A week in Nassau - Happy Anniversary to US!

Well it seems like its been awhile since I last posted, but that's because we haven't been here. Last week we were in Nassau for pretty much the whole week with no internet. The 3rd week of each month the Archbishop has a "Pastoral Day", when clergy from Nassau and all the family islands come together for a day of prayer, teaching, and fellowship. We missed last month's meeting because it was the week of 1st communion and we wanted to do rehearsals and get in a final class in preparation for First Penance and First Communion.

This trip was also important for us because, when we first arrived for this assignment the Archbishop said we should do a review after six months, and if all is well, do an annual review thereafter - well its been six months. So we had called his secretary and asked if, while we were on Nassau for Pastoral Day, we might get some time to do the review with the Archbishop.

Another reason we wanted to take the whole week though, was that the week before was our Wedding Anniversary. So we made a plan that, rather than staying at St. Joseph's parish, we would get a nice room at one of the resort hotels on Cable Beach. An entire week with uninterrupted water, water pressure, electricity, and a full tub for a bath if we wanted - all just an elevator ride from the beach - sounds great, and it was.

Once we checked in we called the Archbishop's secretary and we were told we could meet with him Wed at 11. This was a bit confusing since Pastoral Day is Wed. It was then we were told that Pastoral Day was cancelled this month . It seems they announced its cancellation at the last Pastoral Day meeting (the one we skipped), and a fax was sent Monday (the day we flew). So, we had a meeting on Wed, but the rest of the week to ourselves.

The week was great, despite the isolated thunderstorms (think monsoons). We did get to go to the beach, shop, eat wonderful meals, and meet the Archbishop. Our meeting began right on time at 11 and I was surprised when I looked at my watch and saw it was close to 1 when we broke. Bottom line, we're doing just fine, we need to get a better handle on CCD for the next year with greater parental involvement, but he's not sending us home and we don't want to go so Andros has us for the long haul.

Over the course of the week there were a few adventures for us, but by far the one we'll remember for awhile is our scuba diving lesson. Yes folks, Ginni had the air tanks on her back, lead weights in her vest and she spent an hour at the bottom of the hotel pool learning the tricks of scuba diving (oh yeah, so did I). We need to try this once more before we head out to the reef and try to feed the sharks, but it was a hoot and we live in scuba diving heaven so who knows, we might just start doing this on a more regualar basis. Actually, when we were leaving the Archbishop he told us that one of our parishioners is a certified instructor who taught him! Not only is he a parishioner, he's on our Parish C0uncil!

With the trip to Nassau over, and CCD on vacation, we have time to ourselves for the first time since we arrived. I spent most of this week getting caught up on past due financial reports that I am supposed to send the Archdiocese, but haven't. It's been hot, hot, hot, and humid, humid, humid, so Ginni is spending her time reading in front of the air conditioner in the bedroom while the mosquitos are flocking around every door and window in the place just waiting for us to dare step outside.

Enough for now. I hope you are all well. We plan to return to MA for vacation July 13 - 31. We'll spend time in MA where I will get to baptize my nephews new twin boys (at the same church I was baptized in if you can believe it), then on to Long Island to see our 2 sons down there and connect with our oldest son who will be home from Singapore, then back to MA. We look forward to making connections with as many old friends as we can.

See you in church

Crabfest 2009

Well lets just say life on Andros isn't always about Church - sometimes you have to party and there is no time like Crabfest!

Andros is loaded with land crabs the size of greatfruit - loaded! During the cooler winter months they tunnel underground and stay there till the rainy season drives them above ground. Well if you've read this blog or my page on facebook you know it's been rainy and the crabs are out! This weekend is the annual Andros Crabfest where literally hundred and hundreds of people from the US and the other Bahamian islands flood Andros to have a good time and eat crab in as many ways as you can imagine - Stuffed Crab, Crab and Rice, Crab Soup, Crab with Dumplings, the list goes on and on.

Well the party started Thursday and it will end late Sunday. Here are a few pics of me chowing down and the party that will go into the wee hours of the morning.

Yes, that's right, the crab body makes a wonderful bowl for baked stuffed crab.

