Colonia Valdense, a quiet little Swiss settlement between Montevideo and Argentina.

8am Sunday…0° outside and in!  When there’s nothing but a thin brick wall separating you from that white frost outside, the room gets pretty frigid I tell you! You don’t need cold plunge pools, just come and stay the night in these uninsulated little houses. 

The chilly room still didn’t take away from the enriching little fellowship meeting with these two ladies who live in this home.  Edith and Nelmara are sisters whose husbands moved on long ago.  Up till recently they also looked after their elderly mother, however she passed away recently.  

Daily life for many people is not easy, comfortable nor especially pleasant.  They get up in their freezing houses, and set out while it’s still dark, crunching over the frost to catch a bus for an hour or so to work.  Home the same way.  There is a bad water shortage in southern Uruguay at the moment, and they are taking water out of the River Plate, which is slightly salty! 🤢.  Drinking water must be bought in bottles, which is an added expense.  The salty water makes washing machines and hot water cylinders break down!  🤷‍♀️

Both these ladies have drug-addicted sons, who sometimes live at home with them, and bring all their issues there.  Like one of them took someone else’s motorbike home from a party, and the irate owner came storming around to find it.  (this was 

Saturday night).  When noone came out the house, the motorbike owner lobbed a big rock through the kitchen window and there was a great uproar.  

So, these two ladies, Sunday after Sunday faithfully have their little meeting together.  Just the two of them.  And it’s just like any meeting, anywhere in the world, two ladies not bemoaning their lives, but saying thank you to God for all they have…

6pm, it’s getting frosty again as we walk off to catch the bus back to Montevideo

Two Dear Ladies from Montevideo

 We don’t have many of our friends living in the capital city of Montevideo, but here are two of them!  

98 year old Candida.  Her memory isn’t so great these days, but she loves to see whoever goes to visit her.  She doesn’t get out to any meetings now.  Her mother was professing!

Edel in the lilac top, is showing her the worker photo and she recognises some of the ones she knows really well.

She lives in an outlying suburb, so we were grateful Don and Kathie took us in their car…saving us a few hours on buses.

And this is Edel.  She came in touch with the gospel when her children were young, and life was very difficult.  She has struggled through though, and faithfully visits Candida frequently.  This is not an easy thing for her, as two years ago she fell from the roof of her house to the concrete below and did some bad damage to her head and spine.  She walks slowly, and with the aid of a stick, bravely gets on and off buses and navigates the uneven, broken pavements, which are the norm throughout Latin America.  (I remember hearing an elderly Argentinian man exclaim about the even pavements in the Canary Islands when he went to visit his son there 😄).

This is the little house she lives in behind the house her Hare Krishna son lives in.  I cannot describe in words the icy dampness in this house!! As soon as you step into the door, you feel the cold damp air wrap it’s fingers around you and invade you to your very bones it seems!  This poor little lady lives on her meagre pension here, never ever complaining.  Often in the winter months, Don and Kathie take her home with them after fellowship meeting and she has lunch with them and spends the afternoon there, just so she has somewhere warm for the day.  

The Hare Krishna son gets his fellow Hare Krishnas to gather at his house every Saturday, and they have a jam session on drums and chants…for three solid hours, until 9:30 pm.  Edel told us it used to go on longer, till midnight! She’s grateful it stops earlier now… I came away from visiting her with a lot of admiration for this little lady.

Bit of a different street scene in this part of Montevideo to the flash bit that the Americans live in!  On the left hand side of the photo is a big open drain running with viscous black “water” and many floating objects, and a smell that is NOT for the faint hearted! 🤮.  We were on our way to visit Lourdes, another faithful soul who has a dog’s life caring for her chain-smoking husband who had a stroke that incapacitated him several years ago.  No such thing as putting him in a rest home here… it’s just look after him day and night and try to earn some money in between.  A bright spot for her is getting to Sunday am mtg whenever she can (depends on how husband is), and whenever the workers go to visit her and she can sing hymns and have a read with them.  She lives a way out of the city…we have been once so far and it’s the end of May. 

Lourdes’ kitchen ceiling…it’s crazy the amount of asbestos that is used here in Urugay!  You see it absolutely everywhere.

Where Lourdes lives is a nighbourhood of shack type houses.  This is how they secure the rooves…piling rocks and junk on top to keep them weighted down.  Still got satellite TV though!!

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous… fancy dinner that night with Don and Kathie

South America’s Best-kept Secret!

I’ve been 20 years in South America and never knew Uruguay has such beautiful places! (haven’t been north yet, which is apparently a little more “rustic”😁).  

