Post 3 Our town and neighbours

The surrounding country had a scattered population of about 7,000 with some smaller towns, including San Ramon. It was our responsibility to take the Gospel to all this area .

San Joaquin had a population of about 2,000, a good percentage being Indians living around the fringe of the town. Their houses had palm-thatched roofs; the walls were bamboo and mud, though the poorer ones had walls of palings cut from the palm trunks. Dogs, cats, pigs, fowls, and ducks were all free to live together around the house, venturing inside if given the opportunity. The older folk were mostly able to understand Spanish but generally spoke their tribal language.

The most outstanding feature of the main plaza was the whitewashed, tiled-roof Catholic Church with its large bell and the priest's house nearby. Among the ‘gente’ (high-class), living around the plaza in their whitewashed adobe houses with tiled roofs, were people of various nationalities, some trying to hide from their past and others trading with the rubber-getters whom they kept in a continuous state of financial slavery. 

The foreigners were not alone in this practice. The rich Bolivian cattle owners also living on the plaza used a system of patron and serf, whereby goods and food were supplied to the rubber workers in advance, and of course they were never able to catch up and repay the debt—the bookkeeping was done by the patron! 

Justice and law were certainly lacking in this part of Bolivia, and every man carried his revolver to settle any differences. In the two months prior to our arrival, there had been two murders in the town.

We spent the first few days in San Joaquin walking around the town and its outskirts, and the response to our presence there was decidedly cold. 

Quite soon after our arrival, one evening Jim played his accordion, and we had a short open-air meeting on the footpath just below our rooms as a way of letting people know why we had come to the town. At the conclusion we were officially "welcomed" with handfuls of gravel thrown at us!