Ghanaians make the most of Easter! Easter Monday is the annual Tamale All-Church Picnic.  All the Tamale churches gather for music, dancing, food, and games. Church teams compete in volleyball and soccer tournaments. Others play cards and board games. The day ends with a dance group competition for children's and youth groups with a big crowd of proud parents cheering them on. My favorite event of the day, however, was the women's weightlifting competition!  Wow, those Presbyterian Women are amazingly strong, but then, we knew that!

Good Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays in Ghana.  We attended Good Friday services today from 9 am to 1 pm. Everyone dresses in black as if attending a funeral, hence our attire.  On Easter Monday all the Tamale churches gather together for a big picnic and celebration with food, music, dancing, and games. It will be held here at the Lay Training Center this year.  Apparently all the churches are practicing up for the big church soccer tournament!

There is a saying in Ghana, "Life is religion and religion is life." So pretty much everything has a religious bent to it. Last week we discovered a group holding a Bible-reading "marathon" in downtown Tamale. (It sounded like they were in Leviticus when we stopped by.) The heat has made it really hard to exercise. Would this qualify as "exercising our faith?"

The Northern Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana is holding their annual meeting here at the Lay Training Center in Tamale this week. The Northern Presbytery is the largest presbytery in Ghana in geographic size. There are 61 congregations and 32 preaching points served by only 19 ministers. So leadership in the churches is dependent on lay ministers.  I was invited to bring greetings to the assembly on behalf of Chicago Presbytery and PCUSA.

We are blessed to be sharing this adventure with our good friend Rose Taul.  What fun! Rose is a world traveler.  When she worked at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Louisville, she visited Jamaica, Indonesia, Brazil, the Soviet Union, India, Czech Republic, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. But of all these places, she says "Tamale is the hottest spot of all!"

Home sweet home. Here we are in front of our guest house at the Presbyterian Lay Training Center that will be our home for the next six months.  We share it with numerous bugs, geckos, and other of God's critters, but are very grateful for it. As our friend Rose reminds us, 90% of people in the world would consider it a mansion.

We've jumped right in! We preached our first Sunday here at Trinity congregation in Tamale. The pastor, Rev. Abraham Berinyuu, has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He also spent some time at McCormick Seminary and Fourth Presbyterian Church.  The three of us preached a dialog sermon and had a lot of fun. The congregation was made up of lively young adults.

We arrived in Tamale, Ghana on Wednesday, March 26 along with all our luggage. Hooray! We will be serving at the Presbyterian Lay Training Center.  The weather is a shock - it is hot, hot, HOT! It will take some getting used to. Ceiling fans are the only relief, but the electricity is erratic so you can't always count on them. There is no worry about cold showers. No water heaters are needed. The water out of the tap is plenty warm!

St. Simon Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church of Palatine blessed and commissioned us as we prepared to leave for our stay in Ghana.  PCOP hosted a reception with pizza, cake, and ice cream, three things we won't be having for a while!