The wealthier part of Montevideo, where Don and Kathie live, is very nice.  They live 6 blocks from the waterfront.  I can’t get over how not security-conscious they are…makes me nervous, coming from Argentina where you’d get your cell phone whipped out your hand if you have it out in the open.  Here they walk along brandishing their phones with no fear! (I have been told you wouldn’t do that out in the poorer areas…hmmm won’t take my chances either way).  

So now, we have come to “Maldonado”.  A town I have heard of for many years (due to their being quite a few of our friends here), and always pictured it as a poorish country town with nothing much going for it.  Well.  Look at it!

This was looking out the bus window on the way. About a two hour bus ride from Montevideo, going east.  I was instantly converted to Uruguay ❤️.  The sea!!

So, this is the holiday destination for the rich and famous from Argentina.  A small peninsula attached to Maldonado, called “Punta del Este” (East Point) is the destination of choice, due to the golden sand and extensive beaches.  It has a big marina where all sorts of luxury boats are moored, and high rise building after high rise building…hate to think of what the pandemic did there.  They depend on tourism for their livelihoods.  They are starting to recover but the wealthy Argentinians aren’t so wealthy anymore, so there will be a downturn.

Arriving into Maldonado, Punta del Este in the distance.  Note the whale tail…it’s common to sight whales in the spring.

Rolling countryside of Uruguay.  These would be the highest hills you’d see here.

Apartments and hotels for as far you can see!!  Punta del Este

These high-rise buildings are all built on a fairly small surface area, looks like a massive city, but it’s not!  Lots of our friends here are employed in the high summer season when all the tourists come, which is pretty much 7 days a week, then work is quite scarce for the rest of the year.  Some of them have come to live here from the north of the country and they come from families that have had the influence of the gospel in their lives for generations.  The rest of them are first generation, and have interesting stories as to how they came in touch.

This is Noemí (Naomi).  Her parents were amongst the first to hear and respond to the gospel in this eastern part of Uruguay.  For years it was just them and a couple of others faithfully living the truth.  She grew up going to to meetings, but wasn’t really wanting to committ to it, yet at the same time never really cut off contact completely.  She married, and had a new-born baby when her husband was tragically killed in a vehicle accident.  That took a big toll on her of course, and she started going more frequently, but never committed to it until after she married her 2nd husband, Andrés.  However, during all those years, she would invite people to the meetings.  She had a little mini-market type shop, and a man called Carlos would deliver fruit and veg.  One day in conversation he told her he was looking for something more than his church, so she told him where the Sunday am mtg was!  He got the time wrong and turned up just as everyone was leaving.  José Ramos one of the workers was there and spoke to him, but he never returned.  Until 10 years later!  In that interim many things had happened, but when he came back again, he and his wife Adriana made their choices to serve God.  They live on a market garden farm, and have the annual mtgs and special meetings at their home.  Carlos professed before Noemí, and he would talk to her strongly encouraging her to do something about her own salvation! 

                                  Buying fresh fish at the harbour

                              Gus finding some fat, lazy friends

                                          Yum seafood for sale

Walking down the marina where the world’s wealthy have their yachts

                                                Not hard to take!!

This is Susana and her daughter Rebecca.  Susana also had a little shop like a small supermarket.  These kind of shops are fairly common here as a lot of people don’t have vehicles so they just walk to the local grocery shop in the neighbourhood.  So the aforementioned Carlos also delivered veges to her.  She was super-religious in a pentecostal type church.  She would faithfully trot off to church every week with her 9 kids!  Carlos was now professing, and he told her about the meetings.  So this time she trotted off to the gospel meeting with her 9 kids! (Rebecca is the eldest.  She was about 16 at the time).  Imagine the sight of that big family coming into the gospel meeting!  Carlos would go and pick all these people up in his car, as Susana lived on the smell of an oily rag.  (But still gave all the kids money for the church offering each week).  So they’d go to the gospel meeting, then that night they would trot off to the church.  The church services would go on for hours, full of noise and hallelujahs.  All of a sudden Rebecca turned very rebellious and decided she was NOT going to the church anymore.  She wasn’t a disobedient daughter as a rule, so it took Susana by surprise! And there was nothing she could do to change that.  Rebecca mutinously refused to go so off they went and she stayed home.  The following week her other siblings started refusing to go as well.  

