Picture from Peru

Urubamba is in the Andes mountains.  Even though it's the rainy season and much of the days have been cloudy and rainy, it really is a spectacular view.  The Lord's creation is so great!

We are staying at the present seminary campus for which we are designing a new, expanded campus.  There are several pastoral students and families that live on campus.  These little girls live on campus.  

This is the outside pila where most of the dishes are washed.  The two cooks have had to be told several times about our "weak" American stomachs.....that they can't just rinse stuff off and reuse them because we'll get the parasites in the water.  

This is the Catholic church on the little park in the center of town.  It's currently under renovation and is not having mass services.

Yesterday was the birthday of one of the team members.  In Peru (and in Costa Rica), they have a tradition of the birthday boy taking the first bite out of the cake with your mouth.  Normally, they push your head down into the cake at this point, but they refrained.

Please continue to pray for our work here in Peru.  The final presentation of the design is Friday evening.  Also, please be praying because there have been alot of rain here, and landslides are becoming a problem.  People have lost some of their corn crop already, which is their livelihood.  

First Impressions

      First Impressions can sometimes have a great impact, and it has been no different here.  There have been so many new sights and sounds since landing here in Peru.  This is my attempt to share some of those.  Just as they are somewhat unprocessed in my mind right now, this is how I will share it...a string of thoughts and observations so that you can get an idea of what we are encountering. 

       I find that I try to categorize new things that I’ve experienced into something I’ve seen or experience before.  This place has been an exception.  It’s truly like nothing I’ve seen before both culturally and topographically.  Urubamba is set in the middle of this valley which large green mountains springing up on all sides.  Today the sun is shining a little bit and to see the light shining on the mountains is brilliant and beautiful.  Praise the Lord for his amazing creation!

      The people here are very indigenous-looking.  This means their skin, hair and eyes are dark.  They tend to be shorter, and you can tell that they’ve lived a life of labor and physical work.  I’ve seen pictures of indigenous women from Peru, but it’s so amazing to see it with my own eyes.  Our camera went dead at Christmas so we are relying on other people to take pictures, so I will post some as soon as I receive them.  But, walking around town this morning, so many women had top hats or cowboy-looking hats, all ragged and worn.  We’ve been told they usually tell either what their position in society is or what they are selling.  They wear thick sweaters with knee-length non-matching skirts with little fringe underneath.  They seem very no-nonsense so I’m not sure where the detailing on the petticoat comes in, but it does bring femininity and beauty.  They wear sweater leg warmers with stirrups on them, socks that again don’t match with thick brown or black shoes.   They are normally carrying large loads on their backs with colorful hand-made cloth.   Sometimes it is their goods to sell, sometimes it’s their children.  So, you see them walking around town hunched over, carrying their heavy loads on their way to wherever their daily life happens. 

     The majority of the construction is adobe.  I’ve never seen adobe up close.  It is literally whole buildings made of bricks that are made out of dirt.  It’s amazing that it actually stands, but it does.  The room in which Josh and I are sleeping is actually even on the second floor of an adobe building.  They put stucco on the outside so it doesn’t look like dirt but almost every wall is 1.5 feet wide and you know it is adobe construction.  It seems like a hodgepodge of  paint color, colored tin roofs, hundred-year old doors of buildings that are all different colors, worn and used. 

     Peru is known for it’s hand-made alpaca wool items.  Each night we are sleeping in 40-degree weather without heat, and the 2 alpaca blankets on our bed keep us incredibly toasty.  It’s amazing how soft and warm it is.  Alpaca is a South American animal that looks kinda like a llama.  I am excited to see the market where they are selling these hand-made goods. 

     Yesterday, we attended the church for which the group will be designing a new building.  There is both a Quechua service and a Spanish service.  Almost 100 people squeeze into a little building where there is only one hymnal for each pew to share.  You’re so much closer to your neighbor that you fully know whether he has taken a shower that day or not.  To hear all the Lord is doing in that church was so exciting and I bring glory to Him for his work there.  The young man leading the music just two years ago was a drunk and came to know the Lord through the ministry of this church.  The people seemed to be pursuing the Lord and, in all of Peru, the national church seems to be taking the reigns of evangelism and spreading the Gospel.  This means that Peruvians are spreading the Gospel in place of outside missionaries coming in and the ministry being dependent on them.  

