A photo story of the past few weeks

The day after the long Carnival weekend - a weird pagan celebration they have here in South America - characterized by lots of drinking, partying and water bombing!  People were riding around in utes with big barrels of water and throwing buckets of it on whoever came in sight!  It seemed like nearly every little boy in the city had a humungous water gun.  We got squirted inside a moving bus!  Glad it's over.  This guy .... sleeping it off on the road!

Back out at Monte Sud. The sheep here really do know their shepherds.

With some little paru kids - poor things - they needed a good scrub!  Maria put clips in the little girls hair as it was all over her face :)

Back out in Sella (our other country territory) Amie has a study here so we wait in this pretty spot.

We went to look for a guy who comes to our meetings from all the way out here - he said his house is a bit hard to find and to ask the locals to direct us when we are close.  You wouldn't have been able to tell where he lives - out here!

 Near the start of the "lane" to his house.  It's about a 15 minute walk off the roadside into the field, but I think it took us an hour or 2 to find it after we first started asking for directions to this "lane" from the locals.  There are snakes in these fields, some are scared and run away, others are poisonous and stay and poke their tongue out apparently!!  We didn't see any though, yay.

We finally found a house ... and knocked and waited.  It was the right one!  It was a while before anyone came out - his parents were home and were very hospitable to us.  The mum studies with her daughter and goes to the meetings on Sundays.  She gets up really early (like 4:30am) to feed the animals and cook lunch and do other jobs before she walks back to the road and gets the 20 minute ride back into town.  Their son told them that we planned to visit the next time we were out here, but they thought we would never come because it was hard to find.

Last week we got up early to go with a friend to their country territory which is one and a half hours away by taxi up high in the mountains - Iscayachi.  Iscayachi is some 3,400 m above sea level.  It was a bit cold, even with the bright sun.  It was really nice up there, most of the people are really shy and many cannot read.  We found lots of receptive people, it was a great day.