New Meeting Place for Yarinacocha

This is our new church building in Yarinacocha...okay, it isn't new, but it is new to us...we have someplace to call "home" now, and the people are glad too. Maria and her husband, Wilmer are who we rent the room from. This day was her birthday, and the day that we moved everything into our "Temple". The little kids in the neighborhood come over everytime they see the door open, so we have been able to help some of them with homework and just have a chance to talk to them too.

Empe "welcoming" people to the "templo".

My first Sunday School class in the new room. These are three cousins, Levi, Tricia, and Fresia. Empe teaches the younger kids in the front row.

This is our first service in the new room. We had 23 people in that service. Some others passed by and watched for a while at the door or window, and some of our regulars had to stand at the window the whole time because there was no more seating. That little room was hot with that many people. So, the next Sunday, September 12, we had the kids make handheld fans in Sunday School, like we used to get from funeral homes and use at camp meeting, as an offering to the church (we had talked about offering in the Tuesday service). Because many of them don't have money to give, but they all have talents they can give, we thought this may be a good way to let them help with things that the new church needed. The fans turned out really good...we haven't taken pictures of them yet because the glue was still drying when we left. I want to take pictures of them with the kids that made them and post those pictures.
As I said, we talked about offering in the Tuesday night service. This is a big deal because now we have rent to pay... anyway, we talked about tithe and offerings, and I spent a good portion of the week making this wall hanging. It has three rows of pockets for envelopes...tithe envelopes. Here, a person has the same tithe envelope for a whole year. It has a chart on it for them to write how much money they put in each week or month, and they put it in the offering. Then, when the money is taken out of the envelope, the envelope is returned to the wall hanging so that they can pick up the envelope the next week or month to put their tithe in the offering again. "Diezmos" is the word for tithe. By the end of the 4 days of working on it, I was wishing I had a sewing machine...or at least a good thimble...sore fingers in the end, but a beautiful "Diezmos center", if you ask me.