First Week on the Field

¡Buenos Días!

I’ll give a quick recap of our travels and then go into the details of this past week. We left Lima for southern Lucanas on Sunday at 4 a.m., which was a good decision because we avoided the insane driving of los limeños. About half of the trip was spent driving through the desert, but once we hit the Andes, it was gorgeous. The desert had its own beauty, but the Andes were just breathtaking. Pretty much every day I look at the mountains that surround me and have to remind myself that this is real. Knowing that I worship the God who formed these majestic mountains gives me confidence, and I am constantly standing in awe of our awesome Creator. Anyways….back to the viaje. We drove, and drove, and drove, and drove, and much of our driving was on crazy narrow roads around the mountains (sorry, Mom….you would have enjoyed it, Dad). I would have been a little frightened but for the absolute beauty of the views. By the grace of God we made it 25 miles with the gas light on in the van (and this is going up and down steep mountain passages) until we finally made it to a town where there was a gas pump. We were so thankful because that indeed was a miracle. After we filled up, though, we began driving on even crazier roads, and unfortunately that’s when the motion sickness began. Most of us just felt dizzy and a little nauseous from the altitude, but one of our group members from the church got really sick. It had just gotten dark and we were just outside of Andamarca, which is a village that the church has adopted, when we saw two small children walking on the side of the road, so we decided to pick them up and take them to Andamarca. They were so cute and taught us some Quechua, which was awesome because I’m a language geek . We decided to stay the night in Andamarca because most of us weren’t feeling too hot, so we got rooms at this rather nice hostel (we had our own bathrooms in our rooms and sort of hot water!). The next day we planned on leaving to go to Cabana, but God had other plans….

That morning while some of the group were standing out in front of the hostel, a man walked up and introduced himself, in English by the way, that his name was Andrew and that we was a Christian. How amazing is that?! Then, he proceeded to say that he was the English teacher at the secondary school and that he wanted us to come in like 30 minutes and share the Gospel with his class. So, of course, we went. He introduced us to the principal and the other teachers, and then we went outside to the playground, where ALL the students from the entire school were lined up in their classes just waiting for us to speak. Shane volunteered to tell the Creation to Christ story, and he did an awesome job! We were all just so amazed at how quickly God was working. We were going to leave that afternoon, but then David got sick and so we didn’t leave until Tuesday morning, which is when I got sick. But it didn’t last long, and we only had to travel about 30 minutes to Cabana. When we got there we went to the hostel that the church team had stayed in during their previous visits, and we all got settled into our rooms, or rather for the 4 of us summer missionaries, our homes for the next 2 months. Kelly and I got such a sweet setup! We have the only room with its own bathroom AND shower….but the best part is that there’s a toilet seat!!!!!! We could be sleeping on cardboard, and I would be content because we have a toilet seat. This is a big deal because most of the toilets that I’ve seen for some reason do not have toilet seats, so my thighs have been pretty sore lately. Anyways…

We ate lunch at a restaurant just down the street from our hostel, and we’ve been eating there every day for lunch and dinner because the food is so good and none of us has gotten sick from it (except Abel, our translator, who ate the cheese after we warned him not to). That night we split up into two groups and prayer walked throughout the town. As my group was walking by and praying for the school, we saw a man standing outside of it who Kevin recognized as the principal. He invited us into his office, and we asked him if we could possibly come and teach Bible studies and English classes to his students. We’re going back next week to see what he and his teachers decided, so hopefully that will be an open door for us. That’s all I have time for right now, but I’ll come back soon and finish the rest of the week’s update.