Beirut - Day 2

Morning was breakfast and team meeting again. We met with the youth group of the local church which was helping us set up for the Fun Fair. They're doing a medical clinic based theme, in which each game also tests a particular physical characteristic (hearing, sight, etc.) Clinic staff will be at the fair as well, so if kids have problems playing a particular game they can be evaluated to ensure they don't have health problems. After the meeting we started setting up for the fair itself.



Close to lunch time I started not feeling well, so I ended up laying down through lunch and until that evening. The rest of the team had lunch and then went out in the neighborhood again passing out flyers, praying for people and witnessing. I did hear that Miles (also called Ishmael, or else I misunderstood his name yesterday) called the church from the flyer we gave him (because he had tried to find it last night and couldn't) and had come by the church today.

For dinner we went to downtown Beirut. We started (and ended) at Martyr's Square at one end of the Green Line that divided the city during the civil war. We took a tour of the tomb of Rafic Hariri and the nearby mosque which he had constructed shortly before he was assasinated. Next door to that was a Mennorite church. When the mosque was built it was designed so its towers would be higher than the cross on top of the church, so the church is undergoing construction now to raise the cross higher than the towers of the mosque. Next to the church was some Roman ruins that they discovered when they were rebuiling the area around the Green Line.

We had dinner at a restruant in the downtown area, and then wandered around a bit more. In a square on the end of the street the restruant was on children were shooting a toy up into the air that was lit by LEDs, which then hovered down. We thought they looked rather fun, and Larry (one of the team members) picked up 50 of them for the Fun Fair tomorrow.