Perú 6/13/2010-6/14/2010: Church and Work

Photos are here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=186731&id=580751501

6/13/2010:

Let me get a couple of things straight, first off. 1: Sunday is apparently *not* a day of rest in Peru. 2: The music in your church is *not* too loud.

There. Now, on to business. There were 5 church services today. I only attended 4 of them because the last two were happening simultaneously and I have this difficulty with being in two places at once. We started out at Pastor Victor's church, which is pretty much in "down town" Tingo Maria. These are the people who run the children's home. I was asked to help out with the children's service, and I know from past experience that that's a difficult but rewarding chore. The church holds a lot of people - I'm bad at estimating that sort of thing but I'm going to guess 400-500 in the main sanctuary and another 100 in the balcony. With that many adults in attendance, there end up being a lot of kids. They don't have four services for the fun of it, it's because they can't fit everyone in at the same time. All the services are pretty full.

Since I have some experience with Spanish, I was the one doing the lesson, although the girls got all the materials together. They led the songs too, I just danced around like a crazy gringo. They listened somewhat, especially during the first service. The second was not so successful. I nearly lost my voice trying to talk loud enough for them to hear me over the music going on in the main service two floors down.

Then we ate some lunch and rested for a bit. Then we went to the 4:00 youth service(basically ages 13-19 but there's a wider range than that there), which we were playing music at, and that was pretty incredible. At the end they invited people up for prayer and formed a line with the missionaries on one side and some people from the church who had been fasting and praying for a week in preparation for this service on the other.

Let's just say it was pretty amazing, in a "Book of Acts, New Testament" sort of way. Praying for people, anointing with oil, casting out demons (really!), things like that. I didn't hear about any healings going on but I wouldn't be surprised if there were. The music was quite loud. My ears were ringing by the end of it. It never occurred to me to bring earplugs to church, but I've been to rock concerts where the music was not this loud.

Then we went to Pastor Juan's church (these are both Assemblies of God churches, but this one is in the very poor part of town) which is just about the opposite of Pastor Victor's. The folks from this church have the outreach to the Shipibo people, and a number of them came to the service in a big blue truck. No, they seem to have no problem with putting a bunch of people in the bed of truck.

(The power is currently out here at the hotel. That actually happens fairly often, like once or twice a day. It's a good thing I'm on my netbook with battery backup. Oh there, it's back on.)

The atmosphere in Pastor Juan's church is very different too, and we played worship music there too, then Pastor Kimball (from Louisiana) preached. We got to pray for the people there too, then we each got to greet the people. Charo (the translator) didn't let me say my piece in English because she knew I had some Spanish experience. It worked out pretty well, I guess, except for a few words here and there. We got an opportunity to hang out with them and the Shipibos, and that was really cool.

We finally got dinner at about 10 PM, and we were hungry! Pollo a la Brasa at the famous (in our minds anyway) El Carbón. Now it's going on midnight so I should get some sleep. We're back to work at the Children's Home again tomorrow.

6/14/2010:

Today we worked at the children's home. I ran into the woodworking team first and Andrew needed help routing the boards for the bunk beds, so that's what I spent most of the day doing. And here I thought a router was used in computer networks, but apparently it also can be used to make the edges of wood round while it makes a loud noise - but not nearly as loud as a Peruvian church service. I think I read somewhere that 13 out of 11 Americans don't get their daily dose of sawdust, but we got ours today.

Some other people were also doing some sanding, and others - primarily the team from Texas who arrived on Saturday (and got plunged right into the fire with those intense church services on Sunday) - were beginning to assemble the bunk beds. Meanwhile the plumbing team was multitasking with installing toilets and sinks in the second floor bathroom and getting the water tank on the hillside hooked up. The latter task was accomplished and it was filling most of the afternoon - there's not a whole lot of water pressure, as the showers here can confirm. Hey, at least there's occasionally warm water.

Lunch was Chifa with Chufa (although they just call it Chifa), which is basically chicken and vegetables with fried rice. It's kind of like Chinese food but with a Peruvian flavor. The kids wanted us to play soccer again after lunch but there was still more routing to be done and we don't have a lot of days left here in Tingo Maria, so we had to get back to work. We got most of it done before we had to leave, and the router began to get so hot it was slowly burning my hand. Finally someone got smart and got a pair of gloves.

We had a fun time trying to teach the Peruvians working with us how to say "Git 'er done" because we wanted them to say it to the Texas team the next day. They have a little bit of difficulty making our American "r" sound, but then for the rest of the week, that became the rallying cry for everyone - and we all adopted a Peruvian accent to say "Git air down!"

When we got back to the hotel we started to shower and get ready for dinner when the power began to go off and on several times, for between 10 and 60 seconds each time. It finally did stay on but I think something went wrong with the internet equipment because we've been offline ever since. Yes, I tried power cycling the router, which apparently is not just a woodworking tool but also has blinking lights and doesn't help you connect to the internet. It's not my internet connection and I felt odd looking for their ADSL station in a hotel that's not mine. See? While it might look like I'm in paradise, it's got its problems (and I haven't mentioned the bugs yet) and I'm thinking paradise might cost more than about $300 a week.

After dinner we went to the street evangelism and as usual it went well. I prayed with several people and got to talk to them in Spanish and that was great. Someone said it was our last night attending that, which is kind of sad. It's always a great time. Back at the hotel, we spent some time looking up at the stars, because the sky was perfectly clear. The Milky Way spiral arm was quite visible as well. Beautiful! We're far enough north to be able to see the Big Dipper, at least early in the evening, but far enough south to see the Southern Cross. Those are the only two constellations I recognized.

Well it's after midnight, as usual, and since I'm not on the Texas team (ahem, sleeping until after we left for the job site, leaving early, etc.) it will be an early morning tomorrow.