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