Denny's Car & Travels South

When the Stout family left for America late last month, Denny left his concept car which he’d been working on for a few years.  From what I gather it was initially a VW Beetle which had then had its shell removed and its frame built upon to include a roll cage.  As he’s going to university in America he’s left the car for the other missionary kids to continue to build up.  It was driven from his house to the Asuncion HQ under the strength of the van that dragged it with its 4 flat tyres, and was left at the crest of the hill to be later put by the garage.  The 2 Dans and the Reich kids were given the tricky task of moving the car down the steep hill one night just before the Reiches also left for America.  Worried that the brakeless Beetle would pick up momentum on the hill from the initial shove and crash through the garage we decided to attach it to Dan Reich’s truck and gently back it down the hill.  This proved to be not as easy as expected because the 4 flat tyres made the car overcome the power of gravity and momentum as we pushed it over the crest.  Despite the hill being a good 35 degrees, the car just would not move.  It took a heap of shoving and straining to get the anti-vehicle into place, a place it may remain in until the dozen MKs get it fixed up and able to drive up such a steep incline.  Quite a task!

On Friday I headed to the south on another 7 hour adventure by bus.  The last bus journey I had taken was in a climate-controlled posh bus and at the height of the day the air con unit failed causing an elderly lady to make a fuss and call the police to report she was being essentially cooked inside the bus which had no openable windows.  Because of this I was thankful that this latest journey was in a regular old city bus whose air conditioning was provided through curtained windows.

I got to stay at the Floyds’ house for 6 days to start with, and I was able to see a bit of the school teaching Mrs Floyd does at a local rural school, and got to attend a screening of a Christian movie on the side of their house which 2 dozen locals attended.

They had recently picked up a new pup, a Rottweiler cross which is as yet unnamed (although its 2 most popular possible names are Samson and Genghis and is currently affectionately called Chubster due to its size -it being as wide as it is tall), and the poor pup got savaged by their collie and required stitches.

Also, I got to meet a disabled man who’d been benefitted by the Audio Bible distribution from a couple of months back.  He has club hands and feet which has left him unable to lead what we’d consider a normal life and spends his days sitting in the shade by the main road where passersby sometimes stop and give him money which he’s able to survive on.  A local carpenter had made him a special wooden cart which he was able to get around with that looked somewhat like a longboard with very large wheels.
He was given an Audio Bible in the Guarani language and he listens to it sometimes while sitting by the road.  Mr Floyd told him the account of Adam and Eve and he said he’d never heard it before.  It’s amazing really, because it’s a Catholic area yet even the most known of stories had never been taught.  But now he knows.  You can pray for him that he’d continue to listen to his Audio Bible and that God would continue to teach him and that He may lead him to a saving knowledge of His Son Jesus.

I’m now staying at the Houghes with their 5 kids although our travels for today have been scuppered due to thunderstorms leaving the roads a bit treacherous.  Last night the power went off and it left the whole town in a thick darkness like I haven’t experienced in a long time.  It was quite awesome to experience as lightning occasionally flashed far out beyond the trees of the church.

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Concert in Catholic Church

I was invited to a concert put on by the youth version of the Paraguayan Philharmonic Orchestra who were to play the music, from what I gathered to be, the first Paraguayan opera.  It took place in a Catholic church and as we all got there early there was a service still going on which was interesting to watch.  Unlike Catholic churches in Europe which are known for being extraordinarily lavish in design and filled with idols, the Paraguayan ones I've visited are generally quite ordinary structures and a lot less dark and mysterious, and their relatively few idols are set against bland backdrops.  Whenever I see places like these I wonder how many genuine believers are there, no matter how few, who believe not because of the Roman Catholic system but rather in spite of it, people who act like those God deems "noble" -the Bereans in the book of Acts who didn't just accept what they heard taught about God and how to worship and live, but actually searched the Scriptures to see if what they are being told is true.

How tragic it is to have a Bible, the guidebook God Himself has given to humanity in order that we may know Him, but to simply hear many things about it and to never even check if what we've been told is true.

