(I couldn´t upload the photos accompanying this story, so please check the Huaratumo album on my facebook for photo references. https://www.facebook.com/zach.murphy.5682/media_set?set=a.10153004214799300.1073741854.527984299&type=3# )
This weekend is what I would consider to be your very stereotypical, can’t go back home without, World Race weekend. It all started when we first arrived in our new ministry location in Apolo, Bolivia. Apolo is what you would typically consider a very tiny mountain Bolivian town with just over 2,000 residents. There is a very slow friendly pace to it where everyone seems familiar and local and it is very obvious to be the white folk there. We sit down with the pastor of the church we are working at to get the low down on what we will be doing this month. It becomes very obvious that he hadn’t put a lot of thought or planning into it and would just let things happen as they come… typical. But then, as if a stroke of brilliance hits him, he looks at the calendar and realizes that in 2 days, we will be going on a 4 day venture into the jungle to work with a small village up there. When we ask what we will be doing that weekend, we are simply told “Bring the Word.”
The day and a half fly by as we anticipate this ‘mysterious’ ministry that will take us 4-5 hours deep into a very rural jungle village. We find ourselves rushing in the morning to pack an extra pair of clothing and our sleeping gear in our day packs to be ready by 10, when our trucks will be arriving. 10 o’clock comes and goes as we pass the time playing makeshift pingpong with our hands on the dining room table. Our translators comes to inform us that we will now be leaving at 2 in the afternoon, because the rains had flooded some of the roads over night making the way to the town impassable… We burn the extra 4 hours with hand ping pong and a quick lunch only to find ourselves waiting on the side of the road for our transport to show up: a pick up truck and a small van. It was our understanding 4 people would have to ride in the back of the pick up truck, and the rest would fit in a van. Even though we knew we were in for a long journey in the bed of a truck, we figured we could spread out, get some awesome views, and feel the wind in our hair on our journey to the jungle. So when the truck arrives, 5 of us jump on (because we couldn’t only let 4 people have that experience). We climb around on the bars over the bed of the truck, take a bunch of pictures and joke around about how this will get old in about an hour… Well, 5 minutes down the road we stop at another house. We sit around for about half an hour having no real idea what was going on. Suddenly people come from all different buildings towards our truck with a bunch of bags of food. So we think, well I guess we are also transporting a bunch of supplies to this village. It took up some extra room on the bed of the truck, but no big deal. Then some kids climb on, then the adults… Then we go 5 minutes down the road and pick up more people and more supplies. By the time we leave this second house, we have 20 people in the bed of our truck!!
(Photo 1)
Will and I are sitting on the cab of the truck and Nick and Grant are barely hanging off the back and sides of the truck!! Suddenly, the sweet, leisurely experience of riding the back of a pick up truck with the wind in our hair through the mountains and jungle for 4 hours becomes ‘hold on for dear life or you will be pushed off/ you have to sit on hard metal for 4 hours while we bump through the rockiest/ muddiest roads of your life!’ Despite getting stuck in the mud a few times and having to evacuate/jump off the truck a few times so as not to tip the whole truck over a cliff, we made it to Huaratumo in just about 5 hours and right before it fell completely dark! Praise God, because there is no way you could survive the huge ruts and cliffs of that road in the dark!
(photo 2, 3, 4)
So it only took a few minutes before we realized how thriving the metropolis of Apolo was. Huaratumo is basically a soccer field occupied by horses, pigs, chickens, and dogs surrounded by a bunch of houses, a church, and two tiendas with one other side street that has a few houses and another church. All of these houses hold a grand population of about 200 adults and children. The only bathroom is the woods and the only shower in town is the river it is built on. Electricity is a new phenomenon here, although candlelight is often preferred because it doesn’t require the loud rumble of the generator. No mode of transportation is really required in town, but if you wanted to go for a joy ride, a spin on one of the few motorbikes would do the trick. Due to the lack of clean water, the children preferred method of snacking and drinking is soda and sweet candy wafers, hence the lack of any resemblance of teeth left. Any time there was a soccer match, which seemed to happen every night around 6, the whole town would be out in the front of their house watching the men go at it. Since we were deep in the jungle and right by a river, any exposed flesh was quickly swarmed and devoured by nats or mosquitos, leaving us constantly swatting or itching our skin. Our guest house was the concrete slab on the second floor of what appeared to be the town hall. There was plenty of room for us to spread out our sleeping gear on the concrete and despite their extreme effort to get some light for us, we often opted for the candlelight as well to keep the bug population outside of our living accommodation since the whole room was open to the outdoors. Despite the really tough living conditions, lack of direction, plethora of bug bites, and the feeling of being extremely removed from any civilization, our group of guys really enjoyed the cultural experience and being a part of a community that really relied on God for a lot of their being. About 80% of the community attends one of the two churches there and it was really awesome to see them live in such tight community.
(photo 5, 6)
As the pastor promised, our main ministry was to ‘Bring the Word.’ We led worship, read scripture, and preached at 3 services over the weekend. We also had a full day with the kids where we set up a program including games, english lessons, and sunday school activities. Also, Cole, one of our medically savvy racers, went around the town to anyone who was sick, praying for them and offering any medicine or medical advice he could from his experience. I loved just building relationships with some of the christians there. I have fairly limited spanish capabilities, but one afternoon, as the rain poured, I stopped in at a family from the churches porch. We had a lot of small chit chat about travels and living in such a small village and how the village began, but then it got a lot deeper as we started to speak about our favorite books of the bible and sharing with each other some stories from Genesis and Daniel and why they were important to us. It was so cool that despite our drastically different cultural and social surroundings and our language barrier, we were able to talk about something that transcends any sort of cultural or social boundary, the Bible. It was cool to see how that book is just as big a part of their lives as it is ours. One day when we were working with the children, we were drawing on the chalk board and a girl drew an open book and on it she wrote 1 John and started scribbling some verses. She said that that was her favorite book to read. It was really powerful to hear her say that and again just think of how little children all over the world are being taught from the bibl of the scriptures.
(photo 7, 8, 9)
We ate some of the best food in Huaratumo and had some great adventures with some great people. One afternoon a couple guys from the church told us of this massive waterfall 60 meters high about 30 minutes into the woods. Knowing this wasn’t waterfall 60 meters high about 30 minutes into the woods. Knowing this wasn’t a very heavily touristed area, I wasn’t expecting a well marked trail, but I wasn’t quite expecting about 75% of the way through to jump into almost knee deep water to wade our way upstream to this massive cascade. Once there, we did the typical world race man month thing and stripped down to take a shower under the oppressive force of the huge stream of water. It beat freshening up in the murky stream down in town.
(photo 10, 11)
It was a really challenging weekend for all of us and even concluded on a challenging note. As we were driving back on our 4-5 hour journey through the jungle back to Apolo, we had a lot more room as it was only the 11 of us plus 2 adults and 1 child. But what made it so challenging was the on and off rain storms we kept driving through on the way back. We got poured on which soaked most of our packs and our bodies. A couple of us tried to huddle for dryness under the tarp, but it was far from comfortable being crammed in the bed of that truck during the rainstorm. Overall I think we all learned a lot and were stretched way beyond what we were comfortable with, and met a really awesome community of believers in the middle of the Amazon Jungle. Not a journey we hope happens again anytime soon, but definitely one we will remember for a lifetime.
Thank you Huaratumo.
