Getting to know the church

Saturday night and Sunday morning have been dedicated to getting to know our nearest neighbors and new family. Saturday evening Wimon and Aldebar, one of the men of the church, took us on a tour of the building. Casa ACU makes up about a third of the old El Chana coffee company building. The rest of the building is the El Chana Igelsia de Cristo and some apartments that one of the preachers and sometimes other members of the church live in.


After we toured the lower floors, we headed up to the roof. It was right at sunset and was really beautiful. I've included a picture of El Cerro that is the monte in Montevideo. It was a really warm evening and was a perfect time to be up on a roof. Although, I must admit to being a killjoy and telling some of the boys to quit climbing on things and contemplating jumping from one high scary thing to another.

When we came back down off the roof it was time to hang out with the youth of the church. It is not a big youth group, but there are several students willing to hang out with us even though we speak bumbling Spanish. What's nice is that the youth has now reached the age of the ACU students. Most are now between 18 and 20. Diego and some of the others started introducing our students to mate. Our students liked it better than I expected. Several went out today to buy their own mates.

If you have a bunch of high school and college age students together, clearly you should feed them pizza. And oh man was there pizza. I felt like it was a bit like the story of the 2 loaves and 5 fishes. We all ate until we were full and I think there were still 12 basket fulls leftover. :) The Uruguayan kids did a good job spreading out up and down the table. It took a bit to get everyone talking. But everyone soon got braver and the fun commenced. I was sitting across the table from Natalia with whom I am Facebook friends. We have chatted online several times in Spanish and sometimes English, but once we were sitting across from each other, it took awhile for us to get started. Of course I was talking to myself saying, "Ok, Autumn, you can do this. Just open your mouth. You have to break the ice." Once I did, things were good. We took a picture of everyone together, unfortunately my only picture is a little blurry, but you get the idea.

Today it was soooooo great to be back at church. It was really fun to see everyone. I know I understood things better than last time I was here especially at the beginning. I'm still really struggling with understanding people in general. A lot of it is that I have such a hard time focusing when someone is speaking directly to me. Too much panic... I know I've only been back 3 days... I'll get better. :)

After church, the Walkers, Rachel, and I went to eat then to another ferria. It was fun walking up and down looking at all the random stuff in street market. Then we headed to a grocery store named Disco. From what I can tell the Disco's are the nicer grocery stores, some of them are really fancy. The funny thing about the one we went to today, is that we could never find it last time. People tried to tell us where it was, but no one found it.

Tonight we are going to have a devo with the youth from church and have an English church service later. Tomorrow we start classes... I'll actually have to start earning my keep.