Week 6 & 7

We finally visited the one remaining Methodist Church in Latvia that we hadn’t been to yet. It is located in the city of Jelgava. They rent a meeting room from the Department of Health for Sunday mornings and one evening a week. The pastor is Janis Baumanis.

Janis’s main job is running an alcohol outreach program in Riga. It just so happened that there was an administrator from a Methodist alcohol rehab center in Germany visiting the church the same Sunday we were there. It was fun to find out about their Methodist Church in Germany and its large rehab program.

Rev. Janis Baumanis, his wife and son, and our translator

Janis during the church service

Clarence and Torsten-Micheal Ufer from Germany

The majority of the last two weeks we have been leveling floors, first in a Sunday school room and then in the fellowship hall. There had been quite a bit of floor settling over the years and both rooms had formerly been two rooms. In the Sunday school room there was a 3 inch correction that had to be made to make the floor level. The pictures kind of show the process we used. We patched the bad spots, in some areas removed some of the previous floor so we didn’t have to raise the floor too much and put shims on top of the existing floor - at 30 mm intervals.

Clarence and Rihards inspecting bad area in Sunday School Room

Adding shims to the floor

Sunday School Room with new level floor

Fellowship Hall during floor leveling

For fun, we went to ethnic craft fair at a large open air museum on the edge of Riga. The Open Air Museum has over a 100 architectural exhibits, over 87 hectares of land. A lot of the buildings are log buildings, some dating back to the 18^th century. The craft fair is almost a national event, with people coming from all over the country. There were a folk dancers performing all day.