Church - Peru style!!

well, where to start!...Today was the 15th birthday of the church which Jenny and Roland are involved in. The church hired out a local 500 seater auditorium, and had a well rehearsed and planned show planned.......or so we thought!!! The meeting was planned to start at 10.50am. At 11.15 am, the worship team were reahearsing on stage whilst the PA man was busy writing up the words on power point which could be seen on the wall at the back of the stage!....This all being done with a half filled auditorium!!

Myself and Becky had been asked to play the role of pig farmers in a children's sketch, which we had rehearsed a couple of times yesterday and Chris was leading the band in a worship song! However, the narrator of the 'pig' sketch was ill on sunday which left us with a scene and no narrator.....so Encarni was the hero of the hour and stepped in...and did an AMAZING job!.....So then came Chris's moment to lead a worship song!!....They harequested that a couple of us go up aswell and stand with the singers as we knew the song well. So just to support them and Chris, myself, Jenny J, Encarni and Becky went up and stood at the side of the stage waiting for our cue!!...The next thing we know, Chris is positioned at the back of the stage with the other musicians, whilst me, Jenny, Encarni and Becky were put CENTRE stage with 2 mics and NO backing singers (ironically, i thought we were supposed to be the backing singers!!).....so then what came next was possibly the most embarassing and cringy 5 minutes of my life (although it felt like 5 hours!!) The PA person failed to put the words up so we did not even have other voices to drown us out, the spanish worship singers stood back and looked at us in awe (or something like that!!) and the lights shone on us! I was fully aware that we could not be heard and we could see people on the side of the stage signing for us to put the mics nearer to our mouth, but i for one was not gonna do that....then Jenny Brown runs on mid song and shoves our mics right in our faces..and shouts 'sing up'!...we didn't!!!.....So we officially died on stage...and I for one found that far more painful than the mountain climb yesterday!!....The fact that we were not invited up for our pre-planned encore says a lot! (altho they would not have got me back up there for all the tea in China!!). That said...Chris did a great job of leading the band!!

After church we went for lunch with some people from church where we had a meal of either chicken and rice or beef and baked beans - really!!! - which came to the grand total of about £2.50 per person!!

In the evening was an English church service in the Cafe downstairs from our hostel...sadly no centre stage singing in spanish!!