A big part of the planning for Wednesday was to prepare for the visit of Anglican Bishop Trevor of Canterbury who visited the house mid-day Wednesday with his wife, , and Rector Carolyne. He has been to the Jungle before and wants the church to do more to assist those in the camp.
One project he is focusing on is trying to send a pastor to work in Calais who will be half time in service to the refugees in the Jungle. This requires negotiation with the French bishop of the Anglican church here in Calais.
He recognizes the difficulty of working with the current government but will be urging parishioners in his region to do more for those refugees who do make it to England, especially the unaccompanied minors.
This meant two large meals were prepared for the day. One with the Bishop and one for the guests who came for Farsi prayer in the evening.
We drove to the Jungle to pick up women who would be joining us for Farsi Prayer on Wednesday evening, a regularly scheduled prayer time. There are Iranian Farsi speakers living in the house and the women who live in the women’s shelter part of the camp, a secured area, joined us.
Brother Johannes and Babak led us as we practiced Farsi songs which we accessed over the internet and we could read the anglicized words on the screen when the song was projected on the chapel wall.
You can listen to a little of the singing here. The song was beautiful, but my camera ran out of disk space so it ends abruptly.