Now be nice, I know what it looks like but its a dumpling. Ginni remembered we had the camera with us after I had demolished this bowl of Crab and Dumpling soup (yes it is a dumpling). When I started this was filled with ham, rice, crab, dumplings, crab, a brown gravy/sauce to die for - and did I say crab?

Old grilles never die - they retire to the Bahamas where we put wood and charcoal in the base and crank it up. One of our parishioners had a booth and we went round back and watched as he grilled up some BBQ chicken - fantastic!

And for dessert - Guava Duff! This is a fantastic Bahamian dessert - a sweet cake topped with guava fruit then once its cut and put on your plate, covered with a white creamy sauce. Ginni sopped up every bit of that sauce with the duff to get it all!

And after eating all that, you need to work it off - we also had a live band and singers/dancers galore.

The show was great, with all the bells and whistles of a state of the art hi tech production. Lets just say that when Bahamians party they don't hold back at all (Hey Mon, it was off da chain).

The surprise of surprises for Androsians - traffic. We actually had traffic jams with wall to wall cars, pedestrians, motorcycles, police - it was just like Yawkey way after a Red Sox game in Boston!

Love to tell you more but I have to get up and preach in the morning - enough for now.

Party on

Baptism and a Visiting Choir

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!

Power and Water

Just a quick entry to let you know about one aspect of life on an island. Usually we have all the comforts of home - clearly since you're reading this we have access to the internet. Our children bought us a hi-speed internet telephone with a Boston phone number so we can stay connected and talk from time to time. But all this assumes we have electricity (hehehe).

This past week we've lost power four different times, for no apparent reason, but we get by. The real trick is to unplug our router so when the power comes back on (with the power surge that preceeds it) we don't lose the router. It is a rather tempermental and we've had the phone company here 4 times to try to re-establish interconnect service after power outages.

What really creates a problem, though, is when the water stops. Yes, it just plain stops. There seems to be a problem maintaining water pressure and while we can still cook on our gas stove when there is no power, going without water for four days creates other problems. I have come to learn that bathing in the sink is an art form. Flushing toilets with no water can also be an issue. We have learned to keep a 5 gallon jug of water full and tucked away under the bathroom sink for these times and its come in very handy.

So, while we do have internet access, telephones, fax, high speed laser printers, and a copy machine. We also have those times where non of them will turn on, and we (or our clothes) may or may not be too clean. Island life has its advantages - and its challenges.

Keep us in your prayers
Frank and Ginni

Baptism and First Communion

Hello Again – well I finally have time to write up our First Communion services here on Andros. As with most things here, there were complications. One surprise was to learn that the Baptists here don’t baptize their children as infants, but wait till they are 12 or 13. They have a Christening Service to name the child as an infant, but the baptism is something they do later. One of the children in our program has a mother who is Catholic and a father who is Baptist. He is now in our RCIA program, converting to Catholicism. We learned that his daughter, who has been attending Mass weekly and has been in our CCD classes all year, was christened as a Baptist but never actually baptized. So, the week before First Communion we had a baptism.

She is a sweetheart of a girl and when we talked about her baptism she told me she was afraid of getting wet in front of everyone. I told her it wouldn’t be a big mess, but she was still afraid. I taught her that fear is not from God, but usually from the evil one. I showed her that whenever an angel appears in the bible the first thing they say is usually, “fear not”. I asked her, who would be the winner if she felt afraid of baptism – the devil or Jesus? She understood that and promised that whenever she felt afraid she’d ask Jesus for help.

Well after the baptism she pulled on my sleeve and said, “I wasn’t afraid, I was the winner, I beat the devil”. What a great kid. Here is a picture Ginni took of her being anointed with Chrism, and another with her God-mother after the Baptism.

First Communion weekend was a busy one. We were joined by Fr. Pio Galumalemana, a native of Samoa who is now the pastor of a parish on Nassau. Fr. Pio flew in on Friday night because all day Saturday we did First Penance services at each of the three churches, followed by the Saturday evening Sunday liturgy at the AUTEC base.

