Sunday morning we went to church with Robert and Noelle and their kids. They have a ministry with the very poor people in southern Bogota. The day also happened to be the day of the patron saint of drivers. I have never seen a parade of decorated cement trucks before! They had blue and white balloons all over them along with crepe paper streamers. There were long lines of buses, cement trucks, taxis, etc. in small parades all over the place. Hence the traffic was horrendous (even more than usual). The church is located in an area of dirt (ie mud) roads and semi built houses (again, the people build their houses as they can afford the bricks. The church used to be a house that they opened up the second floor to make the sanctuary. The roof was like a greenhouse roof so there was lots of light. They had a piano player Paula, and the son of the pastor was the drummer. Paula’s husband also sang, prayed and read scripture. We actually did recognize some of the songs, although everything was in Spanish. Noelle had warned me about this, but I was still really surprised. No matter what the song leaders did, no one could keep the beat when they clapped. It got to be pretty funny. The people sang so off key and even with the good drummer, they could not keep proper time! Scott would have been tearing his hair out!!! But to see these people, with nothing, come together to worship was really incredible.
Afterwards we went to McDonalds for lunch..pretty expensive. While parked you pay this guy to watch your car. Next door was a fairly large store so we did a bit of grocery shopping. We got home around 2 pm.
Andrew had made friends with 2 of the guys on Sunday, Carlos and Caleb. Caleb came over on Sunday afternoon and he and Andrew played halo II all afternoon. That evening we did experiment with ordering dinner. Andrew and Kirsten were not too adventurous with hamburgers, but I tried a patacone con pollo y queso. Patacones are plantains (those big funky looking sort of bananas you occaisionally see in the US markets) that are mushed pretty flat (these were REALLY thin) then fried. It was topped with shredded chicken that tasted like that canned chicken, and cheese. Then there was some type of sauce on it. It was actually pretty good. Sort of like a compuesta or Mexican pizza with patacone instead of a taco shell. Caleb left around 8:30 and we all got a good night sleep.
Carlos’s dad is the one who drove us to the mall on Saturday. As the boys started talking they realized that they were all really into paintball. We then mentioned Oklahoma D-Day which I had just taken Andrew to in the beginning of June…..huge reenactment of D-day using paintball by over 5000 people north of Tulsa in Wyandotte. Well, it turns out that Caleb, Carlos and his dad are all really into paintball, they are from Oklahoma and had just that morning been lamenting how they wished they could get to OK D-Day!!! They will be back in the states on furlough in 2 years and we decided then and there that we would all try to meet up at D-Day 2009. It constantly amazes me the connections you find between one another.
