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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Paraguay's "Mountains"

I've written a few times about how flat Paraguay is.  For a time the biggest 'hill' I experienced was hiking the 5 meter rise from the local supermarket back to SIM HQ.  By God's grace I've been able to see a large amount of Paraguay (North, West, South and East!) and I have finally seen some hills.  Interestingly the missionaries refer to them as 'mountains' despite them being nowhere near mountain height, but travelling 200km over flat terrain, a rare hill does seem a lot like a mountain!

This first picture is from the summit of a man-made hill (the bridge West of Concepcion that heads into the flat Gran Chaco region).  Very few places offer views of the landscape like this.

These couple of hills were the first major hills I saw in Paraguay somewhere between Villarica and Caazapa, although there were a few smaller ones on the way, notably beside Paraguari further West (if memory serves me well

The same hills as Dan drives by.

Driving up a hill with a hill on the horizon!  Rare!

Small hills compared to the others, but so far the most scenic place I have seen in the whole of Paraguay.  My image was complimented by a fly hitting the bottom-right of the lens.

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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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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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Yuty to Encarnacion Photo Gallery

A couple of weeks back I was in Yuty and one day I got to travel south to Incarnation, and as I'm editing the film I took in Yuty I thought I'd post a lot of sights I saw along the road between Yuty and Encarnacion.

Raphella's perfume smells like 'Booz'.  Not so appealing for those with UK English.

I promised my FM friend Paul that if I saw parrots in Paraguay I'd take some pictures of them for him.  Unfortunately they aren't all that exciting.

In a jungle hotel in Encarnacion there's a large tree with a shrine to Mary. :(

Paraguayan baby wanting terere.

A huge toad getting prodded into life by Dan.

Old map of the region in a Jesuit museum on the road.

Looks like he has been speared, but is carrying a huge pole for use with a barge.

Jesuit ruins.

Small fry dog. 

One of the oversize lakes created by damming.  Nearby there is a house 90% submerged.

A typical roadside stall.

A major road constructed around the perimeter of a new lake.  There were 2 cars in the 15 minutes we were there.

The sad remains of the torn-up Paraguayan railway system.  The country is much less tourist-friendly because of it.

A pup separated from its litter.

A good place to plant a bush. 

It's not uncommon for cows to roam freely in the streets, although the local fuzz sometimes escort the rogue bovine to fuzz station and farmers pay fine much like parking tickets.

A dead tree pretending to be a pylon.

One of the towns used to be named after a chief from ages past called Bobi.

The other end of the town had a different chief.

A place that looks like a coffee shop only won't sell coffee so I don't know what you call them.  Well, besides 'cafe'.

Wide Load!  Besides transporting 5ft strimmers, the most popular dangerous article to carry on a motorbike in this country is the 15kg gas canister.

A road cutting across one of the now flooded regions in the south of Paraguay.  It's quite serene.

Nice flowering bush.

A frog living in the bathroom.

Frog caught by a kid.

Frog prepared to be transported outside.

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