Happy Day of the Covenant!

Yesterday morning, Lavonne came over for another discussion of the Virtues Project. These meetings bring out a decent amount of sharing and personal growth for all three of us. She says its fate that she ran into Cristina. ("Strike that. Reverse it.") She refused a ride from a friend while carrying lots of bags to see Cristina on one of her runs, and stopped her because she thought she knew her. Now Lavonne visits consistently and loves the study circle-style studying we're doing.

For about two days I have been struggling internally with animosity towards Halva. Sure, he is a great, generous, kind guy. But I suppose it is naturally difficult to spend a lot of time with someone new without seeing things in them that bother you. I tend not take parental advise well, period, let alone from someone unauthorised to give it. After some hardcore meditation and prayer, I feel much better. Playing cards and cooking together helped. I'm sure rocky waters are still ahead, but at least I realise that I need to respect myself enough to speak up when I don't like a situation. Like the morning virtues discussion brought out, you have to respect yourself before expecting others to respect you.

In honor of Thanksgiving and the Day of the Covenant we baked a pumpkin pie! We visited the bazaar (بزار) put on by the Methodist Church. Only Jamal came for child(ren)'s class. Later Junior and Janeel stopped by for prayers and song and I gave a sort of three minute lecture about the Covenant, just so they could hear something about it. In the States children come no matter what because their parents bring them, but in this case a whole family of children and youth only comes if they themselves feel like it. C and me now know we need to make the classes more interesting.

Mass quantities of food. Bernard bought us barbecue chicken from the bazaar. Halva made another dinner of rice, fish with gravy, plantains and potatoes. While we were reading World Order on the balcony (I suggested it out of the blue.), our neighbor's son Eric invited us to his niece's sweet-sixteen party up the road. There we had Vitamalt, two sandwiches each and goat water, and were given a whole chicken, rice, coleslaw and garlic breead meal to walk with.