Travel

To start, we left Costa Rica on Friday afternoon for Lima.  Josh, myself, Micah (another EMI staff member), his wife Beth and two interns, Jeff and Tripp landed in Lima without problem around 8:30 Friday evening.  Our plan was to stay at the airport until the last plane landed at 11:55 and head to a hotel for the night.  Well, just as things don’t turn out the way you planned, the last 3 flights of volunteers were delayed.  The last volunteer was rescheduled to arrive at 3 AM.  Yes, 3 AM.  I was surprised to see that at midnight, the airport was still busy and going strong.  Every airport I’ve ever been in is a ghost town by midnight.  So, to see every restaurant open and hoards of families waiting for their loved ones to arrive at 2 AM and later was interesting.  So, Josh, our fearless leader, took the team of 16 people to the hotel by 2 AM, laid down for 20 minutes and then headed back to the airport for the 3AM flight.  His head finally hit the pillow at 4:30. 6:30 AM came really early that morning, especially for Josh.  We took the hour-long flight from Lima to Cuzco, Peru that morning, then drove 1.5 hours to Urubamba, Peru.  Needless to say, our entire group was pretty tired.  Most of the group used the rest of the day to recover and to adjust to the altitude difference.  Cuzco is about 11,000 feet above sea level and Urubamba is just over 9,000 feet so altitude sickness can definitely be a problem.  Josh, Micah and the architects spent the rest of the day riding around Cuzco looking at current construction and landscaping practices.  So, by the time Josh got to bed that night, he had slept about 2 hours in 48 hours and was exhausted.  I think by this morning, Monday, he finally feels fully recovered.  It was encouraging to hear from the ministry that we are working with, SEBIC seminary and Nueva Vida Iglesia Bautista.  They are so excited that we are here and are excited about what the Lord is going to do through the new seminary campus and church the group is designing.  Their words were inspiring and a good start to the week of hard and long hours of work.

February 2011

The past two weeks have just been a whirlwind of activity.  So much has been accomplished, and it has been really cool to see the Lord work.  The first week of February was our office's Staff Week where we spent time analyzing and discussing almost every aspect of our office, talking about things the Lord has done and ways we can change our policies and activities to better serve our partner ministries.  Then last week was Member Care week.  Our office has brought on board a Christians counselor/psychologist from Florida to assist us in member care which has many different facets.  She is coming alongside us and doing things to help the team members in our office stay healthy emotionally, mentally and physically.  It was a really great week where the Lord really moved.  I know personally He revealed some things to me about how I view myself and operate that need to be changed if I am going to be healthy in the long-term on the field...or even in life in general, not just on the field.  I will say it was probably one of the most fatiguing two weeks I've had in a while, but I praise the Lord and give him the glory for all that has been accomplished both office-wide and in the heart of each individual on our team.  Doors have been opened for a deeper sense of community amongst our team which I do feel like is a crucial part of life here as well.

After the past two weeks, we finally have a chance to focus on preparation for the trip to Peru.  Josh has been working for months on recruiting and planning for this project.  I am so excited to what the Lord is going to do, and I am praying fervently for the hearts of the people that will come to know the Lord through the work of the ministry.  The team will be designing and master planning a seminary campus and Peruvian church.  The seminary will teach Quechua pastors to preach the gospel to the Quechua people.  Please keep us in your prayers over the next few weeks as we travel to Peru. We leave this Friday, February 18 and return on Sunday, February 27.  Things you can be praying for specifically are:

-the hearts of the volunteers, that they will be open to whatever the Lord wants to teach and show them

-health and energy as the days of work and design are usually very long ones

-wisdom for one of the other EMI staff member's wife and little baby who have been planning to go.  The baby has had very mild congestion and they are deciding if it would be best to bring him to the cold weather we will be experiencing.  The doctor has said he thought it would be okay, but they are looking to the Lord for wisdom in what to do

-the harvest of souls that will come to know the Lord through the work of this ministry

Thank you so much for supporting us in prayer. I look forward to sharing what God does on the trip with you in the future.  When we return to Costa Rica from Peru, we will have one day to wash our clothes and pack for a trip to Georgia.  Our home church in Georgia, Johnson Ferry in Atlanta, is having a Global Missions Conference and are funding our return for us to be a part of.  We are so excited to share all that the Lord is doing through EMI.  There will be several open activities at the church, and we would love to talk with anyone who is interested in connecting with us during our time back.  Those dates are March 2-6. We look forward to seeing you while we are back!

