Hello Again
Well I ended my last post with a pic of one of our parishioners and his new baby girl saying her baptism deserved its own post - well here it is.
Laverne and Susan have become good friends of us. They have been bouncing back and forth from Florida to Andros as they prepare to relocate, so I was very happy that they decided to baptize Josephine here (all the kids tell me her name is JoJo).
Here we are with the opening prayer at the door of the church, welcoming our newest member into our community. Just like welcoming any new friend to your home, we greet her at the door and welcome her in.
After we processed in, our Sunday liturgy began as it usually does, but after the homily we began the baptism.
And here I am anointing Josephine with the Oil of Catechumens.
Our baptismal font has been upgraded from Corningware to a very nice stainless steel bowl that we have consecrated as our baptismal font. Here in the Bahamas I use a conche shell to pour the baptismal water during the baptism. In this pic I am blessing the water we will use, you can see the conche shell on the table.
Here is a pic of me with Josephine and her mom, Susan.
And here I am with proud Poppa Laverne.
The following week was not uneventful. It began with a surprise phone call from a Choir Director on Nassau. It seems that St. Anselm Choir is rather well known and usually go on tour. This year, rather than going to Florida, they decided to go to one of the 'family islands' and picked us! So, on Tuesday I got a call saying they were arriving on Friday, they'd already made hotel reservations and wanted to know if I could help them with transportation while they were here. So I helped them out, then scrambled to try to arrange some sort of hospitality for a 15 person troupe arriving in 3 days!
On Friday we met them at the ferry and helped them with their luggage to their hotel. They had booked the hotel immediately next to the pier, which was good. What was not good was that the hotel was overbooked. Soooooo, the hotel scrambles and calls another hotel on the opposite side of Fresh Creek and found 3 more rooms over there to accommodate the people that wouldn't fit. It was a bit awkard, but it worked. (You learn to adapt on the islands)
After they settled in, and had some lunch, Ginni and took them on a drive and showed them one of the beaches here. We went to Love Hill's town beach and they were amazed that there were 3 miles of white sand beach with absolutely no people. One lady commented that on Nassau you need to go to the public beaches the day before and stake out your spot. This was heaven! On the way back to Fresh Creek we stopped and showed them the site of next week's CRAB FEST. This is a big deal on Andros and a major source of revenue. Andros has a very large population of land crabs that, at this time of year, come out of hiding with the rainy season. People catch crabs for weeks and the second week of June is CRAB FEST. Try to imagine a county fair with Crab being the theme and you'll have a good idea of the festivities. Crab will be cooked every way you can imagine and Fresh Creek will be swamped with people. I hear we will actually have traffic!
Anyway, we showed them the fair grounds, then dropped them at their hotel to rest up for supper. Saturday they had made arrangements for a tour of North Andros so they were on their own as I worked on the weekend homily and Ginni did three loads of laundry (we hadn't had water most of that week so now that it was back on we made up for lost time).
Sunday we began with the choir singing at the 8:30 liturgy at St. John Chrysostom, then we all loaded into vans for the 40 minute ride to Christ the King -- all of this done in a thunderstorm and driving rain.
Here they are singing at Christ the King in Cargill Creek, followed by the mandatory posed pic with the Deacon. (I'm wearing red because it was Pentecost Sunday).
In thanks, the parish hosted a luncheon at Captain Neymour's, a local restaurant in Cargill Creek. We took every chair and table they had and the food was great. Here are a few pics of us enjoying local Andros cooking (crabs and rice, fresh from the bush just the night before).
Next week we have no CCD so we hope to catch up on other tasks that have taken a back seat, like balancing the parish books, doing the accounting for the Archbishop's Appeal, and preparing for our first parish picnic.
- See you in Church!
