Tigar Travels: May 2006

Weekend activities

I only have a few minutes to write so I´ll be brief. On Friday I ended up getting sent over to help out with the Outreach team (Outreach=second two month practical phase of the Discipleship Training School) who had come from South Africa. The really cool thing is that our Outreach team met them when we were in South Africa and they were just starting their school. So having bade the farewell thinking I´d never see them again, it was a lovely surprise that they came to Argentina!

On Friday we did the El Comedor feeding programme for the homeless, which was fantastic. After they had all eaten the team taught them African songs and dances and we had a great time making a noise on the streets!

Then we headed off to a small town called Lavalle where we have been working with a church. The team have had to completely lead the service last night and two today (one is about to start hence my lack of time). My role has been to help with translation and I´ve had to translate people´s testimonies and things INTO Spanish!! I think by the grace of God people were able to understand despite my grammatical errors.

Tomorrow we are off to the desert first thing so my next internet connection time will be at the weekend.

Bye for now!

Summary and Santiago

I´ve just got back to Mendoza and am taking advantage of internet at the airport to do a quick blog entry since I´m going back to restricted access.

The conference was great fun. A quick debrief: There were over 350 delegates from different countries all over Latin America and spanning the range of denominations. Our team worked flat out (so did the host team) but it was so worth it. I was hopping round doing slides for the talk one minute, translating filmed interviews the next (not sure how good a job I did of that one!), manning the resources desk, and just generally doing anything else that came up. By the end, the delegates seemed to be really excited about the course (having come along knowing very little) and they had enjoyed themselves, which is great.

It was funny to me to see HTB´s immaculate punctuality, efficiency, order and structure meet Peru´s laidback-ness. It wasn´t unusual for people we were meant to be meeting to go off shopping just minutes before we were due to start, or for pre-arranged taxis not to turn up! Needless to say we spent a lot of time waiting but it´s all part of the cross-cultural experience.I loved being back with some of my old colleagues, too, and meeting lovely new ones - a very unexpected surprise in the middle of the year.

I woke up at 3am this morning to get to Santiago, expecting that I would spend the day waiting in the airport for the 5pm flight to Mendoza... but at the airport they let me loose so I had a couple of hours walking round Santiago city centre -- what a bonus!! It´s great, really really hectic (as much so as central London) but with magnificent buildings.

Now I am going to go and collapse in bed....

Till next time!

My fantastic team on the Niko survival camp in the mountains a couple of weeks ago. Below you´ll see us trekking through snow...

I´m uploading Lima photos but taking advantage of having found a computer that lets me upload to show you a bit of the desert... the first photo shows their system for extracting water... pretty cool.