Home at Last.

After being home for a couple weeks now, I think I know how Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz" felt after coming back to Kansas: everything is the same, but home is really pretty sweet. Anyways, sorry if that was too cheesy or sentimental for you but I just didn't know how else to intro this blog. We are now back though and we are safe and sound taking our de-worming pills and finishing up the rest of our malaria pills. Since we last blogged, many adventures took place. From Arequipa, we went to Nazca where we sand boarded on a bunch of dunes and got ridiculously sandy including nooks and crannies (too much info...sorry). From there, we went to Lima and stopped for a couple nights with intentions of heading out towards the Amazon shortly after.

For those of you who are diligent readers, you will know that the adventures started out with a craving last summer to go to the Amazon. So this was a big deal to FINALLY be able to venture out. It took us about 20 hours to make it to the edge of the Ucayali River where there is a city named Pucallpa. We had planned to get on a cargo boat where we would arrive in Iquitos--our destination for 3 nights. In fashion, our boat left 21 hours late meaning that we had to spend an extra night on the boat at the Pucallpa "port." I put "port" in quotes because this hardly represented at port. Most of the places that the boats would stop along the Amazon was a dirt beach that the captainwould run the front of the boat into until it was beached enough to stop.

Anyways, so we spent the next 4 nights in the boat eating chicken and rice almost every meal and loving the hard life. By hard life, we spent many hours reading and finishing our books from our hammocks. Tough. Oh, but we did have to listen to a baby monkey that wore a diaper screech every morning just outside our cabin on the boat. (I don't really feel like explaining why there was monkey in a diaper so I will let you use your imaginations).
In Iquitos, we had many adventures including hanging out with monkeys that climbed all over us, playing with sloths, holding little aligators, and even letting Anacondas sit around our neck. (Okay, so it's true, I hate snakes so I was the only one that refused. But hey, give me some credit, I held a smaller snake for a little while...and almost wet myself).
Eventually, we flew back to Lima where we had a chance to try paragliding for 20 min rides and some surfing too. So that concluded our travels.
All in all, I think we would all agree in that it was an adventure of a lifetime.

If you want some pictures and you are still out there reading this and care for them, you have to ask for them. Here is one to appease some of you...
For those of you that have heard rumours but never have known...


...It is true, there are snow cones in South America...

Oh ya, and I put two pictures so that way you are all pleasantly surprised.

But sincerley folks,
Thanks for those of you that faithfully supported us throughout this trip. You have been HUGE to us. In fact, if there is one major thing that we have learned, it is that missionaries need support. Not just the whole cliche money and prayer, but also simply knowing that you care. A simple email or encouragment letter can go a really long way. So thank you so much for your support--It meant more than you know.

FYI: Once again, didn't proofread. Sorry about the confusions.

Quick Update.

We know it has been a while but don´t worry we are all alive. In the last time we have been sandboarding, on a 5 day boat-ride to the Amazon, played with monkeys, held anacondas, paraglided, and surfed. We are here in Lima for 2 more days and we will be home on the 9th. Sorry we don´t have much time but that is probably ideal for those of you who don´t make it past the first 3 sentences usually because we are too boring. We will try to elaborate a bit on this when we get home and post some pictures too. Thanks to those of you who have bothered to read and comment. Always is nice...

Alpacan Sweaters

If you were wondering if we survived the ¨World´s Most Dangerous Road¨ from the last blog, you can now relax--we are fine. Just one flat tire was about the only complication. Don´t worry Mom, I was at least 6 feet from the cliff when the tire went flat. After La Paz, we went to Copacabana which is a small city on the edge of Lake Titicaca. Within an hour of arriving, we had found a sailboat rental area. These sailboats were one of a kind for sure. There was only one sail, no jib but still a wooden mast and boom. Sure enough, we decided that for about 8 bucks a person, we couldn´t resist this adventure. So we woke up at 5:00 in the morning and went down to the shore and sailed off to the ¨Isla Del Sol¨ or the Island of the Sun. This trek only took us a while on the way there because of bad head winds, but we recovered by spending the night on the island. On the way back, it only took us about 3 and a half hours because the once head wind, worked in our favour.