At the age of 22 Rebecca had a little baby and was living with the baby’s father, a man who had been married and was a lot older than herself. She already had a daughter, Abigail, from a previous relationship.   They lived in another seaside town Rocha, further east than Maldonado.  They owned a very busy bakery together, but she felt this huge need and ache in her heart.  The workers went to have meetings for her, and they had quite a mission in the bakery.  Rebecca and her partner Walter professed, and there were lots of locals who came, and some of them professed (of the group that did profess, there is just Rebecca and Walter, a d another lady who have continued).  Rebecca wanted to be baptised, and knew her living situation wasn’t right in the eyes of God.  After much agonising about it, she took the costly decision to separate from Walter.  She still cries as she tells of her pain as she walked away, and went back to her mother’s home.  We have a hymn in Spanish which has the theme of leaving behind the old life to walk with God.  One of the verses of that hymn came to her in a very real and for her personal way, and helped her to keep going… translated it says “Be like Rebecca, who left everthing behind - All that she loved with her whole heart.  And she began a long journey, because she believed and obeyed God.”  That decision cost her a lot of misunderstandings and hardships…but she stuck to it.  Still lives with her mother, and that little boy is now 22.  Her daughter Abigail is a lovely young mum, married to a South African called André Wise.  Andre lived and worked for some time in Uruguay years ago, but the couple now live inSweden.  He has a sister in the work, Jestine, who last year went to work on the Argentine staff.  Walter has had his ups and downs, his “on and offs”, but it’s nice to see him coming to the meetings of late, an elderly man now.  He takes part on Sunday mornings, and has a real spirit of gratitude and thankfulness.

Of Susana’s 9 children, Rebecca, and another daughter Ana, and her husband Victor are professing.  Her daughter-in-law Andrea too.  Susana also brought a lady, Celica, from her old church, who professed. Rebecca is always inviting people to the meetings!

A curious feature of this eastern part of Uruguay, are these houses with thatched rooves…they look very much like old English country houses from the Cotswolds or something.

Alberto and Bettina de Abreu.  Alberto is from one of those families that heard the gospel many years ago from the north of the country.  There are two main families whose descendants are part of our fellowship today, and also most of the native Uruguayan workers are descended from them.  De Abreu and Barrientos are common surnames amongst our friends.  If they’re not related to one they’re related to the other…and sometimes both!  Interestingly Uruguay has a very small population (3.5 million) but it has produced a lot of workers over the years.  Anyway Alberto brought Bettina to mtgs, she’s the only one in her family.  They have one of the Sunday fellowship mtgs in their home.

Don’t get to do this in Argentina!  This area is not far from where the River Plate meets with the Atlantic Ocean.  Alberto and Bettina took us to Whale Point to see the sunset…what a treat!  Whales are often sighted here in the spring…watch this space!

Shifting house was never like this in NZ! 😁 Alberto and Bettina live at the front of the property and his cousin Eduardo and wife Graciela live at the back.  So instead of loading up the gospel chariot, just pass your backpack out the window to Gus who puts it in the next bedroom 😆

There’s someone parked down the end of our street! Cruise ship season has been very welcomed by the people here who suffered by lack of them in the pandemic.

                                      Out at Carlos and Adriana’s market garden

Off-Grid with the Texans

Sitting in the shade of a big old Uruguayan tree, in the warmth of a late summer Uruguayan afternoon looking out over scrubby hills littered with rocks and a few cattle trying to find something to eat.  We are staying in the home of Russell and Shirley, an elderly Texan couple with a real southern drawl, and to my delight, say y’all 😃.  I’m looking over my shoulder every so often to make sure Russell isn’t heading toward me, as once he gets someone’s ear, he will not stop talking all about the evil state of the world today, and what are “we” (meaning he) going to do about it?  Sadly he never comes to any conclusions, and winds up with more questions than answers.  His wife Shirley is different, she doesn’t go along with all his mad-cap ideas, but doesn’t have any choice other than listen, and occasionally gently disagree!

They have had contact with truth for many years, through some of our friends in the USA, and Shirley has attended lots of meetings in the past.  About 11 years ago, Russell got the idea that the world is in such a mess, and there will be no food for eveyone, so the best thing to do was up sticks and move to Uruguay, get away from it all, as Abraham did! And get to know God out in the country.  So he sold up and moved down here, and they live on a very isolated ranch in the south of Uruguay.  They have solar power only, and because their system doesn’t retain electricity, if the day is cloudy, there is none.  Shirley has to do all the washing by hand as they don’t have a machine.  She has worked like a slave to salvage what was left of the building that is now their home.  She put down beautiful brick paving, has done plastering, and tiling inside.  What she can’t turn her hand to!  Their daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren all live on the same ranch.  They adhere to some kind of old testament beliefs, the kids are all home-schooled and have weird Biblical names, the only one I can remember is the youngest, Haddassah.  Also on the ranch, is a German couple and their 16 yr old dughter Nellie, who are lovely people too.  They also live off-grid and Nellie has quit school this year.  Just roams the ranch on her horse and helps out with all the farm work - of which there is plenty.   Seems like an idyllic life in some ways… but still, putting their all into this life, with little or no thought of eternity.  

