Friday the 15th June and we were on the move again, this time to the Bible Institute (like the Salvation Army) in downtown Montevideo. We would miss the beautiful farmlands of Mi Refugio, but it would be good to move to the city to be able to minister there, plus the accommodation was free, which, given our team's current financial position, was a great drawcard! Driving there was, no surprise, an interesting experience, with the 14km journey taking us 2 hours! Turns out the GPS wasn't programmed correctly... so we went all the way round and through the city. We spent a lot of time driving through the poorest neighbourhoods, wondering if this was where we would be staying, we were after all being given free accommodation so it wasn't a good time for us to be picky!! After many awkward pullovers stops in the middle of busy roads to get directions we eventually got there. And while interesting, the house was great. Freezing cold but we all had our own beds so that was nice. The bathroom was quite interesting - the guys and girls was only separated by a thin plywood so you can hear everything that goes on in the other bathroom, plus in each bathroom there were two toilets without any separation. I don't know about you but community peeing is still a bit beyond me!!
Saturday was a good day of relaxing, getting to know our new surroundings (there's a great street market round the corner every Saturday selling fruit and veg and other things, like clothes, which I would come to discover the following weekend when I had the unfortunate experience of losing all my laundry at the local laundromat).
Sunday our team split up and ministered in 3 different places. I went with a group to minister at a small church consisting only of children (I wonder where the parents were?! Maybe we just went to the kids service?) near the beach about 45min away from where we were staying. The kids were so sweet, we explained our story of who we are and what we're doing to them, shared some stories and testimonies of our travels and showed them around our car. We'd driven in one of our motorhomes that morning so looking around it was a great adventure for them, seeing how the bed falls out, the cupboards, fridge, etc and the boys pretended to drive it! Another highlight was us sharing stories of some of the grossest things we've eaten on our travels!! We prayed and prophesied over them which was really powerful, speaking into young children's life is so important. A few of our team stayed to continue leading them in a kids service while the rest of us went a block away to evangelize at a Feria (street market). It was a load of fun, chatting to local people, sharing with them who we are and of course experiencing the locals foods and products on sale.
Highlights of the morning include 3 people giving their lives to Jesus, yay God, plus meeting Joe, our homosexual friend from San Francisco who'd moved to Uruguay to be with his partner. It was so great having a conversation with them and sharing some of God's love with them. A funny part of the morning was when the pastor's daughter told us about a depressed lady who lived in one the houses nearby, so Charlotte and I of course say great let's go visit her, which totally shocked the daughter as she was definitely not keen to do this! We went anyway and it was classically awkward, a couple of white foreign girls knocking at a family's door to say his and bless them, baring in mind we barely speak Spanish! But it was also great, the family appreciated us coming round, again just showing a bit of God's love to them, and I hope the pastor's daughter learnt from us about how evangelising is not just handing our tracts hoping people will come to church and get saved (actually this is never what I do, totally not my style), but rather how by building a relationship with people, talking with them and sharing God's love with them you will see their hearts change as they welcome Jesus into their lives. After the Feria evangelising and kids church service we shared a wonderful home cooked meal with the pastor and his family and some ladies from the church. Again we were spoilt with some delicious home cooked cake. Uruguay really has been a country of beautiful home baked cakes for us!!
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