Sunday

Sunday April 29

As expected, there was a church service this morning. They easily spent more time collecting offerings (four all together) and reporting on finances than anything else. In addition, before the service they had an auction. It is common in this area for people to donate agricultural products and then auction them off as a way to make money for the church. Today there was rice, coffee, lots of chilies, some squash and cucumbers, and even a couple of chickens. But despite all the money matters there was a very nice sermon and lovely singing.

I noticed a huge number of of infants in church. I was told that there had been a population explosion the past year. Apparently the entire batch of a commonly used injectable contraceptive was defective. They didn’t know it was defective until, well, nearly everyone using it got pregnant....

It was raining again this morning but stopped by 9am. Started again by 5:45pm. A huge crack appeared in the road going out of here. Very deep, you can step across it but the small car tires here will probably get stuck. (Somebody later on chopped up a banana tree and filled the crack.)

There was a big landslide on the road between here and the town at the end of the road so cars can’t get thru. They will probably need a bulldozer to clear this one, not just a bunch of guys with shovels. If it takes awhile, what they do is cars come to the landslide and pick up passengers there. There may be cars stuck on the other side of the landslide to bring people to the landslide, then they walk and haul all their stuff across. This landslide is bigger than most - they said it took 6 people to carry a motorcycle across it whereas it usually takes 4. Maybe they had to really lift it high.