Iglesia Centro Familiar de Adoracion

Where I come from in Scotland a congregation of 40 is a good number for a church.  Anything over 90 is a ‘big’ church in my estimations, and Morningside Baptist Church in Edinburgh would be the local megachurch with close to 1000 members.  The church I attended this past Sunday in Asuncion had 40 people.  Those 40 people handed out the communion trays to the several thousand people in the 3-level stadium.  It was Paraguay’s biggest church, Iglesia Centro Familiar de Adoracion.

The service started at 10am and I arrived at 9:15 as I didn’t expect the empty roads going through the city or a fast bus journey.  By 10am when the music started there were only a couple of hundred people (see picture), but then this is Latin America where the concept of time isn’t held so tightly.  By 10:30am the floodgates had opened and people streamed in through the various doors and filled 2 of the 3 levels of the stadium.

One of the great things about these kinds of churches is hearing all the voices singing songs to Christ, booming them out, shaking the whole building.  It makes me wonder what heaven will be like with perhaps billions of people singing praise to our glorious King!

Besides this one day, the week has been slower than all preceding it in Paraguay as I’m stuck editing films for 2 weeks.  The good part has been that for a week the McKissicks were here after their family holiday to the beaches of Brazil which meant playing tennis, hockey and basketball most days in the courtyard.  Also the Dreilings were here holding a large garage sale so there was much activity (I bought a hammock that has the colours of the national flag).

The crew from Brazil.

Tyler, 7, in a dangerous place.

These past 2 weeks have brought about some changes for the stiflingly hot summer weather has passed and now it’s really nice mid to high 20’s most days, and one day was actually cold so that I got to wear a sweatshirt and jeans for the first time.  James, one of the missionary kids, told me I was an chump when he saw me dressed for winter because he thought I was meant to be Scottish and able to deal with the cold.  I never thought it would happen, but now I can handle the heat and can’t handle the cold.  So far one night has required a thick blanket to stay warm rather than the usual thin cotton sheet.  It alarms me that if this is autumn, what will winter be like!

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New Year

It’s a few minutes before the New Year and I am supposed to be at a party with friends from my last year, which includes the hike up the nearby city-centre hill to watch the fireworks at midnight, but I am held up on the wild edge of the city at the Bible college.  The college has a big, warm library, and as the whole campus would have been empty, I thought I’d spend a few uninterrupted hours there in the peace and warmth studying.

It turned out I wasn’t alone: Timothy had returned for the new semester (17 days early) and the studying turned into a video game afternoon.

Wan turned up and we got a pizza meal deal and hung out in the common room.  When I joined the college in 2008 they had a poor selection of U-rated movies.  During the 2 years, Daniel (a gun-toting Canadian) and I checked out various little shops for gun-toting movies.  We ended with a selection of around 40 which we left hidden in a box in one of the endless attics of the campus.  The best attic happened to be one that was like something out of Alice in Wonderland as each ‘room’ of the attic had a gap to the next, and the gaps got progressively smaller until one I could only just contort myself through.  They hadn’t been disturbed, except by dust, in over a year, which showed the current students weren’t as adventurous as ones in the past.

We selected a very Christmasy/New-Yearsy video -Die Hard.  After this Wan introduced me to an American cartoon series double-bill which was doing a Star Wars special followed by a whodunit, which is now itself followed by a live-action whodunit.

While Timothy and Wan simultaneously conquer Europe and watch a moustachioed detective on a second screen, I have tried to regain some focus and have been checking out various resources on that far-off land of mystery, mainly journals by those working in its jungles and towns, and I am beginning to realise how far off and exotic it all is.  Things I have learned that I’m not excited about: it’s very hot, there are gigantic spiders that children play with (rather than flee from with arms raised), the earth is reddish in colour, insects are large, and there are man-eating creatures roaming about.  I once saw a possessed dog, and a rat, but these 2 things are the only things I have been afraid of here.  I’m sort of glad it’s still 2011 as it keeps me far away from all of this.

Added after midnight:

An explosion took us surprise at midnight!  Though out in the sticks, we could feel the detonation of fireworks rippling up through the night to us.  Interestingly 4 minutes later the locals staged their own primitive fireworks show.  New Year is slightly delayed out here, or the fuses are longer.  2012.

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Books on Paraguay

A lot has been written about Paraguay, just not a lot has been published, and even less is available in the local bookshop.  There was a wall of 2000 travel books, and with 196 countries in the world, there was, statistically speaking, 10 books on Paraguay.  There ended up being 60 on Paraguay.  Not books, but rather pages from those 2000 books.

58 of them came in a book on Argentina, probably because in Argentina you have to know your enemy.  The 2 other pages came in a book about amazing places off the beaten track.  It was of a piranha-infested river that runs through Paraguay.  Certainly a river of man-eating fish is off the beaten track justifiably.

Apparently it’s a task to get a good map of the country too.

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