Thursday, February 7, 2008

Mapuche Trip, Day 8

Friday was our last full day with the Mapuche people since we were leaving the following evening. I woke up feeling better. Praise God! I was afraid it was going to get worse. We had our usual morning routine, then piled into the truck to go to the third pueblito, the one by the lake. We set up some the church and made signs and invitations, and then headed out to invite people. For some reason a stray dog followed our group the whole time—a stray dog with one red eye. It was very creepy looking. We headed back for lunch, and we were all tired so we were pretty goofy. We decided to take some pictures of our hands, going from palest to darkest. I was really the only one who was easy to figure out where to be in the order, since many of the rest of them were so close in color!

We had our last time with the kids. There weren’t as many, but it still went well. Afterwards we showed the video again, and we were pretty tired. And since we’d seen it so many times, we all started dozing off. Cote, our leader, got pictures of almost all of us sleeping. It was quite entertaining. Before we headed home for the end of the day, we walked over to the lake. Some people had brought their swimsuits, but it was pretty cold so I didn’t even bother. We sat on the beach eating and watching the few brave people who went in. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast. The two guys in the lake came back to shore and started picking up the girls and throwing them in the water. All of us (except for one girl they had mercy on since she wasn’t feeling well) ended up wet to some degree. Since I had money in my pocket, I didn’t get more than my legs wet. Thankfully. It was soooo cold! At one point a random horse ran down the beach. Weird! We packed up and headed home.

We had dinner, a full meal since our lunch had been small, and although we were tired, spent a lot of time talking and laughing. It was our last night together, just the 8 of us. We’d started calling ourselves a family, with the two leaders being the mom and dad…which was interesting since two of us were older than the dad! We named ourselves the Duran Dias, which means the Last Days. But it came from a combination of two people’s last names—Duran and Diaz. They all thought it was pretty funny. I didn’t quite get it, but was more than willing to play along. :o)

After being beaten badly in a game of “Manitos Calientes” (a hand slapping game, basically), I headed to bed.

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