Once again Friday night's Alpha course went quite well. Although I don't think there were any major breakthroughs, but we learned a bit more about the culture and some of the people.

For whatever reason several things came up about various superstition. One in particular is the evil eye. For those of you who aren't familiar with it you can learn more here . In particular several people were suggesting than one woman was having headaches because someone had looked at here with envy. The other mention of it came up as Hannah was telling some of them about how people would sort of sing over Taza complients about her being cute or precious when we first got her. They then reminded Hannah that she ought to be careful with Taza because of the evil eye. There were a few more issues such as this in the women's group.

Another observation was that it seems many of the people here see God as a human with more power. Meaning that God was jealous, vengeful and to be feared because if you make him mad, he's going to take it out on you. Although we believe this issues need to be address and talked through, we're still not sure how to do it other than talking to people one on one about what is true of God and even then they seem to be quick to agree but slow to believe.

In my group we talked a bit about how God guides us and it was quite interesting to hearing some of the guys talk. Most of them said they never really thought of God guiding them, having a plan for their lives or really anything to do with them until they started coming to Alpha. This amazed me. Even though they have grown up in a Catholic culture they really never thought anything about God. On an interesting side note, one of them were telling about an evangelical who used to live in Puerto and in the end he said, "you know, it was kinda like your religion." I realized that this man in particular is coming just because he wants to learn about God, the Bible and christianity and really has no idea about religion, churches or denominations. It was kinda refreshing.

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