Obeng was our guest speaker and John Kanbonja, the evangelist, was the other speaker. Emmanuel Alebor, one of the other evangelists has also passed away.
We were late getting started this morning because the cooks had to wait for the hot chocolate to cool down so they could put it in the plastic bowls without them melting. I have tried to explain to Rita that the chocolate does not have to come to a rolling boil before she can serve it. I also tried to get her to boil small amounts of water and dissolve the sugar, chocolate and milk in the hot water and then top the pots up with regular temperature water but she just does not get me.
After dismissal prayer Steve asked everyone to bring the chair they were sitting in to the front so they could be stacked and counted. This made for a lot less work. He also asked the men to take the canopies apart. It did not take them long to get everything dismantled.
Steve and I both took loads of people to Yendi to catch their buses home before we could start hauling stuff back to the mission house. This morning we had Mr. Iddrisu drive the motor king out to Kulkpeni; we were able to get all the Child Center’s benches and chairs loaded into the motor king which saved us 2 trips. We got back to the mission house with most of the stuff we took out. We lost 3 – 5 gallon plastic water containers, had one broken chair and one broken knife. That is not too bad for such a big operation.
The cooks shared the food that was left over, they went home with garlic, onions, curry powder, ginger, beans, pig oil, soup and bread plus we paid all the cooks for their hard work. Rita had 20 women that helped her cook while Matthew and Tichak were in charge of the storeroom of food.
We are once again tired; I guess we will rest when we get to heaven!
Enjoy your day!
In HIS Service,
Steve and Kandie
