Sunday at La Ceiba

Mateo is the Legal Representative and the President of the Kekchi Baptist Association of Churches. He is also the first Kekchi pastor we met. Because we are no longer in New Horizon on Sundays, we decided that we could start taking our teams to a Kekchi church on Sundays after the Pastor's training. La Ceiba is 3.5 hrs from our house and is the town with the largest Kekchi church in Petén. Mateo just recently became pastor of this church and he was very excited to have us come.

There were over 600 people in attendance. Part of that was over 160 kids. The kids were so excited that they crowded in the front of the church waiting on the Gringos to be introduced so that they could then go play.

Pastor Bob was asked to preach, so I translated into Spanish and one of the deacons translated into Kekchi.

I very quickly had to lose the microphone. My translator couldn't understand spanish through the speaker system, so Bob spoke in English through the mic, I yelled in Spanish, and then Kekchi went through the mic again.

The kids were very excited to sing and do the actions they learned with the words for the Gringos. They had been practicing their songs with their Sunday School teachers. It was very impressive to see that many kids doing their choreography together.

Younger kids (those still nursing) staid in the service with their moms. The sleepy ones stayed near the aisles so that their kids could get a nap!

After the service we were treated to a lunch of tamales. This was my request instead of caldo, because there is a much less chance of somebody getting sick. Everything is cooked inside the banana leaf and not touched by anybody else until you unwrap it yourself. Two ladies in the church worked for 24 hours in order to make 1600 tamales. In case you were wondering, it takes 125 lbs of chicken to make 1600 tamales. Earlier in the week I had given the president of the church's deacons an offering from the team to help in buying the supplies, since I had requested the type of food. It probably only covered about 2/3 of the final cost. They had also gone out on their own and bought bottled water and Pepsis for the team.

It was a wonderful time and I am even more impressed with the Kekchi work. I also kept thinking back to the questions that had come up during the training time and realized that men who have what we would think to be little Bible education are responsible for huge numbers of people.