I’ve started a series to highlight the different cities around Lanús, where we are starting Faith Baptist Church. We have posts on Lanús and Avellaneda. This post is dedicated to Gerli. Gerli is pronounced as “hair-lee”. Gerli is settled in between Lanús and Avellaneda and is smaller in comparison to the two neighboring cities. The town is home to some 64,000 people (according to a 2001 census, the latest census I could find). It straddles the Avellaneda/Lanús county (or partido) line with almost half of it’s inhabitants in each of the two counties. The outskirts of Gerli are just 4 kilometers from the building where Faith Baptist Church in Lanús will be started. The small city has over 30 neighborhoods. Like Lanús, Gerli is divided by two things, the large avenue Yrigoyen and the train tracks.

While there is not much to say about this town, for how small it is, it is full of people! It is also centrally located, and has people commuting through daily to and from Buenos Aires, whether by train, bus, or car. This is the story for many of the cities around Buenos Aires. They are all full of people and have even more people passing through each day.

Of the surrounding cities around Lanús, Gerli is certainly of the smallest of them. It’s proximity to where we will start Faith Baptist Church in just a few weeks makes it more interesting. Even so, the city is in need of at least two Baptist churches, one on the east side and one on the west side. This would make reaching Gerli much more realistic. Yet another reminder that the need is far greater than we sometimes even realize! Pray for laborers.

In the next posts, we will look at Banfield, Lomas de Zamora, and Temperley as well as a special post about some of the surrounding neighborhoods and villas (pronounced, “veeshas”) of Lanús.