Church

As you might have easily guessed from a post on local churches a little down below, we haven't dared joining any of the evangelical churches around here, for obvious reasons of mental sanity and hearing-system health, and either the bigger, more established, Catholic Church, just to two blocks away as it doesn't convince us much either, being surely less into crazy singing and not used to mad preaching but a little too devoted to rituals and venerations of saints for our tastes and for what the children are accustomed too; moreover, with so many different confessions and congregations in our neighbourhood, we felt it would be awkward, for us strangers, to choose one and not the other, as the risk is people would start wondering about the reason for the choice and, even more important, we wouldn't be comfortable at all in trying one and then stop going if not at ease, again not to offend anyone and not to start possible attempts at conquering the strangers for one church or another...

So, we didn't go to church for six months, but we managed to make up for that loss, which even the children were feeling as something odd, with some simple but at times very good family-services in our room, something on the line of what we did for a couple of Sundays in Rwanda, when we stopped going to the church we were supposed to work with and we still hadn't found a valid alternative. 

But things have now changed, as from the beginning of October we've been going to a church in the city, thanks to our dear friends José&Marlene, who tried it out before, as they had some connection with it through their church in the States. They said it was a good place, with good people and a good service and we agree: we felt welcome, the service is to our liking and most of all Michele&Sam are very happy, not only for the opportunity to play around (there's some green outside!) with a few well behaved children before and after the service, but also for the sort of Sunday School a lady organises for them during the service. It's a Mennonite Church, which means it's somehow close to the Methodist tradition, which is clear from the way the service is run and even from some hymns, translated from some we are very familiar with. What's more interesting for us is that the Mennonite Church is behind the Mennonite Central Committee, a missionary organisation we were close to work with straight after our Rwanda experience, with a youth project in Nicaragua which we had already been selected for, only to be told at the very last step that the local partners had decided not to request help from outside. So it was quite surprising but very nice not only to meet some other foreigners (from the States) in the congregation, but also to discover they are either are currently working or have worked with MCC; we told them of our "near miss" and about our present situation, we heard what they're doing, we shared opinions and hopefully we'll have more conversations with them in the future (you never know what might come out!). In the meantime, we've started collaborating with a small project of the church, simply by helping a small group serve food last Saturday for lunch at their last meeting (end of school year) with a group of youth who are studying secondary school on weekends and whom they have somehow followed, with encouragement and some extra activities, in a school just down the hill from our area, in the next colonia (sector, settlement...), that is the infamous Bucaro on which we wrote months ago, considered a terrible place but for us not as dangerous as it might be for some locals (at times we go down to play at the sort of playground around the football cement court, we went for lunch at a couple of families' places and the boys to play at some schoolmates'). Of course, the main attraction of that meeting were our two skilled and beautiful little waiters, more than the church members' attempt at doing a bit of evangelism, but it was anyway worthy for us to know something else going on around here, visit another school and help the people from the church, who really appreciated it.

The only issue with this church is the location, as it takes us about one hour and 15 minutes to get there, either with 3 buses, as on the first Sunday with our fellow volunteers, or with 2 buses and a 30-35 minutes walk, as we've done the past two times, when they were not with us. However, when we get lunch at one of the ubiquitous little food shops or stalls, it becomes a good way to spend half of our Sunday (or more if we add a visit to a nearby museum as we did two weeks ago) and proof of this is the fact that the boys, even considering the walking option, keep telling us they want to go every Sunday.