Iceland - Day 11

Today was election day in Iceland, a very important one since the country went bankrupt a few months ago. We went the couple of blocks into downtown Keflavìk and actually had a hard time finding a restaurant open, but the traffic was heavier than usual. It was a reminder, though, of one of the things we have found different in Iceland. The people tend to wear black all the time. All black. And the folks you see on the street or in the mall or even on the advertising billboards look so solemn. But speak to someone and suddenly they are very warm-hearted and friendly here.

Today was also back to work for us. About midway through Jimmie´s lesson Tuesday Marias had rushed from the room and returned with a tape recorder. From that point on he recorded everything. As we were leaving Thursday Marias handed the recorder to Jimmie with a request that Jimmie do again the missing 2 1/2 days. He wanted to have all of the evangelism series on tape, so Jimmie worked on that today.

Also, the tiny congregation has never had any Bible classes, only worship. And they don´t usually even bring their children to that apparently thinking it is only for adults. Katrece and I stressed the importance of teaching the children as well, so we put together a children´s Bible class for tomorrow. Katrece decided to tell the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 so I went to work attempting to translate "Jesus Loves Me". I used an Internet translation site, but I simply could not sing it. There were way too many syllables. So I tried "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and got better results. Then Hilmar, our landlord, arrived so I asked him to check the translation. "No! No! No!" was his response as soon as he started reading. The web translator had used a bad word, totally unacceptable. Oh, dear! I never expected that! Thankfully, Hilmar rewrote the song for me. Now if only we can sing it tomorrow.

This evening we went to the grocery store to buy the fixins for a Mexican Nacho dinner. But the first hurdle was "Where´s the beef?" We all searched the meat trays searching. I located various pork cuts. That was easy because there was a picture of a pig on it. But ground beef was eluding us until we got help. Mexican was good tonight.

- Linda