Colombia snippet: Louder than the War

It is a painfully beautiful evening here on the west coast of Florida.  This is why I love Sundays.  Everything stops.  It's so quiet.  Depending where you live.  Most places I've lived have quiet Sundays.  In Barranca, (place where I worked in Colombia) one of the hardest things for me to get used to, was the lack of quiet on Sundays.  Sunday mornings were the noisiest times of the week there if you were in the city.  Starting at 6am the evangelical church behind our back porch would start up with the electric guitars, the speakers the size of our dining room table and the drums pounding away.   Church services in Barranca were like rock concerts for God.  Maybe they had to be loud so the Divine, who was obviously very far away from this seemingly forgotten backwater of the world, would hear them.  Barrancabermeja is the closest thing I know to "hell on earth".  Scorching hot days.  The heat so palpable you could feel it pressing down on your skin.  I'd armor myself before going outside: sunglasses, hat, sunblock.  The glare was deafening.  And everyday a new murder or two or three with grisly photos in the local paper.  And then the terror that was harder to document because it was in people's hearts.  Barranca was a loud, hot, violent place.  Maybe they had to be loud to be heard over the fear, the anger, the violence of living in a war zone.  All I know is that if you were in any particular church in Barranca on a Sunday morning the sound was deafening and the music and the praying was louder than the war.