My Day 4

Today, I stayed @ home the entire day. Thanks Keng Suan for teaching me about the ginger tea. Will try to find ginger later. Was busy preparing the Singapore seminar coming up on Saturday where Eelee and I are suppose to present Singapore. It is an outreach event where we hope to meet more contacts. Quite stressed over it because I also dunno what is there to present. Haa.. so we were two Singaporeans busy searching the internet to know more about Singapore.

Imagine you are a lady; you are far far away from home for a long time; and its a cold winter night; you are really busy with your work; you struggle to make ends meet; you sleep an average of 5 hrs a day; you have to cook for the household and worse of all; you fall sick. For all those who by God’s grace is reading this, please hold what you’re doing now and spend sometime to pray for sister Cindy k? Pray to God for healing. We had a short time of worship to break our fast. When people are driven to a corner, sometimes, in fact, all the time, all you can do is to pray. It may sound clique, but when all you can do is to pray a simple prayer of, “God, help me,” will God not have compassion and answer the payer. As I see her struggle on, rushing her dinner after the worship because she have class after that, without a hint of complain, I asked myself if I would have given up if I were her. Yet again, I am so humbled.

I had a short chat with David over dinner. He really talks like Pastor Ben. He was commenting that the Chileans are really smart people and they are a bit like the Chinese Business man who are intelligent and won’t let you know what they are thinking and leave you guessing.

The people here would rather embrace negative news then good news. If something bad happens, it is alright, when something good happens, they get suspicious.

There is a very high level of distrust among people in Chile. This can be stemmed from the past where a military dictator ruled. Neighbors don’t trust neighbors because one may be a spy from the military government and the other a supporter of the democratic fighters. If the democratic supporter gets found out, the secret police will just take him away and people will never see him again. The situation is a bit like Singapore’s HDB where people just go home and close their doors at the end of the day and mind your own business. Just that the element of distrust is much higher. Thats what 20 yrs of dictatorship did to the country. Since people are not trusting, building of relationship here is so important. We need to win their trust and friendship 1^st, before preaching the gospel.

That’s for people who are above 17. For those born after the dictatorship, the youths like to play punk because there is this new found freedom that the people do not yet know how to use. It is a little like the American youths. With freedom comes responsibility.

The people here mainly have a Catholic background, and people are sick of it. The word God and Jesus is almost used as a swear word here. We need to bring a new perspective to the bible that it can be read in an applicable and relevant manner.

The Chileans like our fellowship and gatherings. But at the end of the day, they are like most South Americans, they don’t commit and stay. After a while, they leave. We need to build them on the word, the truth because at the end of the day, it is the only way to make them stay.

Morals are not being talked about in this society. Although PM Lee may not be a Christian, he does address the nation about morals. It is totally different letting God come into the government and preaching about God. The President of Chile is agnostic and does not share much about values to people. There is just something very wrong about the system here, be it the government or education system.

As you read this, do pray for Chile k? I hold on to a belief that anything without God will degenerate over time and Chile is in a bad degenerating state now. Do encourage your friends to pray for us as well k, because, the only thing we can do now is to pray.

Labels: My Chile Experience 1