The sunset from the "Isla Del Sol"

After this adventure, we took off for Cuzco, Peru on another freezing cold, overnight bus where we connected to a train to Aguas Calientes which is at the base of Machu Picchu. If you have seen pictures of Machu Picchu, you probably think it is neat, but we are witnesses to the fact that it is way better than it looks from the pictures. It is much bigger than you would think from those indications. Thank goodness we loved it, because they make you pay an absolutely ridiculous price to enter. We also had a chance to hike the giant mountain called ¨Waynu Picchu¨that you see in the background of this picture amidst the clouds.
From here, we were only able to get tickets for a first class train that only took us half way to Cuzco. We were pretty choked at first but we reluctantly accepted to take these tickets because there is no other way of getting away from Aguas Calientes except this train. Needless to say, our scruffy faces and dirty, stinky clothes and backpacks did not necessarily fit the norm for first class. However, we were pleasantly surprised with the most ridiculous entertainment which included a man with a mask and a stuffed llama around his neck dancing around followed by a modeling show to techno dance music. What a riot.
Skipping ahead, we are now back in Cuzco where we will be here until Sunday evening. Yesterday, we all bought sweaters that come from Alpacan fur which are ridiculously awesome to say the least. Anyways, from Cuzco, we will take another overnight bus (probably freezing cold again) to a city called Arequipa where there are huge volcanos and the biggest canyon in the world. It is more than twice the size of the Grand Canyon.
That´s about it. Here are some pics as promised.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100862&l=74a39&id=116205194

On the Road, through the Desert.

Well, it is official, we are now backpacking through South America. But first, let´s backtrack a bit and tell you a little about our Pastor seminar that we did on our last day in Paraguay. We woke up early in the morning feeling underprepared and wondering if the dark, dreary clouds were going to turn to rain. Well, long story short, the rain came and poured. We adapted though, and kept pushing through the theoretical stuff in hope that it would stop raining and then we could do the practical drills if it stopped. Well, our speaking went well and people were really responsive but the rain wouldn´t stop. At one point, we made a joke to the people that the rain wouldn´t stop us in Canada from playing soccer. Well, I don´t know if that is what spurred them on, but either way, they felt the material was valuable enough to do the drills even in the rain. Funny enough, the rain was worse than we had ever seen as it was probably a sort of tropical downpour and Bryan and I were both wearing white T-shirts. Bad News. Oh well, overall a great success and we were stoked to be finished. Oh ya, we also have some hilarious pics that we hope to post one day of that youth group game where you put the lifesaver on a toothpick that sits in your mouth. Then, you have to pass it off to the next person´s toothpick without dropping it. If that is confusing, we basically watched these people ¨almost kiss.¨ Very amusing.

Now let´s bring you up to speed with what we have done so far. Our first 50 hours or so included about 35 hours of busing with a little bit of waiting in bus stations. We bused through Northern Argentina, into Southern Bolivia to our first major stop in Uyuni. The bus ride from the border of Bolivia to Uyuni was only about 270 km but it took us over 10 hours which included: cliff hanging bus rides, amazing scenery, driving through shallow rivers and creeks, randomly have to change buses in a city for some reason, and getting stuck in the desert sand for about 30 min where we got out and pushed. I am proud to say that 4 out of the 10 people pushing were us Canadians...proving that Adam has large biceps.

Anyways, Uyuni is a town of about 14000, and basically built strickly for tourism to the largest sand flats in the world. Here we went on a 2 day tour where we stayed next to a volcano that had about 10 families living in the town. There is so much we could say about this but basically, we were 3800m about sea level and then climbed a bunch of the volcano to about 4500m (that is about just under 15000 feet). It erupted 20 000 or 30 000 years ago whiping out the people. We also went to this cave where there were 5 mummies (a family) that was killed by the ash) but somehow their bones are still existant. Kinda hard to believe and the tour was in Spanish but we understood this more or less.

