Day 5 - And You People Mock My Vegetarianism

I am happy to say that outside the United States, there are Christians who sleep in on Sunday mornings. My host family does, anyway. Their church servieces take place on various evenings throughout the week, like the service that I spoke at the night before. The only Sunday commitment at the Foursquare Church of La Comunida Florida is an 11:00 AM Sunday school, open to kids of all ages. Crystal and I crept out of the sleeping house at 10:30 to meet our team at the church - we would be active participants in Sunday school that day.

Now I've been active in children's ministry before, but that is not necessarily what God has called me to do with my life. So anytime the team participated in anything having to do with children's ministry, I was perpetually terrified the entire time. Still, I think I made it through without too much grief. If anything, the kids thought my nervousness was funny, and even though they spoke too quickly for me to understand* I could at least figure out when they wanted a hug, which I gave freely.

After Sunday school we returned to our homes and spent the rest of the day with our families. We stayed for Sunday lunch, which in Hermana Delfina's family is a big, big deal. We met the extended family - her son Jose Luis, his wife, and their three children, two girls and a three-year-old boy.

It felt like Thanksgiving as twelve of us sat down to Hermana Delfina's seemingly endless spread. They had broken out the barbeque (bigger, hotter, and more dangerous than an American barbeque, mind you) and served the meal in three courses: Chicken, Pork, and Beef. Not to mention the rice, salad, sliced tomatoes, guacamole, and six liters of Pap** and Coke that were being passed around. Hermana Delifina fixed everyone's plate, and she asked how hungry I was.

"A little?" I said nervously.

But neither Crystal nor I had eaten breakfast, and she insisted we wouldn't starve on her watch. She piled a heaping serving of everything on our plates, so that lunch stood a good six inches high as we sat to say grace.

"We'd better pace ourselves, Crystal," I muttered. And pace ourselves we did. There was no way we were leaving that table without cleaning our plates. Just like a traditional Thanksgiving, the two of us sat back half an hour later a little fatter, and feeling both content and slightly sick at the same time. I'd never eaten that much meat in one sitting in my entire life. It was certainly the most I'd eaten in the last three years, and I remembered then just how much I missed being a vegetarian. It wasn't bad then, but I would certainly pay for my carnivorism the next day in Val Paraiso.

*Two of my teammates stayed with a host family who had a three-year-old son, Benjamin. While most of the children in our host families eventually came to understand that we didn't speak Spanish fluently, Benjamin insisted that we were fluent in Spanish and really could understand every word he said.

**Pap. They say it is papaya flavored soda, but somehow I detected something more along the lines of Dubble Bubble Bubble Gum. Pap, Fanta, and Coke dominate the soda scene in Chile.