Tarapoto Peru July 4th

Tarapoto Peru July 4, Sunday

God Bless America. We sang this song on the bus on the way to the first day of work at the job site. The bus ride to Lamas is about 30 minutes. Everyone was in a single bus today, complete with the entire center aisle filled. No keeping the center clear. Safety is a different concept here. The town streets and roads are full of motor bikes (2 wheels) but more interesting are the motor cars (3 wheels) taxis. We have not seen a single helmet or accident either.

We have seen many very interesting things. A slower live. These people have so little. I think of all my junk back in Florida and wonder, why do I think I need it all.

Everywhere you look, it begs to be photographed. Beautiful people and smiles. Up at the job site we are the town’s current attraction. People come and stand in the road watching the oddity. They drive by slowly to see the swarm of giants putting up this church. The place is noisy with the cement mixer, the block cutting saw and the rebar saw and the air is full of dust. They are watching us and we are watching them. In the back yard of the house immediately next door to the church we watched a cock fit this afternoon around 5 when we were trying to get these much too eager people to stop working and go eat. Earlier in the day the woman of the house was squatting on the ground washing clothes in a wash pan. At the end of the day, back at our quite nice A/C’d hotel room, during my cold shower, along with the where is the hot water thoughts, I also thought that most people in the world have never and will never have a hot shower.

We have 6 rows of block up on one-half of the front and down one side and the rear. On the other side, we have the first row. The construction bossman, Chuck Poole, tells us that the first day is the slowest, when everyone is finding their teams and niches.
Rhonda Jeffus with Markham Woods Maranatha Group

Random thought from Dan:

I heard my first dog bark tonight in Peru. Dogs don’t seem to bark in Peru they don’t jump up on people either. They don’t run after cars. There ribs are showing and they don’t seem to show much life at all.

I have learned that to really experience Tarapoto you must ride the bus hanging out of the door. Inside the bus you don’t smell the road side café (just a table set up along the side of the road with a few chairs and maybe a cover). You can’t see the people and you are not riding as they do. Mike and Richard I now know what they do with those trucks they send to South America. They convert them to people carriers. They remove the beds and put on a flat bed with a cage around the 4 sides. Then they pack about 25 people inside and drive for hours and hours along bumpy roads going who knows where.

We took a man to a hospital here in Tarpaoto he was from Lamas and lives near the church. He had various problems and needed to go to the hospital but had no way to get there. After dropping the crew off at the hotel Hernan and I along with the bus driver went to the hospital about 15 minutes away up a dirt road. Computers are not a necessity for a hospital here in Peru. The ER was rather small with green tile on the walls then a red stripe around the room. The upper half of the room was white. The waiting room had no chairs only 3 wheel chairs for the patients. Visitors waited outside. There were 3 room children, women, and men. There was somebody there that had a broken arm that was in a splint. I would say that ever bed was full maybe 10. The hospital service is free but not the medications. We were given the prescriptions and had to go the pharmacy at the corner to get them filled they gave us the drugs and we took them in to the nurses.

We also went to an Indian village down the hill and meet some beautiful children that we invited to Vacation Bible School.

Bye for now Dan