Anyways, last night we took an overnight bus to La Paz and we will be here the weekend. Hope to get pics up later and hope things are good back home...

PS. Too lazy to proofread, hope that this makes sense.

Last Days.

We are wrapping up our final week here in Paraguay and slowly working on our good-byes. But that doesn't mean our schedule is light by any means. This past week, on Saturday, there was a huge storm with winds up to 150 km/h. Us boys were actually at an outdoor church concert. To be totally honest, we were not entirely intrigued with the music; however, the backdrop of the concert consisted of countless lightning strikes in the distance that constantly lit up the sky. It appeared as though the storm was just a dry lighting storm, but all of a sudden we felt one rain drop. Similar to B.C. (except usually worse), when it begins to rain here in Paraguay, it pours. So within about 1 min of that raindrop, everyone was running from the torrential rain to the indoors of the church. Us boys actually had to leave early anyways in order to catch the last bus back home. Ya we got soaked but that is all we saw of the storm really. The winds were not as bad where we were.
As we learned later though, it ripped apart some areas. For example, the soccer complex/soccer club that we are doing the pastor seminar at this Saturday received 1 million dollars of damage in the 6 minutes of the storm. A building was ripped apart. At the time, the building had 80 kids in it, but they were able to escape before the building collapsed on them.

On Sunday, Paraguay just set the world record for having the biggest Asado (not sure about spelling) but it means BBQ. It included over 50 000 people eating over 25 000 kilos of beef. Unfortunately, we were unable to attend because it would have taken five hours upon arrival to have a taste of the steak. But all was well because we were still full from a massive BBQ that we had at our house the night before with several local Paraguayans.We are now working hard to prepare our seminar for this Saturday. It will run from 9-3 and essentially it will be Thomas, Bryan, and I trying to explain to 150 pastors how to run a soccer camp including issues like: registration, multi-day camps schedules, drills, silly games, and devotionals. If you think this is an intimidating task, you are right. For those of you who are diligent followers of what we are doing here, you might already know that we finished a 35 page document that explains this. Now we essentially put it to pratical use and train. Prayer? Please.

On Saturday, we finish off our time here in Paraguay by attending a Christian Rap concert that everyone has been talking about since we first got here. Should be...interesting. Actually, I am sure that we will have a great time with everyone as this will be our last time to "hang out" with the majority of our many friends here in Paraguay.

Sunday morning, we leave for our travels. Oh, and by the way, Mark (my brother) has arrived as of yesterday which is very exciting. We will take him along with us to our final visits this week to the Soup Kitchen tomorrow, the Orphanage on Thursday, and then to the seminar and concert on Saturday. It will be a crash course on the kind of things we have done here for him.

That is about all and from all of us: Thank you very much to all you who have been taking the time out of your busy lives to read up about us, comment on our blog, and pray for us.

Wonder to Wonder

All is well in the world of us boys. We visited two wonders this past week. The first of these a natural wonder, the second, a very man-made wonder. On Tuesday, we left Asuncion for Ciudad del Este which is a border city with Brazil about 4 hours away. None of us had visas and Judah forgot his passport at our house. Sounds like an impossibility to cross the border right? Not with our good-looks and charm. Ok, maybe that is a stretch, in reality it was the lack of border checks when you cross this border in a local bus. We had no questions asked and we had no problems.
Next, we bused to the Iguazu Falls which consists of 275 falls along 2.7 kilometers of the Iguazu River. These falls are quite incredible and we were spending most of the time trying to find out which one of the falls Indiana Jones went off in the latest movie. After the day finished, we climbed in the bus and the torrential down-pouring of rain began right on cue.
The next day, we visited the Itaipu Dam. This 25 billion dollar dam employed 30-40 thousand people over about 15 years. It holds enough concrete to build a ten-metre wide road from here to New York. That is a lot of concrete. Now I must say, concrete is not the most exciting thing to look at but the creation was still a wonder. As a result of this dam, many animal refuges were built to preserve the animals. One of these, we were able to make it out too. We were the first people to show up in the day and we got a free tractor ride and a free horse ride too! Very exciting for me (Adam) who has never been on a horse before (embarrassing I know but exciting all the same).
We made it home safe yesterday evening and got back into the swing of things today doing more planning for the soccer seminar with the pastors on November 1st. We also await the arrival of a new member of our team...my brother: Senor Mark Knowlson.

