We have moved into a house in the Asuncion area.  We are currently living in the parsonage at the Methodist Church of San Lorenzo.  San Lorenzo is a suburb of Asuncion.  We wish we could send you a sound bite of what we hear.  Living in the city is very NOISY!  We are about a ½ mile from a major east/west route, so we hear trucks and cars all night.  Add these sounds to chickens, cows, horses, kids, and then each house has a different radio station going.  However, the rent is free.  We are making improvements to the house, so our actual monetary outlay per month is probably more than paying real rent, but we have enjoyed being a part of only 1 church community instead of 9 different churches.  The pastor for this church has his own house, so the “pastor’s house” had been empty and was available for our use.

Our house is about 600 sq. ft., so we run into each other a lot!  The white building to the right behind our truck is the Sunday school building.

This is the San Lorenzo Methodist Church.  Our house is just to the left, next to the white Sunday school building.  No excuse for being late to church!

Being so close to the church means that we get to hear everything that is going on.  The church doesn’t have lots of services (only Sunday at 9:00 AM, Tuesday & Thursday evenings at 7:30 PM), but they do have an active youth program on Saturday nights.  We’ve decided this should be “date night” for the Bakers.  The youth use our front yard as their volleyball court; and, like all teenagers, enjoy lots of loud music and great fun.

We must tell you about our neighbor.  Raymond lives directly across the road from us and is the “official” gate keeper for the church.  When we leave the house he always asks: where are we going, for how long, when will we return?  He is an interesting character that writes poetry in Guarani.  He had written a poem for Mother’s Day and was going to read it on a local radio station the evening of Mother’s Day.  We wanted to listen to his radio debut and so asked which station.  He pointed to a radio tower and said, “That one!”  We asked if the station had numbers, and after thinking about the question gave us numbers.  They weren’t correct and since holding our radio out the door in the direction of the tower didn’t produce a signal, we missed hearing Raymond’s radio debut.  We feel our house is well guarded with Raymond in charge.

We have also started a well this month.  The well at the Y’Apy Indian reservation is used by about 50 families.  It is in a geologic formation that has not been producing the volume of water needed for these folks, so we wanted to drill another well much deeper.  We would like for them to have 2 wells, 1 with an electric pump and 1 with a hand pump.  With both wells, they will have access to water with or without electricity – and the electricity goes off lots of times!  However, we have started this new well twice, and both times we’ve had equipment failure.  We are now back at our house in San Lorenzo with hoses being repaired.  We have a team coming the first of June, but hope to have this new well in by the end of June. 

Please pray for the success of this well.  We’ll let you know in the June report how things go.

Until then we remain…