We came and are staying two nights, we thought that might be all we could take of Russell’s ramblings! But amazingly, it opened up for us to have a little Bible read with Shirley all on her own this morning.  First time that’s ever happened apparently! Later Nadine heard Russell snoring, so the Lord must have sent a great sleep over him so we could have time alone with Shirley 😆.  We read John 1 with her, and she said afterwards, “there’s so much more in this chapter than I ever thought”.  

Poor Russell has all the right questions, but never really seems to want answers.  “Man’s wisdom leads into a maze”  pretty well sums him up.  His questions and ideas lead to more questions and ideas, and it is very tiring to listen to!  Anyway, he makes us very welcome, and gives thanks at every meal, so that makes a change from the workers getting asked every time😁

The red roof between the trees in the middle of the picture is their house…22kms along a dirt road from the nearest town.  No cell coverage.  The house itself is probably 3 kms in from the road, bouncing over paddocks.  It was basically fallen down when they bought it 11 years ago.  I don’t know what this house looked like before, but from their description it sounds like it was a typical farm-hand’s house.  I’ve seen a few in Argentina, they are just dumps.  A few crumbling concrete walls, and a concrete floor.  Cold.  Damp.  So this is a total transformation.  

Scrubby old farmland

Part of the inheritance that came with the farm

Shirley making her yummy “biscuits” (American for scone)

These photos from inside the house show all the tiling and brick work, and ceilings and that Shirley and her son-in-law did.

All the paving outside, and little brick walls around the garden is Shirley’s work.  Love the little reminders of their Texan long-horn cattle they had back in the US.  Sadly, it is evident by the state of the garden that she’s just given up.  She had planted a beautiful flower and veg garden, and if it’s not the cattle or sheep that get in, it’s the rabbits.  And if not the rabbits, the ants! They are the biggest enemy to a garden.  Come overnight and devour everything that is green.  She went back to the US one year for a few months, and when she came back Russell hadn’t looked after anything and all her hard work was for naught… 🤷‍♀️

                            Russell-free Bible study with Shirley 😄

Stunning sunsets out in the campo (country)

We get to meet interesting characters in our line of work…there was a knock at the door one day and in walks this shy, polite girl with German-accented English.  This is Nela (Nellie), the daughter of the Germans Steffan and Frida who have been lent a plot of the “promised land” to park their container house on.  She had come over on her mare Mississippi, to let us know they would like us to call on them later that day.  Her dad has an interesting story.  He is from East Germany, and tried to defect to the West, but got caught.  They threw him in jail, and because of the maltreatment, he nearly died.  From time to time, sympathisers in the West would donate money in order for a random prisoner to be released.  This time they decided to release Steffan as he was dying anyway, and the West could have him!  He was sent to hospital where he recovered.  Frida was a nurse there, and they ended up marrying, and at about 9 years ago came to Uruguay.   Not sure what for…looking for fulfillment in life I guess.  Frida’s parents are not happy about the arrangement.  All her brothers are doctors, and here’s Nellie, a bright girl, quit school and roaming around the countryside on her horse!

Note her typical gaucho clothes (the South American cowboy). The boots, pants, belt, knife and beret (and horse!) are all very typical of a gaucho.

The Danners’ container home.  They are extremely hard working, and have their solar-power system working perfectly.  

Frida speaks pretty good English, and occasionally has to ask Nellie (who speaks fluent Spanish as well), what a word means.  It was boiling hot this day, and here we are enjoying a glass of cool water, which had some kind of leaf in the jug, a handful of little rocks, and a silver coin…all good for the health no doubt!  Unfortunately Steffan was not home.  

The Danners’ compound

Russell and Shirley’s three grandchildren rode over to see us.  Funny hearing their very American accents in the middle of Uruguay!  The eldest girl, Hava (I think) was puzzling about how to untangle her horse’s tail so she can put him in the local parade next week.  

Hadassah aboard “Luna”, and Hava on Castillo, she is starting to break the grey horse Nevada…the life of some home-schooled American kids in Uruguay!

Going home to do their afternoon “chores”.

The land that the Lord has “given” to Russell to “be a steward of”.  All it seems to produce are miles of thorny weeds and rocks!  It’s kind of depressing to say the least.  As Russell drove us out of there, taking us to catch our bus home, the whole way he talked and talked and mused and thought out aloud.  Told us about how misunderstood he was, and yet he was so firm about doing the Lord’s will…how many people pleaded with him to not bring Shirley down here…and yet he remained firm in his convictions.  He believes that if he goes back to the US, he will be arrested!  Shirley is going back soon for the duration of the Uruguayan winter… get the feeling she would be very happy to never see this place again! (Y’all 😄)