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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Angoninguíteguesáque or Pangoninguíteparitigáde

With New Tribes Mission I got to go to the Gran Chaco last week whilst it was in full bloom, its arid flatlands brought to life and various shades of green thanks to God's giving them an abundance of rain recently.  For some it was a blessing as it watered the crops, whilst for others they were flooded.  When seeing such a difference in the results I remember Elihu's words to Job (Elihu was the only friend of Job's whom wasn't rebuked by God for speaking falsehood about Him) when he said, He brings clouds to punish men, or to water his earth and show His love. (Job 37:13).  This shows me how God uses things usually used as a blessing to often speak to people by causing it to not be a blessing.  Elihu also said earlier, 'He says to the snow, "Fall on the earth," and to the rain shower, "Be a mighty downpour." So that all men He has made may know His work, He stops every man from his labor.' (37:6-7)  God communicates to people through many ways, although they don't hear it.  Earlier still Elihu said as much, 'For God does speak -now one way, now another- though man may not perceive it.  In a dream, in a vision in the night... He may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep from pride... or a man may be chastened on a bed of pain... God does all these things to a man -twice, even three times- to turn back his soul from the grave. (33:14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 29, 30).


God speaks to us through difficult events, through illness, through creation, though we don't often understand it, and we remain in our rebellion and even get angry at God for brining calamity when He is actually bringing it to get their attention, 'For when I called, no one answered, when I spoke, no one listened.  They did evil in My sight and chose what displeases Me.' (Isaiah 66:4)


While in the Chaco we visited the Ayoré tribe who are having the complete Holy Bible translated into their language, and as I looked over a book of their Bible, I saw a very long word which caught my eye, Angoninguíteguesáque, and I asked what it meant so I could learn a Ayoré word.  The Bible translator said it meant open-eardness, and its antonym is Pangoninguíteparitigáde which is closed-eardness.  Who has their ears open to God's voice I wonder in the Ayoré tribe, in the Gran Chaco amidst its recent difficulties, and around the rest of the world I wonder?


Here are some other pictures from the tribe and other places I saw last week.

Tribal pastor

Pastor teaching.

Bible translators.

Ayore dolls.

Tribe guy with an awesome face.

This man was kind enough to do an interview for us.

People from a different tribe to the West.

Kids from 2nd tribe.

Smiles.

Heading out of a tribal community.

Anthony found this outhouse interesting as its throne was sideways...

...so he demonstrated the angle a person should sit!

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Gran Chaco With NTM

This past week 4 of us have travelled to the North West of Paraguay into the sparsely-populated, arid Gran Chaco region.  The Gran Chaco spreads into Bolivia to the North and Argentina to the East.  SIM works south of Asuncion with subsistence farmers whilst a lot of NTM’s work is North with the tribal people out in the wilds.  As I’m working 2 weeks with NTM it gave me the only opportunity to see this part of the country and visit some of its tribes.  I’ll write some more about the tribes we saw at some point later, but as much of the adventure was set on the epic road trip there and back, I’ll talk of that first.

Much of Paraguay is totally flat with the occasional hillock, and when we reached the bridge over the river beside Concepcion it really struck home just how flat the country, especially the Chaco, is as there was not a single hill in sight.  What it lacked in hills we hoped it made up for in wildlife since there was such a huge area of scrubland with so few hunters/people, as the rest of the country has been disappointing in the lack of wild animals.

Exiting the bridge we found an immediate decline in traffic (from medium to almost zero) and a steep falling away in the road -literally as huge, 0.5ft deep potholes littered the tarmac road as it cut an almost straight line through the low, thorny scrubland.  Long grasses reached out onto the road and made the 2-lane highway seem long-abandoned, desolate and narrow.  After the bridge it took about 20km until we passed a house, and each further house or settlement seemed to be separated by a similar distance.

As it was extraordinarily flat, the slightly raised road often had long patches of floodwater on either side, not more than 1ft deep but covering large areas.  Some shacks we passed were surrounded by these low floodwaters, but life inside them seemed to be continuing.  Last week we were supposed to have driven out here, but the Chaco was hit with torrential rain which left much of the area flooded this way.  The local news had called it a disaster zone, which sounds extreme until you know how very tranquil Paraguay is with its weather.  It is never struck with the kind of storms the southern states of America get, so what is a bit rough for us in the UK or USA is extreme here.

We drove about 300km over bad roads, through the vast prairie, but in all this distance we scarcely saw anything in the way of animals besides the small herds of cows and goats which crossed the roads, and various vultures and storks.  We were, however, blessed with an encounter with a groundhog who posed for us and bit Jeremy’s leather boots, and later he and Anthony jumped out the car and captured an armadillo.

Here are some more pictures of the things we saw on the roads between Concepcion and Filadelfia.

