Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Due to a possible transportation workers' strike, our plans for today were altered somewhat.  In the morning, our interns took us on an awesome tour of several of the Trujillo C&MA churches.  They range from very poor (one is a site for Compassion International programs) to the large 800-1000 member church in the nice downtown area.  That church (Larco) is the "mother church" for a number of the other churches; every so often they just pick out a part of town, buy a property there, and hive off 200 of their members to start the new work.  The sincere desire of all the pastors and the churches for reaching their communities was touching.  Two gave brief testimonies of how God had worked in their lives that left many wiping tears from our eyes.  We found once again how our kinship in Christ so easily transcended cultural boundaries.

On our way back to the guest house, we purchased some sugar cane for everyone to try.  This is one of the many items sold by roadside carts, and our group is determined to try every new food item they see (I wasn't kidding about the cow heart).  Maybe because they have yet to find one they do not like (even the cow heart, a.k.a. "anticuchos," met with rave reviews).

The afternoon saw more concrete footings completed, the personal highlight for me being watching Abby N. pushing the concrete-filled wheelbarrow right alongside the hefty guys.  We also attempted to do our mini-VBS for the neighborhood kids.  Probably 10-15 showed up with their "cann-dy" faces on.  They dutifully sat through our attempt to read the Jonah story in Spanish (with a visual aid), then virtually swarmed us when we pulled out the hats and stickers we had for a craft.  Abby L. attempted to play "duck, duck, goose" with them, and we gave each a wordless-book bracelet.  We have a child-oriented tract that explains what the colors mean, and since we didn't have a very bilingual intern with us at the time, we decided to at least give out the tracts.  You have never seen anyone so eager for tracts!  They had no idea what they were, but everything else we had given them had been good, so they were clamoring for as many as they could get.  Please pray that each tract will come to someone who will read it, and God's truth will find fertile soil even through this crazy method of evangelism.

Tonight, most of the group is suffering from a mild stomachache from the "lomo fino" we ate at a local restaurant.  Lomo fino is a "fine cut" of steak, and it was so fine that we all ate too much.. thus the stomachache. : )  What a tough missions trip!  Tomorrow we should be visiting the day care to do our VBS as planned, and doing construction in the morning.  Thanks again for praying!!