Anttilat

Tuesday morning was quite peaceful, there wasn't a horrible hurry like in some other mornings. Everybody seemed to get their luggage packed in time. Breakfast included some wheat porrage and elderberry (Holunder) soup from last night which was absolutely great. Before we started off the people in Versöhnungskirche wanted to bless us and gave us little clay shells as a memory from that place.

The sun was still shining when we sat on the yard waiting for takeoff. But once we started walking it only took maybe 15 minutes until it was raining heavily. Some of us had left their rain coats into the other bag and got soaking wet in just a couple of minutes. Klaus then offered that we could skip the hike and take the minibusses as the weather was so awful. Me and Ari took this chance and went straight to Siloah to meet Tuomo and Laura (the twin). Everybody else wanted to hike those about 10 km in pouring rain.

Siloah is a friendly place with happy looking people. Unfortunately most of them didn't speak English so we ended up sitting in one corner and chatting with each other until the hikers got there. After dinner the English speaking person there told us about Siloah and gave us a little tour.

Siloah was formed by three families who wanted to live together Christian life. Nowadays they own 230 ha land and have various kinds of business. They do farming and in addition they for example host camps for boy and girl scouts and medieval days for school groups. In addition to the owning families Siloah has volunteers who come there to live for some time and work for the farm. The work day starts with prayer, there's another chance for prayer at lunchtime, and again in the evening. They have meals together and generally seem to spend a lot of time in each other's company.

In the evening we had a barbeque. People from Siloah prepared the food - potato salad and sausages I think - and we enjoyed it over a warm fireplace. Some of us spent a long and funny evening playing games. After several nights of sleeping on a floor we welcomed real beds with real blankets in them.