After the couple of idols were bowed down to by much but not all the congregation, the musicians quickly set up and put on a marvellous performance.  Much of the lyrics of the songs were addressed to God, and it was very good to hear.  Here are some pictures:

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British and Chinese and Korean Food!!

Having made do with my poor-quality cooking for ages, there has been a recent glut of wonderful moments when I haven't had to eat my own less-than-sprakling usually oil-based creations.  First it was MK Daniel's birthday a bit over a week ago and I was invited to his B-day meal at a major Chinese Buffet place in the city.  Smokes! it was expensive, however.  G64,000!  I almost fell off my chair when I heard the cost!  It's about half of my weekly groceries cost.  It turned out that's it's about £8.70 in British pounds, so it wasn't so bad.  I'm glad I ate a lot of cake, however.

Yesterday I got a double blessing in that I was invited to two different folks' places for lunch and dinner.  Firstly the new British couple (doing English teaching short-term) invited me for the quintessential British meal, toad-in-the-hole with gravy.  Then the Lee family took me to a Korean place near Downtown for a meal!  Yay!  It has been half a year since I last had any of these kinds of things, so I'm so thankful.

On the way back from the Korean restaurant, we encountered a street performer.  The city's major intersections are alive with them.  As the traffic stops at the lights for nearly a minute, a  performer will often jump out and do a 45-second performance of juggling or balancing, and then spend the remaining 15 seconds going from car to car for coins.  Sometimes it's not so great as the performers are little kids and their parents are forcing them to do it -although some give the impression of enjoying performing.  But when it's a skilled adult then the acts can be very entertaining.

David at the Chinese buffet.

The Lees

Kimchi!!  YUM!

A talented Asuncion street performer.

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Children's Centre

Last week I was able to join some of the Stout family as they helped out at an Asuncion children's centre for kids from a low-income area where parent(s) work most the day and can't provide enough time at home to look after their little ones.  It was really awesome!  The band of children were so sweet.  They sang, listened to stories, did crafts, ran around like mad things, and had a good day.  There's just so many ways to get involved in community projects here, and it was such a delight to see this one.

Here's a couple of pictures from the day:

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A Day of Manual Labour

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!

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Audio Bibles for Paraguay (San Francisco) [Part 2]...

Continuing from where I left off in an earlier post…

The fog that had enveloped us on the road down from Asuncion lifted and the sun came out as we all got suited up with logo-ed aprons to reach every isolated corner of the spread-out community of San Francisco.  It seemed very fitting that the mist that was heavy upon the town and reduced visibility was lifting to be replaced by blue skies as the Holy Bible was being taken to every home.  The group of 50 or so Christians made up of believers from otherwise unconnected churches as far apart as Asuncion and Yuty, were split into various smaller groups and given several town blocks to hand out Audio Bibles in the native Guarani language to after being given some training in first how to use the custom-made Chinese devices so they could then explain to those who they were giving them to how to work them.  It seemed to be a case of men going with men, and women with other women, with each group having a leader.

Last time I filmed an Audio Bible distribution I spent most of the time with a group of two (Dan Hough and a Paraguayan believer), so this time I tried to get some shots of the others.  So first I joined a group of Paraguayan girls that was led by Jean Floyd (an SIM worker who’d previously lived in San Francisco whose planted trees a decade ago now are the canopy that is the church’s roof).  The younger girls started off a bit shy, them being 15 or so, and from the city now in a totally different world, but soon they were filled with courage.

Jean's team of Paraguayan girls.

The girls at a farm shack.

Around the block from the church was a former neighbour of Jean’s and she happily invited a group of us into her little house where her granddaughter was running about.  I’ve noticed how much more inviting the small shack of a relatively poor person is about 10 times more inviting than the house of a well-to-do Briton.  Much of this is because Latin culture is to be around neighbours, friends and family a lot, and to have an open house, whilst in the UK we keep everybody away and only have people in occasionally.

After this I took a lift with Dan Hough’s 2 teams out into the sticks of San Francisco, out along the dirt road to almost Yataity.  Dan’s teammate was the same Paraguayan as the former Bible distribution, but his 2nd team who’d do the other side of the road (the even numbers, so to speak) was the youngest team headed by a Paraguayan teen who led 3 missionary kids, Daniel, Luke and Camden, aged between 8 and 12 roughly).  

