Increase at the Memorial

After having the Memorial for the past two years at our Kingdom Hall, and recognizing the problem (though good) of increasing attendance, we decided this year to rent a conference room at the Sports View Hotel in Remera. This venue would also give us more room for parking, thus alleviating the somewhat chaotic situation experienced in previous years.

Of course, there are pros and cons to every location. One big “pro” was, judging from the reaction of people during our invitation campaign, the familiar Sports View Hotel would be a big draw. But, no, we had to explain to people, there would be no involvement with the gym, the swimming pool, or other hotel amenities and, in response to someone’s question, no food (at least not the kind they were thinking of).

The “cons”: Could we trust the hotel’s sound system? What about the 25 nonfunctioning lights in the room we would be using? What about the quality of the toilets? We also had to bring our own speaker’s stand (note to locals: it is not called a “platform”), which a brother in the congregation kindly sanded and varnished.

Well, we needn’t have worried too much. The management replaced the light bulbs—though an hour before the start of the program—the sound system worked fine, and the result was that we had an attendance of 242. This was about an 11% increase over last year!

And look at the floor of our Kingdom Hall, all shiny and new! We weren’t there to enjoy it, of course, on Memorial evening, but the French and Kinyarwanda congregations did.