Vying to be heard: cattle, chickens, trucks, and a sermon

In church this Sunday, the pastor had to keep raising the volume of his preaching. Sunday here is market day. Buses poured into town, using their air brakes to slow their way into town. Trucks lumber on the main street beside the church, loaded with green-plantain bananas, oranges, and potatoes. Cattle and sheep were herded past. Stray dogs, chickens, and families wandered by, some of each of which popped into the church for a bit of a visit mid-sermon. One big german-shepherd-ish dog, came and slept just near our feet for the second half of the sermon. In honour of the Catholic month of Corpus Cristi, firecrackers boomed at random, sometimes in clusters that lasted for seconds strung together. And all of the while, the pastor tried to raise his voice above the din, so we could hear the father's day sermon. Maybe that's why this week's morning sermon was only about a half-hour long. One of our two local OMS churches: Buen Pastor If you get there 'on time' the church is pretty empty. Most people have arrived by mid-sermon (an hour later). Firecrackers have been going off night and day, all month. This OMS church is attached to the compound where we live in Saraguro. This church is called Amada De Dios.

Maggots, and rats, oh my!

Earlier this week, when I went to clean the bathroom. I swept behind the toilet and found new rat poo - sad. No wonder the cat was making so much noise the night before. He even knocked over a stool in the kitchen. I wonder if he was involved in a big rat chase? He is a big cat; walks like a well-built lion, likes to attack everything he sees, and is a really sappy in-want-of-love kind-of cat. After sweeping, I picked up a soggy-haired barbie that had been played with in the shower. Its hair was crawling with maggots! Aaaaaack! Iiiiiiiick! Yuck! They nearly touched me! So Don and I super cleaned and disinfected the bathroom floor to ceiling. The morning after we thoroughly cleaned the bathroom, I woke up to new maggots squirming on the bathroom floor. More gag-filled cleaning . . . oooooh what I would have given for a wet/dry shop vac! We weren't sure how the sticky critters were getting in; we checked all over the bathroom floor, and then the ceiling. THEN Don checked the space between the ceiling and the upstairs floor . . . there were two dead rats decaying up in that narrow dark space; maggots were breeding up there, then dropping through the seams of the bathroom ceiling. Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwww. Don has cleaned up the dead rats. Poor Don . . . ick, ick, ick!!!! So now we aren't expecting to encounter any new maggots. Good thing we all have slippers!