Good afternoon from Paraguay! The local temperature today feels like 94 degrees.
Today we have a bit more downtime before we begin more intensive technical work at the local churches and radio station tomorrow. It's a much needed day of relaxation after two full days of travel.
This morning we started our Sunday by visiting a smaller congregation in Belle Vista, Paraguay. The congregation had an older and more low tech vibe than the church in Obligato we visited on Saturday night.
Church at Belle Vista on Sunday.
The Belle Vista church was one of the churches we’ll work on this week. I think it’s a newer and smaller congregation- they have (what we’d consider in the US) many more technical issues to work through. However it was still a great hour of worship! The people here are very docile and friendly. They are (or at least seem to be) happy to see us!
This church needs some serious upgrades to their projection... it was interesting to see the person running the slides on the screen switching between projecting text on a Microsoft Word document to Powerpoint slides.. One of the things we brought was ProPresenter (which would allow them to use just one program) and when we told them we could install it and train them, they seemed very excited. We also will help them with some wiring... the current sound situation is a bit of a disaster. Their tech guy told us through an interpreter that they "needed help urgently" in the tech department.
Joe and I are planning to spend one of our afternoons at Belle Vista cleaning up some of those issues and training. Its a relief to know that our help is direly needed!
We've been tooling around in this awesome, vintage van! We fit all 21 (including the driver) of us in this bad boy. I'd say it's probably circa early 1970s. That baby purred! I’d say we averaged about 20mph the whole trip.
Lots of children playing in the Parana River
After church we went to a really cool restaurant down on the Parana river, which we're told is the 2nd largest river in Latin America, next to the Amazon River. The Parana divides Paraguay from Argentina... so the land you see on the other side is a different country. Norberto (basically our guide, he's a missionary down here) told me they patrol the waterway during the week but not on Sundays (which doesn't sound so secure) so we didn't see them.
We spent about two hours down on the beach or on the patio... We even built up the courage to strip down to our shorts and swim up to our necks in the river! It had some serious current when you got out far. No piranhas in Parana, so that's good too.