Soultouch goes Spanglish

After spending a long, uncomfortable and extremely funny night sleeping on the floor in Johanesberg airport we made the 12 hour flight from South Africa into Buenos Aires safely and without too much boredom. We arrived sleepy but excited at our new host home on Wednesday evening, thankfully just in time to try a lovely spanish supper dish, tortilla, before heading to bed.

Thursday morning started with a much needed Spanish lesson from one of our lovely hosts Susan. We then headed to San Andres church to meet with Valeria and Camilla, the 2 main co-ordinators of the social outreach side of the church, for lunch. Camilla explained to us that San Andres church is still linked closely with San Andres school and University, and although the church itself does not have any of their own social outreach projects they draw alongside many other projects in the surrounding area and are always supporting and helping those around them. Over the course of the lunch we were pleasantly surprised with an extremely well organised time table for the next 2 weeks that ensures we cover all of the different projects and get a real feel for the work the church does here during our time. This type of organisation has become foreign and almost strange to us after living on “Africa time” (any time you want) for so long, but the structure was welcomed by us both and our western minds.

On Friday we spent the day working in a poorer commuity in Buenos Aires in a soup kitchen run by one of the churches there. We helped the dedicated pastor and volunteers hand out steaming bowls of polenta (corn flour mixed with water, milk and cheese) with a sauce similar to bolignaise, and cups of juice to the many children and families from the community that cant afford to buy their own food. Everyone was really lovely to us and so patient considering none of them speak English and so far Laura and I can only string together a few small sentences of Spanish between us. There seems to be a general warm and loving feel to the people here so far, or maybe its just that I like kissing people on the cheek when greeting them!

Very proudly we managed to use the correct Spanish to find our way back to the church on the bus to give a presentation on Soultouch to an Elderly group from the church. Everyone was so nice and really seemed to appreciate the presentation and a look at the many photos we have gathered over the year. And we were invited to join them for afternoon tea which is always nice!

It would seem we have a busy few weeks ahead of us with hospital visits, childrens parties, food banks, several presentations (including one in spanish!) and working at a youth retreat camp, and hopefully on top of all that we will be slowly but surely learning more Spanish as the days go on. It all seems very exciting and we are looking forward to it all, but prayers are needed for the language. Laura, although nervous aswell, sounds great using the words she knows, but I need a bit more of a shove into it as I have very low confidence in new languages. But so far everyone is being very patient and I know that the times of trial are when God helps us shine the most!Eek I hope so!

Love and blessings,

From a mucho scared Jenn! xxx