We began at AUTEC for a 10AM First Penance Service, then 12 noon for St. John Chrysostom’s First Penance, then hit the road for the drive to Cargill Creek where we had a 3PM First Penance Service there. Ginni and I had created a program starting with song, prayer, a scripture reading (the prodigal son), and a short reflection, then individual confession and a closing prayer – very simple. A nice touch we added was a box filled with sand and candles. After each child came out of confession they lit a candle. The image of going from darkness to light was great.

After hearing confession from 20 children in 3 different locations, as well as some of their parents, Fr. Pio had a full Saturday – but it wasn’t over. Now we drove back to AUTEC, where we started, and celebrated the Sunday liturgy – with 3 of our 20 kids receiving their First Communion.

Fr. Pio invited them up around the altar during the consecration. Here is a pic of us around the altar praying the Our Father.

AUTEC has a neat tradition of having the First Communion children barefoot. You can see that in this pic where the children have brought up the gifts and Matthew is on his way back to his seat.

Here’s the history of that tradition. A few years ago, as they were preparing for first communion one family could not find dress shoes for their children. They’re usually in sandals or barefoot on the island and the AUTEC store doesn’t carry children’s shoes. Off base, none of the local stores had shoes the right size either. The priest at the time suggested, “Well, if you can’t find shoes, have them go barefoot, its fine with me and they go barefoot all the time here anyway.” While a nice suggestion, the children were embarrassed to go barefoot while all the other kids would be wearing shoes. The problem was resolved when all the other children, to help them out, decided to go barefoot too. The next class thought this was really cool and they decided to go barefoot too, and a tradition was born.

Here is a pic of all of us at AUTEC after First Communion.

The next day was Sunday and the first service was at St. John Chrysostom. There were 6 children receiving First Communion here. With so many at this parish we had them do the readings, bring up the gifts, and the Prayers of the Faithful.

Fr. Pio invited them up around the altar for the consecration and here we are surrounding the altar with Fr. Pio and our class picture.

After St. John’s we hit the road again for Cargill Creek and our First Communion service at Christ the King parish. Here there were 11 children, from age 7 to 14 – and here you can see Fr. Pio with the children flashing there First Communion Certificates.

Our service at St. John’s and Christ the King was complemented by an electric keyboard (2 in Cargill Creek). Laverne Lockhart was one of the players and here you see him with his new daughter Josephine. JoJo will be baptized at Christ the King next weekend, but that deserves a post all by itself.

See you in Church!

Fire in Fresh Creek! Bereavement at Sea.

Hello again - well its been a busy week (aren't they all).

This week we are in the final prep for First Penance and First Communion for 20 children. Spread out over 3 churches we have children from 8 to 15 years old. But, as you can tell from the title of this blog - while that may have been the plan for our week, and it is where we spent the bulk of our time, something else took center stage.

Early Tuesday morning I went downtown to order flowers for Mother's Day (a simple corsage for the Mom's of the parish). On the way I noticed a field was being burned - a pretty common site here on Andros, but this was right next to one of the largest buildings in town. A few hours later we were working in the office on the CCD lesson for that day when we heard alot of commotion outside. When we stepped out of the office and looked toward town, this is what we saw.

Well we hustled down the hill toward the fire and it was clear that this blaze was out of control and there wasn't much we could do but provide moral support for the locals dealing with this horrific fire. The only business still operating in this building was a liquor store and we made a line of people to get cases and cases of the stores inventory out of the building. We were able to save alot but the heat grew and eventually much was left inside. Over the liquor store were four apartments. Occupants were throwing their belongings down to others in the street and they were able to save most of what they owned and nobody was hurt.

This was the largest building in Fresh Creek, a two story complex of three buildings. The end of the building facing you had four apartments on the second floor and the first floor had a small fish and tackle shop that'd been closed for years - and the town liquor store. In the next building was an open patio with a common roof/attic, and the furthest building was a disco/nightclub that had also been closed for several years. All together, however, they made up a city block and this fire was intense.

