I have very quickly realized that there is no way that I will be able to relate everything that I am doing. I don´t really want to just list the things I have done because that is boring and doesn´t really tell you much. So, I think I will just write about the most significant or exciting things that are happening.
Today Pastors Matias, Martina, and I went to the church community of Lomo de Ramos. This morning when we were eating breakfast and getting ready to leave for the day, Matias twice told me that we were going to go up a mountain almost to the sky and he asked me if I was ok with this. I said ¨of course!¨ (having very little idea of what I was consenting to). I was a little confused about why he would ask me if I was ok with this, but as I have done a lot throughout the past days, I just go with the flow and do as my wonderful Salvadoran hosts do. We left in the pickup truck and traveled on the highway for a while and then turned off on a ¨road¨ to go to the community. I have put road in quotes, because this was a road only in the loosest sense of the word. It was passable in the truck, but only barely. We did exactly what Pastor Matias said we were going to do: go up the mountain almost to the sky. The ¨road¨ went steadily up and in some places it went up very steeply. There were sharp turns, big rocks, huge holes, water going across the road, and my favorite (cows in the road). A couple of times Martina got out of the truck to make sure the tires were still ok. We climbed up the mountain on this ¨road¨ for what seemed like 45 minutes. A few times we had to back up a little to get a running start to make it up some of the steeper sections.
For 8 years before Pastor Matias bought his truck he had to walk up to the community once a week. Pastor Matias only has one lung due to an injury he suffered during the civil war, so climbing up the mountain was very difficult for him, but he still did it. Every week. I heard that it takes about 1.5 hours to walk up there. I don´t think I want to try. For $3 each way you can pay for a ride in a 3 wheeled taxi vehicle, but there aren´t many people who can afford this. So, most people walk.
Thanks to God we made it up that mountain! There are only about ten families that live up there in this community (I can guess why!). Even though it is a small community, the presence of the Lutheran Church there is very strong. They have a huge, beautiful school built through donations of time, labor, and money from churches in the U.S., and they have a nice little church. I got to meet the students at the school and then we headed to the church which was next to the school.
After the church service, we headed back down the mountain. On the way down we made quite a few stops. We stopped at a few church members houses to drop things off or to pick things up. As we passed people walking down the road, we picked them up and they rode in the back of the truck. We also made a detour to the community where the Brisas del Valle church is. I only got to see the church from the road, but it looks beautiful! I can´t wait to go back and see it, hopefully on Friday. We had to go to the school there so that Matias and Martina could talk with the director of the school. And then headed back toward the highway and to home. I was SO glad be back home, but I am also very glad that I got to go to see this community. The school kids were pretty darn cute and the all church members were very friendly and welcoming!
So, it turns out that when I wrote the last post about the road to Buena Vista, I had no idea what a bad road looked like. I guess it´s all relative.
Yesterday it RAINED. Starting at about 4:00 in the afternoon it POURED on and off until about 3:00 in the morning. The good news about the rain is that it really cooled things off and I didn´t have to go out in it. For about an hour at a time it would pour and then let up and then stop and this repeated quite a few times. In my bedroom I have a nice metal roof. I very glad to have this nice roof because it doesn´t leak a drop, but it was VERY loud when the rain poured down. But that´s ok, because I was dry and cool.
