Preaching the Gospel at Work?

Things are a little different in Peru than in the United States.  A new man in our church, Hartur, invited Wehrner to preach at his work.  Hartur works at something similar to a highway department, which is building a new highway in and outside of Cusco.  Each morning the work crew has a charla (a meeting to start the day), at which Wehrner was given 20 minutes to talk.  He preached the gospel to everyone and we gave out a tract and book to each worker.  I was thinking that this would be next to impossible to do in the States.  Surely someone would complain that their rights were being violated and then Wehrner would have been put in jail for hate speech, that is, for preaching the gospel.  We praise God for the opportunity and are thankful that things like this are still allowed.

Construction and Community

We have been working as much as we can at the land.  It seems everything is harder and takes longer in Peru.  We are doing everything ourselves, so far, but it is hard work and long days.  Chase and I spent four days at the land trying to pour the monolithic slab for the shop.  I really need a shop in order to store all the materials and tools for the shop.  We can't really leave anything at the land or it will be stolen. 

 

The slab has been a challenge.  We have no water or power at the land so I bought a generator and rigged up a pump that I use to get water from a little creek down the road.  We had all the gravel and sand delivered to the property and I hired a truck to bring the 60 bags (96 pounds each) of cement and 30 rods of re-bar to the land last Tuesday.  I rented a cement mixer from my neighbor.  The first day everything seemed to go wrong.  I had to return to town for parts, we had trouble with the pump, and then I couldn't get the cement mixer started.  We got everything ready to

go at 5pm and I made a bad decision to start so late in the day.  We ran out of water and were only able to pour a small amount of concrete.  We cleaned up into the night.  It was a disaster day.

 

The next 3 days went well.  We got a good system down.  We had to pour the slab in sections because of the lack of water and the time it takes to mix the concrete.  Each load takes six, five gallon buckets of gravel and sand and one 96 pound bag of cement.  We have to do 11 of these loads per pour.  At the end of the week we did 29 loads, which is 174 buckets of material and 29 bags of cement. In the process we had to fill the water tank 11 times.  On top of this, we are trying to pour concrete and finish a slab in the rainy season.  We were constantly covering and un-covering the slab to finish it.  We were tired.

 

We have been meeting our Quechua neighbors.  We are the only foreigners who have ever lived in this community so they are very interested.  They stop buy and ask questions about the construction and they ask what we plan on doing in the future.  We basically tell them we want to build a house for our family, raise beef to butcher, and grow crops like they do.  They really respect this and the fact that we work hard like they do.  My neighbor, Max, came over with his family to introduce themselves.  He brought pop and we all had some.  He then poured out a proper amount around my concrete slab to bless it.  They are very superstitious and syncretized in their belief of God and mother nature.  Another neighbor stopped by and we had a long conversation about life.  He said that when God gives the rain and their crops grow good, everyone is happy.  However, when the rain doesn't come and the crops go bad, God is punishing them and the men must go work concrete in town.  Funny.  I was thinking working concrete was punishment myself.  lol. 

 

Overall, we love the land and look forward to living in the community.  There are tremendous opportunities to build relationships with these simple but lost people. 

 

 

 

 

Church Evangelism Day at the New Mall in Cusco

On the first Sunday of every month our church has a fellowship meal after service and then the whole church hits the streets to evangelize.  We have been pretty consistent in this unless we get rained out.  Today we decided to give out hundreds of gospel tracts at the new mall in Cusco. 

Cusco just got it's first mall, which changed the whole city.  Cusco went from having nothing to almost everything overnight.  For example, we buy most of our groceries at a grocery store that is the size of a very small town grocery store in Montana.  In fact, the gas station stores in the States are usually much bigger and better.  Now, in the mall, they put in something comparable to a Safeway.  The funniest part of the new mall experience is that they put in escalators.  Most of the Cusqueños have not seen an escalator before.   In the first few days, the mall had to have someone stationed at the top and bottom of the escalator to teach people how to get on and off.  The people were almost terrified at the moving stairs.  The lines to get up the stairs were very long because the people froze up and refused to get on.  They would try and time it and then jump.  Many old Quechuan ladies fell on their face at the top because they couldn't get off.  Even now, every time we go to the mall, we see people freeze up in sheer panic when it is their turn to get on.  It is very amusing.  Anyway, there are groves of people flocking to see the new mall so we decided to take advantage of it and give out a lot of tracts.  We gave out around 500 in an hour.  Here is a very short clip of some of the kids in action.  The video is not much since it is hard to film and give out tracts.