It feels out of place to be halfway across the world in South America and then be greeted in Dutch when you sit down for breakfast. Glimpses of Afrikaans catching your ear while the students of the bible school chat makes this almost feel like home. Suriname has less than 500 000 people and is mostly thick uninhabited jungle. The city of Paramaribo is where most of the action happens. We found ourselves 22.5 km down Marten Luther King Highway outside this capital at Hebron Zendelingen School. The school is a training base for missionaries who want to go out and preach the gospel. Discipline is surely a key element in this training school. Scheduled class times, chore times, and prayer meetings fill a day up faster than we thought. Chores include cooking, dishes, egg duties, moving cows, mowing lawns, picking berries, cleaning ponds, and laundry to name a few.
We were soon swooped up into a van and taken to remote churches nestled away in the landscape. One such church was in Victoria Village in the Brokopondo district. A small church with a slanted roof filled with bush people. Such an extraordinary place. The pastor runs a shop from the front of his house next to the church to support his family. Convenient and good use of space. Not that space is an issue. The jungle is just so thick that you have to fight your way into it. You can barely see a few meters into the greenery that is intertwined to form the lungs of the earth. The whole jungle is alive and breathing every minute of every day. I will miss this place just for the fact that it is mostly untouched. You get a sensing that this is how it's supposed to be. Untouched. Everywhere we go we build and develop and expand. Why don't we just appreciate what is already there? We all yearn for times without any traffic or phones or pollution. Yet we create these spaces wherever we go. We are peculiar in this sense yet we frown upon people who live in the jungles.
We are strange like that...