Demonstrating how the Audio Bible works.

Seeing SIM Paraguay’s missionary kids makes me wish I became a Christian at a much younger age.  Granted God had many reasons why I’d be saved in Japan at 26/27, but I do have such regret at a wasted life which could have been doing mission trips for 15 years.  But I also remember that nothing in God’s economy is wasted, and He turns what seems like wasted times of life into beneficial things that can help others due to our knowing a number of snares of the Devil that held us back so long.

Because of the enthusiasm of all involved in the day, the whole town of San Francisco was reached, as well as the next village up the road, and also Yataity where the McKissicks have their medical clinic.  Quite what effect the Audio Bibles will have on the community is unknown and will require a lot of prayer as I’m convinced the enemy will wish to distract the community and the people with other things, so please pray that the people will listen to the Word of God and no longer be led astray by falsehood, and that the various items outside of homes which ward off various spirits will be taken down as signs of new belief and hope coming to the hearts and minds of families.

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Audio Bibles for Paraguay (San Francisco) [Part 1]

On Friday afternoon I was asked if I wanted to “go tomorrow”.  I took this to mean church as Tom has invited me to go with him to church on Sunday.  “Sure!” I said.  

“OK, we’ll be leaving at 1:30 tomorrow morning.”  

Something didn’t quite sound right about that.  I didn’t realise I was a day early for church.  What I had immediately said “Sure!” to was a 1-day mission trip.  Various church members from a couple of local churches had signed up to go by bus to San Francisco to hand out Audio Bibles, and now I was going, at 1:30am.

They had hired a bus to do the journey in.  It needed to be a tough bus as it’s only tough ones that make it down the dirt road segment of the journey south of Cazaapa.  At 12:30am it arrived, and I was taken aback as it was a regular Asuncion city bus, all brightly painted similar to Jeepneys in the Philippines, only 3 times the size.  From what I gathered this was the bus of a church member, one which would for the rest of the week be used circling some route in the city.

The buses here are great.  You stop them by pointing a gun-like finger up across the road.  You pay the very reasonable sum of 3,000G (something like 20 pence).  When you want to get off you need to get to the back of the bus and pull a string attached to the ceiling that runs forward to a bell near the driver.  Once I was heading to church and I squeezed past the people standing in the middle of its wide aisle, and went to pull the string only to find there was none.  I couldn’t signal the driver, and I couldn’t shout to stop without using the kind of vocabulary that would cause a mass panic as I’d be announcing an emergency.  I had to wait for the bus to slow down, then I jumped and hit the ground running.  In hindsight this was rather foolish as there could have been a telegraph pole right there for me to crash into.  Paraguayan buses: Adventure.

On early Saturday morning, about 20 people were on this bus and we set off into the night.  And my goodness, I regret wearing just shorts for the journey.  This was the coldest night not only of my stay in Paraguay, but also the coldest in my life I think!  As soon as we were out of the city a thick mist fell, and it was freezing.  In fact it probably wasn’t freezing, or any worse than in Scotland, only I was in shorts, which wasn’t wise.  At times the visibility on the road was reduced to about 30ft, and I imagined little reports in next weeks Asuncion newspapers mentioning a bus crash of Christians.  To fill us all, or perhaps just me, with dread, we passed a car fully engulfed in flames on the lay-by!

Someone must have checked weather reports and it turned out there was a big collection of blankets available which were passed out.  I wrapped myself into a sort of breathless cocoon inside my felt blanket as I perched on my chair, hoping it really wouldn’t take 6 hours to get there.

I don’t sleep on bus journeys, no matter how comfortable or warm.  Yet somehow, by God’s grace, I managed to sleep about 3 hours!  With me, I tell you, this was impossible, but with God, all things are possible.

We arrived in San Francisco with the thick mists still hanging in the air.  It made such a peculiar, otherworldly sight.  This was a town I’d only ever seen in the blazing sun, but now it seemed about as miserable as a dreich Scottish morning.

We were met at the Forest Door church (the one that has walls and roof made of swaying trees, and a carpet made of grass) by local believers, some who had been on the Audio Bible distribution over a month ago beyond Yuty.  This was a much bigger group than then.  Back then it was about 25.  This time there was about 50.  It was amazing to see!