Here are some more pics: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2098139&l=a9ccb&id=116205194

Just another Day in Paraguay

This was the week that Jesus Responde had been preparing for about 2 months for their Festival de Esperanza. This festival ran on Thursday and Friday night and Saturday in the morning and in the evening. The amount of people that came to this festival was amazing, the total number of people that came this weekend was over 55,000 people. The week was full of intense work that was both tedious and long. We spent a good amount of time setting up all these chairs in this mid-sized soccer stadium. Believe me, trying to get this rows straight was a job in itself, it's harder then it looks.
There was good entertainment on the nights. They had a rapper that pumped up the crowd, and also had these two guys rocking on their guitars. I think the main event for these people was the Argentinian singer that made everyone flap their arms like angels, like in "Angels in the Outfield." I got a kick out of that, the crowd loved him for some reason. We were also on crowd control for the last night which was an experience, I definitely heard a couple of those taser guns go off in the crowd when the securtiy was trying to get the crowd to move back to their seats. We were given passes that said "Organizador" which I am sure you know what that translates to. Well, these passes meant that we were supposed to know what we were doing. More importantly to us, it meant that we could go anywhere in the stadium that we wanted. But as Spiderman was once told, "With great power comes great responsibility." So we were supposed to know how to answer people's questions about anything they wondered. We would be lucky to understand and even luckier if we gave an answer in understandable Spanish. I have no doubt that people wondered why there were organizers that didn't speak the language. Just another thing that we found ourselves laughing about. Anyways, our time there was really cool because we got to see a lot of people respond to the gospel at the alter call and pray with pastors.

With two more weeks here our time here in Paraguay is coming to a close. This coming week we'll be taking a little trip to Brazil and Argentina, to see some amazing waterfalls ("Iguazu Falls" which if you saw the new Indiana Jones movie, it is the one that they miraculously survive from 3 plunges over the edge of these falls). On top of this, we may even do some hunting.

Opa!!

Well our time at the orphanage is now finished. Things went really well overall, and now that it is over, we realize that we will most definitely miss the kids and youth there. For those of you who have ever worked at camp and been in cabin for a week, you will be able to relate to our feelings of leaving the orphanage. It is kind of like the last day of a week at camp and you are excited for some real peace and quiet but then when they actually go, you do have some mixed feelings.

On Thursday night at the orphanage, we were invited by one of the older guys to his school about 15 minutes down the road. He was involved in a night that included all forms of dancing. Some of these were traditional Paraguayan dances and some were hip-hop. But nothing beat out the rendition of "Grease" where there were the boys and the girls dancing to "Greece Lightning" and "Summer Lovin." Us Canadian boys were bellowing out the lyrics that we recalled from when our parents played the movie for us when we were knee-high to a grasshopper. And then at some other point in the night, some Paraguayan girls from the orphanage grabbed each one of us boys and started dancing with us before we had any chance to be embarrassed that the attention of the people had turned to us and away from the stage.

We did not have a subtle good-bye on our Friday evening at the orphanage either. There was a skit that they had prepared for us which was in Spanish and no we did not understand everything but we were still almost on the ground laughing. It included a few of the women that were over 20 from the orphanage (a couple nearing 40 years old) who were all over these guys in the skit who were supposed to be the "Canadian boys." You can imagine how amusing this was to us.

