We experienced quite a lot of opposition in entering Uruguay. For example it took us 4 days to reach the capital, Montevideo, from Buenos Aires, when it's actually only about an 8 hour drive! But God is good and we have found opportunities to minister along the way. The first setback was being pulled over by the police in Argentina and being given a fine for not having valid car insurance. This wasn't entirely fair as the team had been assured when we entered Argentina that we didn't need insurance, but now we were told we needed it and were thus breaking the law by not having it. Aaarrghh. So in between discussing this in the freezing cold (winter in South America is cold!!), the policemen were very nice about it and gave us a reduced fine rather than impounding our cars. Far more exciting was that one of our team members got a prophetic word from the Lord for one of the policeman so she gave it to him and managed to share Jesus with him. In the natural we tried not to worry about the extra money we suddenly had to pay, especially as we'd barely had enough gas money to start with, so now we definitely didn't have enough gas money to get to Montevideo having just paid the fine. But God is faithful and the very next day we had an anonymous donation in our team account which was exactly the right amount to cover our unforeseen expense. Yay God!

Driving onwards and we get to the border, only to hit our second problem for the day. Car insurance issues again!  We needed to have car insurance for Uruguay before we could enter the country. Slight problem was that we couldn't buy car insurance at the border as they don't sell insurance at the border, but then we couldn't drive into Uruguay as we didn't have said car insurance. Err. So after some negotiations they let one of our cars drive into the country to try buy the insurance at the nearest town. So off they went and the rest of us hung out at the border for 3 hours. Cold, bored and hungry, waiting at borders is not that fun!! But we do manage to entertain ourselves and learn to be patient through it all. After buying the insurance at the bank on the way our team members felt to pray and prophesy over the bank staff members, which they did! This is particularly significant as Uruguay is not a religious country open to faith at all. For example, holidays all have secular names, like Christmas is Family Day and Easter or Holy Week is Tourism Week. We were also blessed through this with the bank staff members finding and organising a hostal for us to stay at that night in their town of Frey Bentos. 

Two men drinking mate (tea) in the main square in Frey Bentos