All is well and wintry here in Winnipeg. Stuart is in Grade 12 this year and is the president of the Student Council, as well, he works part-time in the produce department at Superstore. Andrew is in third year university, studying economics. He plays trumpet in a couple of community bands. All members of the family made our You Tube debuts during the past year. Carol was part of a 'flash mob' at Portage Place mall downtown, part of the promotional launch for 1HopeWinnipeg, a campaign to raise awareness of and funds for five community/outreach ministries of Winnipeg Presbytery of The United Church of Canada. You can view the dance at 1hopewinnipeg.com.

Last year, during a cleaning bee at the church, a package of letters were discovered. the letters dated to the Second World War. The letters were written by men and women from Transcona who were serving in the Armed Forces. Carol thought it would be moving to invite youth from our congregation and their friends to read the letters (they being about the same age as those who had written the letters originally) A couple of youth read letters which had been written by one of their grandparents. A few read letters written by people whose names are on the Memorial List we read every Remembrance Day Sunday (names of people from the Transcona community who died while serving a war) Carol used a flip camera to record the readings, then edited them into three videos and posted them on You Tube. You can see them by googling You Tube, then searching Transcona Memorial United Church. The video posted Nov 9 features all of the readers, each reading the beginning and end of a letter. Stuart reads the letter from R. Warner and Andrew reads the one from Leslie C. Brewster.

While posting these videos, Carol discovered that I, Jeff, was already on You Tube. You will find this 2 minute video also referenced on the TMUC You Tube site. It is an interview I gave while at River Running - a United Church conference on inter-cultural ministry.

That's some news from Winnipeg - Jeff