For some the journey had been made to participate in their first form of evangelism, for others they had done this kind of thing for years.  Some were young (even a couple of pre-teens), some were old, yet everybody was part of the same family.  They were all out to put into the hands of every resident of San Francisco, a full Genesis to Revelation Audio Bible in Guarani that they could fully understand, which would mark the day when everybody in town could for the first time have access to the Truth of God directly, no longer relying on superstitious understandings of the Bible, or what had been twisted and handed down, or by the few incorrect things the locals priests would have offered in their own blindness.

I’ll write some more about the day of delivering them next, but first here are some pictures of the day up until that point.

To learn more about the Audio Bibles for Paraguay project, visit the website: http://audiobiblesforparaguay.org, and to support the work from a distance, donate via the project page on SIM.org: http://sim.org/index.php/project/91039

The city bus that safely got us there.

The unloaded precious cargo it carried: hundreds of Audio Bibles.

The volunteers start gathering at Forest Door Church.

It really was that cold!

Sorting out the boxed Audio Bibles.

During a lesson on how to work the Bibles.  The instructions would have to be explained to each person who received one.

What always surprises me is the number of Christian youths who turn out to assist these events!

One of the youngest volunteers gets help with his deliverer's bib.

Another youngster helping organise the pens on the chair for everybody.  "Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless." (1 Corinthians 15:58)  

The courier bags the volunteers will carry, each loaded with about 20 Audio Bibles.

A group photo before heading out.

A prayer by a Forest Door Church elder before leaving.

Dr. McKissick and David looking over the maps the latter had prepared so everybody could be reached.

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Sin Prisa y Sin Pausa

There hasn’t been much to write about these past 2 weeks as I’ve been in Asuncion the whole time editing.  I can’t make editing sound interesting, so I won’t try.  There also haven’t been many interesting things happening around here except another night-time thrill-ride to Asuncion airport to pick up a bunch of students from a Texan Bible college (on the road at 2:30am I had the great sensation of pressing the brake when approaching an intersection and nothing happening, then almost driving into one of them 50ft trees they have growing out of the centre of the slow lanes in dual-carriageways in Asuncion).  

The Bible college group are doing summer work similar to what I got to do at the Faith Mission Bible College, only they got to travel further than I did (Ireland isn’t far from Scotland).  It took them something like 3 days to travel here, which is more than it took for me from the UK.  The group of 5 are spending 2+ months here with SIM and New Tribes Mission.

I’ll be filming the activity they are involved in, that being the audio Bible distribution up the river from Concepcion in June, and they’ll be at the SIM Paraguay winter retreat in July the week before I head back to the UK.

Besides this I have dropped around to the New Tribes Mission 2-week seminar with Mike to film some of it and the work they are all doing.  For these past 2 weeks, until last night, a bunch of New Tribes Mission people were staying here at SIM HQ, including the lady I remember seeing in a NTM video from Papua New Guinea (you can see it here: http://usa.ntm.org/content/mission-videos-and-mission-photos/148/footsteps).  She gave a presentation at the church last last Sunday too, and it was very heart-breaking.  She spoke of how the tribe she worked with were taken through the Bible in something like 40 lessons over several weeks, and the day came when they reached the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and the whole village fell silent, none had anything to say, no questions to ask, just silence.  

Days later she asked one village lady what she thought, and she said through tear-filled eyes that she understood that Jesus had died for her.  Much of the village said words to that effect over the next few days, and they were all dealing with the weight of that knowledge, a weight which actually lifted the burdens of their sin.

At the NTM event I was about to speak to SIMer Greg Stirling (right) and ask him why he was there, until I realised it wasn't him, just his NTM doppelgänger!

The event brought out one of the families from the East I got to film.

At the church there was a celebration of mothers for Paraguayan Mothers' Day.  All the kids got up and spoke a bit of why they appreciated their moms.  Romy, one of the MKs said she appreciated her mom's patience with her.  I'll say!  Minutes later Romy beat me up in church again!

The New Tribes Mission presentation about Papua New Guinea.

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