Belgium

WOW, Belgium was amazing. We went for 4 days with 80 other members from our church. The aim of the mission was to run an English Fayre and Evening concert and to support and encourage the local church which we support.On THursday 12th April, at 8 o clock in the morning 17 cars and 1 van left One Church, Gloucester and headed for Dover port for a 12.55 sailing to Calais. The journey went smoothly and from Calais we travelled through France, into Belgium and to our destination; Herstal, Liege, Southern Belgium. We arrived at the church about 7pm that evening and were greeted with cups of tea, dinner and a big Welcome from the Church over there. After enjoying some food and fellowship with good friends we left in groups so go to the hotel. Our first challenge was to find the hotel. We came last - well someone has too!! It turns out there are 4 options for Liege in SatNav but the road we were looking for was only in one of them. We tried to put the road name in but it didn't accept it so we decided to head towards Liege anyway. After still not finding it we and 40 mins later we prayed out to God to help us and which after that prayer we had the idea that maybe we should look at the accents on the letters as that might be the issue - it turns out it was, and when logistics man Chris rang wondering where we were we were able to tell him that we now were headed in the right direction but were 10 miles away. Ahh the joys of mission. The hotel - Premiere Classe - well as Kev described it, it was clean and functional. It had a double bed, belgian telly and a space pod for a bathroom. Interesting. We fortunately were only sleeping there so it was ok. ON Friday we met at church and had a fantastic breakfast - in fact the food throughout was amazing - and then some orientation time/team time. In the afternoon we went down to the town square to start preparing for the english fayre. Pete and I ran the tin can alley stall. Who would've thought so much planning was needed to go into what seemed like such an easy stall. Set up the tins in a triangular shape and then someone knocks them down. We did that but soon discovered that with the wooden balls the tins weren't goon last very long before being too dented to be stacked on top of each other. So after various efforts into the design and how we were going to play it we decided to go with this:

The aim was to knock just the top tin off each post without knocking any other tins off. Saturday morning was the fayre - a big white marquee had been set up for the day to house the fayre and we spent the morning setting up tables, decorating the tent and making the place look inviting for the locals to come to. Once we were set up other menbers of the team came and played the various games on offer which was a good opportunity to practise our french. Trying to explain to french people when all you can say is Bonjour was interesting. A lot of "Oui's" and "Non' in various high pitched voices, questioning, agreeing, disagreeing etc. Most people got the idea and generally it was quite hard. Only 1 person actually managed to knock all 3 top tins off without displacing the others. Other stalls included tombolla, ping pong challenge, splat the rat, hook a duck, face painting,the bottle stall, craft and a stall selling English Cream teas. We had about 200 people came through the tent and we were able to invite them to the evening concert. In the evening we held a church-style concert of how we do church at easter in the UK. About 30 people came to the evening service which the Belgium Church were really pleased with. Sunday morning we were down at the community centre for church again. Simon spoke to the churches, it was great to share church with people whose language we didn;'t know but with whom we felt like family. Lauro's daughter Kerin did most of the translating and she was amazing going from french to englsih and back again without even blinking. We helped to pack down after the service and were ready to leave by about 1pm. We left in convoys of 3 heading towards calais. We got most of the way to Calais when the 'refuel' late came on and after travelling a few more miles decided to fuel up. Being englsih we assumed the petrol stations would be open, but not so. We went to a couple which were closed and one specifically for trucks, one which takes card payments but there is no cashier but that wouldn't accept our English cards. Finally we found a self-serve petrol station 4 miles from the port and were able to put some fuel in. The journey back was more choppy than on the way out but it was fine, no hiccups. We did get delayed on the M4 as there were traffic works which had cut the motorway down to 1 lane from 3 to fix a cat's eye. I guess the council didn't think that the last day of the esater holidays there would be a lot of people returning from holiday. We got delayed by about an hour and returned home by 11.30pm It was a short mission but definitely worth going and I can't wait to go again. I would love to take the kids with us next time, but it would depend on their age. Here are some photos from our trip: