Feast in Benin City - Feast Day 5

Monday, October 02, 2017
Benin City, Edo, Nigeria
The Feast here in Nigeria is being kept near the airport at the Randekhi Royal Hotel. Cody and Bobbie Kitts, usually serving as a deacon and wife in the Cincinnati-Dayton, Ohio, congregation, are here to coordinate the Feast for Senior Pastor for Ghana, Tom Clark. The Clarks normally spend every other feast in West Africa and this year are feasting in Colorado. (The transfer of the responsibility for Nigeria recently passed from Mr. Tim Waddle to Mr. Clark.) The Kitts are amazing people, having come to Nigeria on many trips for the better part of a decade now. They are adept in working in the third world and able to cope with the hardships and difficulties that come their way with a smile. They love to travel and they clearly love the brethren here. It is obvious they are loved and appreciated a great deal by the brethren that they serve. We are delighted to work with the Kitts to help serve the brethren here.
The Randekhi Royal Hotel has two sections – the ‘Gold Wing’ and the ‘Royal Wing.’ The Feast is being held in the Royal Wing – the less expensive portion of the hotel. Overall, the hotel is very nice when compared to the neighborhood in which it is situated. In fact, for about $85 US dollars a night, Pam and I have a very nice room on the second floor with working air conditioning, two large windows (with burglar bars, of course), tile floor, private bathroom, and a king-sized bed. Bobbie and Cody had arranged for us to have a small refrigerator and an electric tea pot to boil water. They also had stocked the room with a box of local tea, several packets of Starbucks instant coffee, packets of instant milk (for coffee or tea), packets of sugar which looked like home-made packets of some illegal drug  ;-) a dozen bottles of water, a bottle of fruit juice, a bottle of ground nuts (peanuts) and a box of chocolates. These gifts made us feel like the king and queen arriving to the room prepared for us. What a kind and thoughtful welcoming gesture to make us feel at home! We can safely say that this was the nicest room we stayed in during the African portion of this trip.
The Gold Wing and the Royal Wing are actually two different buildings. To go between wings requires that one go out the gate, walk about a block on the street and then enter through the gate of the other. The Gold Wing complex is surrounded by a six foot wall on top of which are eight strands of electrified wire. At the two entrances to the Gold Wing are armed guards with what appear to be automatic rifles hanging at their side – my guess is a Kalashnikov (AK-47). I did not ask to take their picture nor try to get one on the sly for obvious reasons. Dusty and worn, these weapons are either not very well cared for or are very old – or both. I suppose that new, clean, rifles are likely too expensive for a security detail like this. Most of the time it looks like the guard stays inside the guardhouse until a vehicle nears the gate to enter or exit. 
The Royal Wing is not as heavily protected, having a six foot fence with razor wire on top, but no electric wire. Rather than a swinging metal gate as the Gold Wing has, the Royal Wing has a guardhouse with a 12 foot metal pipe 2 inches in diameter stretched across the entrance. To make it easy to raise the ‘gate,’ on the end of the pipe an old truck tire rim has been welded. All the guard has to do to open the gate is push down on the rim and the heavy metal pie has enough counter weight to lift up and allow a vehicle into the compound. Unfortunately, the rim seems to have been welded on the wrong end of the pipe and is opposite the guard house.
As mentioned earlier, the Feast is being held in the Royal Wing. Here we have our church services, all of the members rooms, all of our activities, and we also eat all of or meals together here. One of this things we have enjoyed the most is eating meals together with the brethren.  We eat or first meal with the Kitts so we can get better oriented to the Feast here. But after this we will eat all of our meals at various table s of adults or children learning as much as we can about them. We make this an early night so we can be as fresh as possible for our first day of services and activities.
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