Friday, April 23, 2010

Despite bad testimonies among the believers here, there are about 30 brothers and sisters that meet regularly and they, like the other villages, asked us to have the early morning meeting (4-8 a.m). I preached on Revelation 22 “Christ's last 3 calls”. Afterward, we met with the leaders and begged them to live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called. At 10 a.m. we left promptly for our twenty mile trek on foot for the next village (the river was too shallow to travel in our canoe). After about two hours of hard walking we were startled by a 7 foot long black and yellow poisonous snake that came across the trail just a few yards ahead of us. It stopped and looked at us for a second and then disappeared into the forest. An hour later we had to cross the river. The locals say that people are always stepping on stingrays when they wade through and you have to throw rocks ahead of you to scare them out of your path. Very exciting! After about 5 hours of trudging through mud and traversing spectacular jungle landscape we finally arrived in Santa Rocio. We jumped in the river to cool off and then we were off to supper. One of the brothers had just killed a huangana and his wife made hot chocolate from freshly ground and toasted cocoa beans. Yum! That night I preached Romans 1 in the open air to all 150 inhabitants. Afterward we were very sore and tired but managed to read all of 2 Corinthians together in our tents before going to sleep.

That's a baby-ish anteater... yes, sad. They eat EVERYTHING here.