Bless My Bloomer's: Highest City in the World? Nov 2012

HIGHEST CITY IN THE WORLD?

In four days we traveled over 26-hours, held five Family History meetings of about two hours plus each and almost froze to death.

I have described the mountain driving in other sections of this Blog and it has not changed. Mountain roads in Peru are all the same, narrow, dangerous and packed with slow moving truck traffic. Double Yellow Lines , mean nothing unless the police see you. Tuesday's front page story carried the weekend death of four people on the road we had traveled over only hours before. Twenty-two others died from a similar bus accident.

After 12 hours of driving, Corro de Pasco a mining city of 70,000 high in the Central Andes of Peru, was the location of our first meeting. According to the church members it is the highest city in the world. According to Google Corro de Pasco at 14,370 feet ranks 16th. That is behind cities in China, India, Chile, and Bolivia. However, Peru does boast the highest city in the world at 16,727 feet; it is La Rimconada with 30,000 people. Going from sea level to over 14,000 feet is not something you want to do very day. Some of us were sick.

Corro de Pasco has two meeting houses, however when we arrived the heat had not been turned on and the water was turned off. I think the temperature was about 45 degrees inside the chapel and it never got above 50 degrees. There was only a small group waiting when we arrived, but their enthusiasm was wonderful, and they were attentive the entire three hours. The internet has been the main problem. We never know what will work, or if a building will have a net connection, or how large the band width will be. But, the meeting went well.

After an additional three hour drive back back down the mountain, we held a meeting in Huanuco at a more reasonable altitude of 6,200 feet. Huanuco has a population of about 170,000, with a beautiful activity town square. Parades, fountains, and lots of trees are flanked on every side by old colonial style buildings. Our Saturday night meeting was attended by about 200 very enthusiastic members. It is hard to describe the wonderful members.They have been impressive everywhere we go.

(Sunday morning, Nov 4th) We attended church and then conducted three more Family History meetings. During Sacrament meeting seven Young Women received awards for their work in Indexing and Family History.

Huanco is a beautiful town. Corro de Pasco is in the High Central Andes centered around an open pit mine this is somewhat smaller then Bingham Copper Mine. But in both locations the members are very very interested in family history work. We were amazed at the number of people attending Huanco's meetings.
Sunday afternoon after church we held a four hour block of instruction on Indexing and then Family History. We bring seven or eight computers with us and divide members into small groups. This meetings filled the Chapel with standing room only. There were about 200 members attending. About 6:30 we drove to another Stake and conducted a second meeting for three more hours. This meeting was attended by over 200 members and lots of youth. It was about 11:00 pm when we got back to the hotel. It was great to work with these members.