Paraguay, Part II

After I wrote last night, we went out for a meeting with the local pastors and conference officials to coordinate our efforts. It was a fun meeting, where they served us pizza with really good vegetables on it and some of their tasty soda. This morning, we had breakfast at the hotel, which was actually quite decent--they had oatmeal, cereal, fruit, yogurt, bread, and hot drinks. All in all, it won't be hard to eat it every day for the next two weeks. We had another debriefing, then Shaddai and I spent the rest of the morning working on my sermon for tonight. It's a long process, involving lots of translation work. There's no way I can get out of this trip without improving my Spanish. Around 1:00 we left to have lunch at the Adventist Hospital here. The food was incredible, and they even laid it out in a very attractive presentation. It was like dining at a five-star restaurant without the excessive number of forks and formal dress. We went shopping for supplies then, which was interesting. We had to speak Spanish as much as possible, because the people who sell things here will sometimes raise the prices if they hear English. Oddly enough, they didn't sell any usefully-sized construction paper, so we had to buy large sheets and cut them out by hand later.After dropping those supplies off here at the hotel, we left to our preaching/Vacation Bible School site. The VBS site is a soccer field with a cow in it. Our first program of that will be tomorrow, which will be interesting. The local woman who was showing us around gave us a tour of a nearby school. Parts of the small building are 70 years old, and its 5 classrooms serve 190 students, some of which have to meet outside. Other, newer schools get better funding, and this one has been threatened to be shut down. I was shocked at the poverty of the school--they definitely didn't have enough desks, which looked like one breath could knock them down, and most of the crude blackboards weren't even mounted to the walls.When I started to set up, I discovered to my annoyance that I did not have the right cable to connect the projector to my computer. So, I had to preach without the beautiful power point slides I had worked so hard to create. That's life. I enjoyed faking my way through song service; they were mostly songs I knew in English, but had to pick up really quickly in Spanish. We had a great turnout--about 150 people, many of them children. The sermon went really well, despite the technical difficulties, and the people were very kind as they left. Most of them are Guarani natives, and Spanish is their second language. When we came back to the hotel, Shaddai, Scott and I enjoyed a nice, long, refreshing swim in the hotel pool. Tomorrow will be even more busy than today was, including a live interview on one of the local radio stations. In the meantime, we will sleep very well.