This past week, here in our city, was the celebration for the Virgin of Urkupiña This is one of the largest Catholic festivals in our country with several hundred thousand people coming from many countries here in South America and around the world. If your not familiar with this kind of celebration, basically there are Virgin’s or small doll like statues representing the Virgin Mary that are worshiped in almost every city with many times more than one per city. This is started when someone supposedly sees a vision of the Virgin Mary where she gives them special instruction and from that they make the statue and the Virgin Mary answers their prayers when they go to her. Here the most popular Virgin is called the Virgin of Urkupiña. It is in an area on the outskirts of our town called Quillacollo. As you might remember from our video last year there are thousands of people the night before everything starts that walk from the center of the city to where the Virgin is almost 15 km or 9 miles away. Last year we prepared a large pot of coffee and hot chocolate to give out along with tracts to those who were passing by. It took only 15 min for everything to be gone. This year we wanted to do even more hot chocolate, coffee and tracts. The people of the church prepared two very large pots of each and we had extra tracts printed for the activity. This time the beverages lasted about 20 min and we passed out close 6000 tracts in 30 to 45 min. The best part was to see many or most of the people reading the tract as they walked by heading to look for a spiritual experience in this festival. Our prayer is that the seed of the word that was planted will one day soon bring forth fruit.