My rather poorly made 360 of the Paraguayan horizon from the vantage point of the bridge outside Concepcion.

Anthony and Jeremy catching an armadillo

The snared beast.

Set free.

The groundhog photoshoot.

It wasn't afraid of anything.

A dear old tribal lady who hitched a lift.

A field of flowers by a small hut in the middle of nowhere.  Reminds me of how God grows beautiful plants on distant mountains and places no human eye will ever see, all for His glory.

This truck slid off the road into thick mud.

A flooded Chaco hut.

Harvest.

The unloved guard dog who jumped into the car when we stopped at a peanut butter farm.

Windscreen.

The black dots are horrid, big-butt spiders in vast, 20ft webs.

Flowers in a flooded field.

A vile, big-butt spider.  Its tread was like nylon.

A stork hiding in the grass in a rare area of meadow.

Due to the floods and amount of unmoving water, the Chaco was teeming with mosquitos.

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New Tribes Mission

These past 2 weeks I have been working with New Tribes Mission (http://ntm.org) and I have been all over the North of Paraguay with them visiting tribes and Bible translators and so forth.  There have been many adventures, but that's for another day.  However, here are some pictures of the sights so far...

Seeing the often primitive shacks the tribal people live in is humbling.  The sense of community is the advantage they gain from the disadvantage of living conditions.

Hair-combing seemed to be high on the agenda for most women and girls.

Some tribe kids watching a dance performance.

A tribe's older men folk form a line to dance.

The women wore these cool ankle thingies.

A kid down a tribal street.

A tribe's church.  It has no glass or shutters in the window gaps so people, not only children but adults too, use them as entrances and exits.

Carrying water from the well for the church-goers to have terere.

One of the worship leaders stopped mid-song to get some terere, then continued on after a few seconds!

Highway from the church.

Tribe elder giving me a look.

Kids with a bike with no tyres, only rims, but having a great time nonetheless!

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Stranded in Asuncion with New Tribes Mission

I was supposed to be travelling north into the Grand Chaco region of Paraguay from Sunday onwards, but there has been a huge rainfall (50cm) there flooding a lot of dirt tracks making it inaccessible for a few days, but there was a lot of Asuncion-based NTM work to be done the week after, so the weeks have just been changed about.


So on Sunday some of the work entailed heading to a large Baptist church in the city with connections to NTM and interviewing a Paraguayan girl who went on a mission trip with NTM recently (which is rare as Paraguayan churches are yet to really grasp hold of mission work, although some early steps are highly encouraged and joy-filled, such as the Audio Bible distribution I wrote of a couple of weeks ago).


The whole Baptist church took a step where most British churches don't go, and went out with invites to the Luis Palau crusade happening in a week at Asuncion's Jockey Club.  Luis Palau is an Argentinian evangelist, very much the Latin American Billy Graham, so it's exciting times and so great to see so many churches go out and let people know.  The Paraguayan believers don't do the job with sour faces as I know British people do, they go with joy at working for the Lord, so it's ace.


Besides filming a bit of that, I went with Mike, his wife Trisha and kids to the peninsula in the large river between Asuncion city and Argentina.  To get there you can either take the ferry, or, even drive it in a major four-by-four.  The trouble with the latter option is it means driving through one of the largest slums in the city.  The city was quite quiet as we made our way to the peninsula because the 2 big football teams in the country were playing that evening, and in the slums there was a festive atmosphere as people crowded together to watch the TVs (and everybody seemed to support the team called Guarani which is based quite close to SIM -they have a strip like Juventus and Newcastle, and I'd rather support one of the underdogs, but that's just me).


Through the slum we had a good look at the downtown area of the city from a good vantage point.  The end of the peninsula is actually a club with extensive grounds, sports facilities, basketball and tennis courts, water slides, a huge 2-storey pavilion, and somewhat typically, it had all fallen into disrepair and whilst having space for 800-1000 people, there were about 15 of us.


On the way back we stopped before the slums to photograph and film the river boats and fields swarming with dragonflies.  It was at sunset, so magic hour to the photographer (my pictures are just vidcaps, so not ideal as still images as always), and since we were surrounded by the totally placid grand river, the mosquitos came out in their hundreds and attacked in hordes.  I must have been bitten 40 times in just a few minutes, although only one bite was long enough to cause the usual pain.


In the rush out of the car to get good shots, then running back in swatting off the mosquitos, I managed to lose my mobile phone.  I had just an hour before been presented by Trisha with a month's credit for it which she then installed, so it's the ideal time to lose it if it'll be a benefit to someone in the slum.  God's hand is in these things.

Water slide across the field.

Riverboat on the peninsula.

Part of the unused park.

A boat on a peninsula outcrop.

Downtown Asuncion from the park.

The field of dragonflies.

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