Academia Estruria

So, Josh surprised me by taking me to a night at an Italian cooking school for Valentine's day.  I wish we had gotten a picture of us, because we were a pair!  He was told we needed to have aprons, hair covers and closed-toed shoes.  So, the only things we could find were short little aprons worn by cleaning people here where it covers the front and the back down to your waist and has little ties on the sides.  And I was definitely sporting a hair net.  We walk in and the other two people in the class look like professional chefs with nice cooking aprons and chef's hats.  Besides feeling a bit out of place in the way we looked, it was an absolutely amazing night.  The instructor was an Italian man from Florence who looked exactly like the old chef on the movie Ratatouille.  He also had this sidekick who just fluttered around the room teaching us all kinds of cool things about Italian cooking and throwing out Italian words as if he was straight off the boat from Italy.  Come to find out, he is actually Costa Rican.  The whole class together made 3 different things, and I can't remember a single name because they were in Italian.  The first was a meat dish which in Spanish was called Roll of Meat.  It was layered pork, then ham, then beef then bacon with a mushroom tomato sauce thrown in the middle somewhere, rolled and baked.  The second was a delicious vegetarian tomato sauce with pasta.  It was the first fresh sauce I have ever made which was exciting.  The third was fried cheese balls which were AMAZING!!!  The best part was at the end of the night, everybody sat down to eat the food we'd prepared together.  We got to try proscuitto made right in his kitchen and everything.   It was really such a great experience, and Josh and I had so much fun together!  It was a great way to spend Valentine's Day.  And the best part was, he let us join his class for the night without charge!

Battle for Haiti

I was forwarded this link video from a friend:

Here we are

Okay, can I please just say I struggle with the title situation.  It seems very hard just to tell what's been going on in life and have to give a TITLE to it.  Just a sidebar:)  So, we have for a while now been back into full swing at the office and in life here in Atenas after our short time in Georgia at Christmas.  It's definitely dry season which means a couple of things.  It means the clothes on the line dry in less than 2 hours which has made laundry oh so much more manageable.  It means that you can actually PLAN to do things in the afternoon.  It means the children at the orphanage can play outside in the afternoon instead of being cooped up in the house because of the rain.  It means that I actually have to WATER my growing little hibiscus plants which I haven't seemed to kill yet.  It means the air is dryer, the wind is much stronger and dust abounds...i.e. having to sweep my house every single day is a very real possibility.  Josh has been working for over 4 months recruiting and planning for his upcoming project trip to Urubamba, Peru.  I am so very excited that I have the opportunity to go with him on this trip.  It is a blessing to work for an organization who sees the importance in the non-engineer spouse feeling a part of EMI, our mission and work.  The group will be designing a seminary campus and a local church who have the purpose of training quechua pastors to spread the gospel among the quechua people.  Quechua is the name of a people group living in the central Andes mountains in South America as well as the name of the languages they speak.  Please be praying for our hearts as Josh prepares to help lead this group of architects and engineers, for God to do a mighty work in the volunteers that are going and for the fruit and harvest that will come through the gospel and truth spread by this ministry.

We continue to adapt and integrate into the culture and community.  Admittedly, it has been and will continue to be a much longer process than I thought.  I thought we'd come to Costa Rica and immediately fit right in and have ticos as best friends.  The Lord had other plans.  It's a day-by-day process..."poco a poco" is a phrase I have come to know well.  It has been incredible to see, however, tremendous growth in this area over the past 5 months.  We have been accepted as family by a church here.  Our pastor's wife even shared with the entire church what I had shared with her about the people in that church being our "family" here in Costa Rica.  She encouraged the people of the church to get to know us, invite us over to their house, etc.  We have found a place that we feel at home with and where we can grow spiritually with strong biblical teaching.  When we left Costa Rica, I had in my mind that we had one "home church", and that would be our main church support.  What I have found here is that, although it doesn't in any way take the place of our "home church" in the States who we believe is so important and incredibly supportive of our ministry, Iglesia Valle de Beraca here in Costa Rica has become a body of believers that wants to come alongside us in prayer and is truly interested in our life and ministry.  A big step for me was going to my pastor's house and having "cafesito" with his wife and children.  Number one, I don't drink coffee so my "cafesito" (which is a coffee break that is taken pretty much every afternoon around 3 by Ticos) was really warm milk with a little coffee and lots of sugar.  Number two, and more importantly, it felt normal.  It felt like friends just getting together to chat.  She and her son took me to see some land their family purchased where there are lots for the parents and both children to build a house.  It was an incredibly rich time of building relationships of which I look forward to doing much more.