Ok so our ministry this month is helping our church get a new roof by cooking pan de pascua which translates to bread of Passover. This is a traditional dessert made only at Christmas time here in Chile. If I could relate it to anything in the USA it would be a fruit cake, although I have never had fruit cake. Anyways it has all sorts of spices in it and it also has pasa’s(raisins), nueces(walnuts), and fruta condensada(condensed fruit). It’s pretty darn good, if I don’t say so myself. In the process of making this wonderful bread we mix it in a big tub so it can fit a little over 25 kilos of goodness in it. We mix with our entire arm in til the dough is finished. And then we ladle out each individual bread at one kilo and put 9 in the oven and wait a whole hour to an hour in a half for them to finish. After they have been pulled out of the oven and cooled down we put them in pretty
Christmas bags so they are ready to sell. After a whole day of cooking, we then get to go on the streets of Los Andes and sell them to the locals at 3.800 Pesos which is around the equivalent to $6 US.
So it is fun to sell pan de pascua, we get to wear aprons that have the body of a little elf on them with the words “Santas little helper” and a Santa hat too but there are times that it gets to hot and/or we aren’t selling as many breads as we could be selling. It can be I little frustrating when you and your team put in all this work and nobody wants what you have. Every once in a while there is a person that wants to buy a pan de pascua so I want to tell you a story of probably the coolest morning we had with the locals.
Zibby, Bern, Christiana, and I went out around 10am to start selling. There are more people out in the morning so we knew we had a better chance. We rounded our first corner from the church and started walking. We walked maybe 200 yards and we stopped to ask if these two younger ladies sitting on a bench if they wanted to buy some casero(homemade) pan de pascua and they said no but as we turned to walk off Zibby was asking if the guy next to the ladies if he wanted some and he straight out asked in perfect English
“how are you?”
This NEVER happens, I mean everyone here speaks Spanish only the gringas(Americans) speak English. Of course we got excited and sparked up a conversation. He asked us the usual questions like why are you guys here, where are you from, and why are you selling pan de pascua. We all were intrigued by what this man had to say so we stayed around, after 3 minuets the ladies that said they didn’t want to buy had changed their mind and bought one from us. Cool right, well it gets better. We started to wonder how this guy knew such great English so we asked him, the guy learned from watching Friends on Netflix how cool is that. As we are talking he let us in on his life.
His name is Carlos and he owns the shoe store we were standing in front of and another one around the block. Carlos has a wife and three kids and get this, they LOVE Disney. Can I just tell you how extremely excited I was to find this out. Carlos and his family love to travel outside of Chile and their favorite place to go is Disney world.
I wouldn’t say that I am a fanatic but I do know a thing or to about the greatest most magical place on earth. We talked about all the new things Disney is building, what are the best times in the year to go, and what are favorite rides were. The coolest thing is that him and his wife go every other year and then the whole family goes the years in between. That’s definitely dedication right there. Getting to hear how excited he got talking about it definitely put a smile on my face. In the mean time of talking to him we sold a total of 9 pan de pascua’s five of them Carlos’s mother bought when she was helping locking up shop for fiesta which starts around 2 pm.
So 9 doesn’t sound like many but it’s better then what we were selling and we met a cool guy that buy the way opened up his shop for a place to come chill if we needed to and we also got to pray over him. God moves in unexpected ways if you are just willing to do things like selling pan de pascua. He wants you to experience life to the fullest because let’s be honest God isn’t a boring dude he loves to have fun!