Then after the skit, they turned on the radio to some hip-hop music and once again, we were yanked out of our chairs and forced to dance for the group. This included some of our coordinated camp dances from the summer which they loved. It also included a dance off between us three Canadian boys. After all this, Thomas and I (Adam) got up and did a skit for them while Bryan took pictures for us. Again for those of you who worked at camp, Thomas and I worked together to do the Phoenix Dirk Banana skit. They loved it, and as soon as we finished, a women and man got up from the orphanage and impersonated our skit.

After the group prayed for us, we decided that it was time to speak to the group. A couple hours before this, we had scrambled to come up with a short speech in Spanish that would express our gratefulness to the people at the orphanage. Now this was a risky idea because our Spanish is usually barbaric at best so the meaning may not come out the way we intended. Sure enough, this came true and got a great reaction. In the speech we were trying to say "Thanks for the food, it was always delicious. So we wrote, "Gracious por la comida, estueve siempre ricisimo." Now, if you know Spanish, you are probably already laughing because the verb "estar" is an irregular and we forgot that the same rules didn't apply that we had learned. The word we were looking for was "estuvo." Close right? Well what we said instead was "Thanks for the food, I was always delicious." Thomas was the victim of saying this statement. The joke after was that the girls at the orphanage thought he was delicious anyways. Needless to say, the people at the orphanage had plenty to make fun of us with as we were leaving.

This week we are once again fully occupied. From Tuesday afternoon on, all of Jesus Responde and us as well are fully dedicated to the upcoming festival. It will be a blast and its going to be an experience of a lifetime...

A Belated Post

Here is a blog that was attempted to be posted last Monday...we will get another one up soon that is more updated.

First off we thought we would let you all in more on what we are doing currently with AIA down here. Well let us tell you, we have somehow been designated to design a template for soccer camps to be run here in Paraguay. Ok, I mean we all have some experience with camp life from work in the past it should not be that big of a deal I guess. That is how it started anyways, but it slowly evolved into something slightly bigger, which of course was helped by Thomas always nodding and saying "ya sure we can do it". Now we have the task of putting together a material packet on how to run a soccer camp. On top of this we also are running a training seminar for around 150 people on November first about how to run a soccer camp. Isn't it funny how God gives you tasks bigger than you can handle so that we rely on him more. Anyways, that is what we are currently working on for AIA, which is super exciting and intimidating at the same time. As far as it is concerned we could definitely use some prayer for this work, and it will be much appreciated.

But now for some more light hearted stories. Today as we were a bit out of commision from sickness which kept us from going to the orphanage as planned. But throughout the day we had a little adventure anyways. So, here in Paraguay grass grows rather differently than in Canada, its also planted differently. A little side note on that, when we were at the orphanage last week we had a chance to plant grass and it is not how you would think. The process involves going to a patch of well grown grass and pulling out individual pieces, root and all, one by one. Then you take this pile of pulled up grass and stick it in the ground in a different place, one by one. It is quite the process very difficult and grueling work. And the funny thing is with kids always running around who knows if the grass will actually even grow. But back to the story about grass. Well our lawn at our house has been growing for a long time now, there are some pieces of weed or some kind of plant life that was up to about our waist. Not anymore! Judah went came home at one point during the day and walked into the house holding a machete. Being young men we automatically got excited at the sharp object. Well anyways we got to go out into our jungle of a backyard and start hacking down the grass, and amazingly enough it is cut and looks semi-respectable. Even more amazing is that during the day there were only two cuts and one was from opening a can of peaches. Needless to say it was a thrill.

The final story that must be told, and this is only cause I(Thomas) wrote the blog and feel it is important is one of dinner tonight. Long story short, I cooked. For those that know me know that is shocking. I made some spaghetti and tomato sauce from scratch. I would love to say it was absolutely delicious, but that would be only due to pride. However, it can be said it was not

Dios les bendiga.

P.S. It is Thomas' birthday today. Happy Birthday and Feliz Cumpleanos Thomas!