A major concern of mine was the grey roof you see in the forground of this pic. That is the home of one of my parishioners. The little black line to the left of the peak of the roof is not a beam in the burning building, it is Hugh, my parishioner, standing on his roof with a garden hose.

The fire burned for hours and the US Navy base sent its fire truck to help with the blaze (our town has no Fire Department). Their large truck was too large to get over the Fresh Creek bridge so all they could send was the pumper. The fireman told me that they almost had it under control but they ran out of water and had to go refill their tanks. When they returned it was too far gone and all they could do was watch it burn itself out.

I was really rather concerned for Hugh who owns the home on the corner in this pic. Throughout the most intense heat, with flames shooting 30' into the sky, Hugh stayed on his roof with a garden hose, soaking it down to prevent its catching fire as well. All anyone could do was watch the drama play out - in the end Hugh saved his home, but the entire block this building took up was a total loss. Here are a few better pics of Hugh on his roof towards the end of the blaze.

You can not imagine the impact this has had on the town. This was the largest building in town and its gone - but for many, the fact that this was the only liquor store in Fresh Creek was the biggest concern - both a comical and sad commentary. Once the fire was out, and the building had cooled so you could get close to it there were crowds of young men trying to get into the building and get bottles of rum that hadn't been saved or burst in the flames. Police were on the scene but I saw several armloads of bottles being carried home, and the next day saw a few with bandaged arms and hands who had scorched themselves trying to pick up the hot bottles. Pretty sad.

With the fire burning itself out, there was not much more for us to do so we headed off to the AUTEC base for our scheduled 3:00 CCD class. When we came home all that was left was a smoldering hulk, with young guys still trying to rummage through the wreckage to salvage a bottle or two.

The next day I got a call from the Navy Base that one of the sailors at sea had just been informed his wife had died and they were taking him off the sub to send him home. He'd be arriving at the base around 10 - could I get there to provide him some support until they could get him on a plane? So I went from the flames to the frying pan.

He was a young man and it was a sad story. They'd dated for about a year and had only been married since December, five months. Suffice it to say all I could do was be there for him as he called home, heard the details of her death, cried, and began to grieve as only a young husband could for his new bride. Its times like this I wish the Navy could afford a full-time chaplain but I was glad I could be there to help. His name is Bruce and if you could keep him in your prayers I am sure he'd appreciate all the spiritual help he can get.

Speaking of prayers, keep us in your prayers too - we need it!

Fishing In The Bahamas

Well I have been remiss in not blogging my first real fishing trip while here so this is it.

After Easter, but before Fr. Martin's departure, one of the parishioners in Cargill Creek offered to take us fishing and we took him up on it.

Jim Johnson is a local Bahamian who has a boat and offered to take us out. Fr. Martin and I met him at the dock in Behring Point and off we went. This is a pic of Jim at the helm as we cleared Cargill Creek and headed out to sea.

When we first arrived on the boat there was another man on the boat, his name was Christian and, after we had cleared the Creek and were out in the ocean Jim stopped the boat and Christian donned a snorkel and mask and slipped over the side. We weren't sure what or why this was happening until Christian slipped below the surface of the water and came up with two big conch shells. Now these were not the pretty pink conche shells you see in the tourist shops. They were dirty and covered with sea grass - conche in the wild.

We trailed Christian for what seemed like 40 minutes and he kept handing us conche after conche and (since I'd given Jim $50 for gas) I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever actually toss out a line for fish. Turns out this was part of Jim's plan - conche was bait.

With a boatload of bait off we went to fill our coolers with fish. We caught several variety but by far the most common was the Bahamian Porky. Isn't he cute? Let me tell you, once we fileted this little cutie it was great white meat. What a fish-fry!

One thing about this fishing trip is that while I used my 9' Ugly Stick and fancy Daewoo reel with all the bells and whistles, Jim and Christian basically used a spool of line, a rust nail for weight, and a hook - regardless of what equipment we used, we all caught fish - you can guess who caught more (I think the secret was their rusty nail sinkers).

Nothing better than a drop line and knowing when to yank it.

Suffice it to say we had a great day and weeks later, Ginni and I are still eating fish from this one fishing trip.