Kara Kara is a shanty little town that was all started with a dump… Literally.
People needed a way to make money so they would either take taxis or walk to the city dump, Kara Kara, to collect trash. The things that they collected would be taken to the local market and sold in order to provide food for their families. It wasn´t long before people started to realize that it would be cheaper just to live at the dump and suddenly shacks began springing up all around. Now, Kara Kara is the poorest neighborhood in all of Cochabamba.
Although Kara Kara may be a dump, it has the most beautiful church that I have seem in my entire life I think. I am not talking about the building, (by the way there isn´t one. The church building is a tin roof that covers some benches) I am talking about the people.
The past couple of weeks we have had the privilege of attending their Saturday night youth service as well as the Sunday morning service and never in my life have I met more welcoming, humble, passionate, and hungry people. Sometimes only 12 people show up and they respond as though God had blessed them with the biggest crop this world has ever seen. I don’t always know what is being verbally communicated, but you can literally see that they love the Lord through the way they live, act, and interact with one another.
We always say that we want to live out our faith and that we want people to know we are Christians by the way we lead our lives. That is something that is much easier said than done, but this church lives in such a way that even when I don’t understand their words they are obviously Christians by the way that they live. I want to be more like that, so that even if there is a language barrier Christ is proclaimed by the way I represent Him with my life.
