Today Cherlynn was moving house from Villarrica to Asuncion as she readies to return to America for a year or so, so a bunch of us were on site to help with the moving. The truck arrived, filled to the gunnels with the heaviest wooden furniture I’ve ever encountered. It was one of the great-looking ancient trucks you’d see in a 1970’s movie and a scrapyard outside of Latin America, the kind that fill the roads here and seem forever fixable, without the salt deterioration so prevalent in the British Isles.
It had to back down a very steep road to the site and as it began to go, Denny noticed its drive shaft was rather clunky and once it got on the gradient and gravity was taking over, it wasn’t able to move forward. A wing mirror hit a tree and the driver tried to gun it forward and manoeuvre slightly, but as he engaged 1st gear the truck just went further back. The wing mirror lost its battle, and the truck hit the greater slope, all its weight suited to the load in the back and the cab was raised in the air like the head of a stretching dog. It looked like it would be a calamity, but everything was tranquilo for this is Paraguay and what I’d deem an unsafe load in the UK is normal here. I like it, it makes everything interesting and stops me being a traffic cop all the time.
Here's a not quite typical, but a quite common sight on the roads:
 |
| Some strings holding on heavy steel as the truck continued for miles like this at 60mph. |
Today, helping unload the truck’s burden (which included a boxer dog in a cage) and carry big cabinets holus-bolus up 2 sets of stairs, made me long for IKEA furniture which can be disassembled. However it was a good few hours of exercise and math, trying to figure if the bulkier bunkers could be fitted through the upstairs door by the time we all ran out of strength at the top.
 |
| The truck after some unloading. |
 |
| Almost done! |
It was a really good time, and Danny, Perdo, Denny, James and I had a enjoyable day of heavy manual labour. Cherlynn treated us afterwards to empenadas and icy Coca-Cola. Whilst waiting for the empenada delivery man, Denny found Cherlynn’s fire-extinguisher, and realising its contents were out of date (they have all these laws here regarding having them topped-up or replaced every year), he took the liberty of not losing its contents to a shop’s bin and chased me with it. Danny had to go back to work and jokingly told Denny not to get any on his car. So seconds later his car was covered with extinguisher dust!
 |
| Danger man. |
 |
| Danny's car. |
 |
| The yard after being extinguished. |
To sum it up: Not much achieved for the Kingdom of God today, but a group of God's children are happy!
1 comments:
:D
Post a Comment