Arequipa is known as a very "seismically-active" zone, and last night we received our official welcome into that zone.
It was an earthshudder. Not an earthquake, because it wasn't that serious. More like a hiccup. We were about to fall asleep when it hit, and our basic response was, "Hmm, that was interesting, okay, let's go to bed."
The radio reports that it was 3.9 on the Richter Scale.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
La venganza de la lechuga
In other words,"Revenge of the Lettuce."
Thank you for your patience as we took a short break to allow me to recover from some wicked food poisoning. A few days after arriving in Arequipa, I decided to make myself a nice, leafy salad. Turns out that was a bad idea, as the lettuce grown in Arequipa is especially prone to a particular kind of parasite. Nearly every Arequipan that I have talked to - who knew that I was sick - has been like, "Oh yeah, we don´t eat the lettuce here..." Lesson learned.
Down with health-consciousness! More empanadas, please.
In the meantime, we have settled nicely into our work here. Here´s what our days look like:
7 AM - Wake-up, try not to feel hatred towards insane rooster or barking dogs
8 AM - Danny leaves house for Spanish lessons
8 AM - 12 PM Danny studies Spanish; Anne cleans the house, cooks and reads about missions
1 PM Eat really big lunch (as in Spain, lunch is the primary meal of the day here)
Afternoon Work on church projects
7 - 9 PM Attend ministries of the church (young adults group, a discipleship class, etc.)
On Sunday afternoons, we will be spending our time in Ciudad de Dios, where the church is working on a church plant. We went to Ciudad de Dios for the first time last week and really loved it. Here is a little bit of background on the place itself: Ciudad de Dios is an underdeveloped "suburb" of Arequipa. Many of the city´s manual laborers and domestic workers live there, and although large in size, Ciudad de Dios is comprised mostly of small, one-room houses made out of sillar (a type of volcanic rock). There is no running water in most (if not all) of the houses, and electricity is also seemingly a luxury. There are a few little stores throughout the development - including small restaurants and convenience stores - but not much else.
The church has been working in Ciudad de Dios for years, and has had particular success with its children´s club, which brings about 40 children each week to a small gathering place that the church has built (which is actually attached to the home of the woman who first encouraged the church to come to Ciudad de Dios). It has also expanded to include an adult class and a group for teenagers. Each week, a team of five from the church goes to Ciudad de Dios to run these programs. Our job last week was to help with this children´s club.
As soon as our car drove up to the children´s club site, about 7 children came running out of the room to bang on the windows of the car and greet us. Three stray dogs soon followed (more on that later). I was encouraged by how excited the children were to see the team arrive. We played with them for a little while and then started the day´s activity, which included singing some worship songs with them, helping them memorize a verse from the Bible (1 Samuel 16:7) and telling them the story of David´s election as the king of Israel. We ended the day with a coloring activity. By the way, there is nothing like watching a group of 4-year-olds memorize a Bible verse (in 5 minutes) to convict you that you need to do better at memorizing Scripture.
Cute anecdote about the children - i.e. "kids say the darnest things no matter what country you´re in" : As we were getting ready to start the lesson, a little girl in a red Polartec hat (it´s winter here) ran into the classroom. She was about three years old, possibly a bit younger. So I said hi to her and asked her how she was and she looks up at me with her gigantic eyes and her cute little hat and says, grinning, "I´m fine. My mom just gave me a shot!"
Not-so-cute anecdote about dogs: Although our offical job was to help with the children, my unofficial role at Ciudad de Dios became that of the Dog Whisperer. There are a lot of stray dogs in Peru and especially in Ciudad de Dios. They are surprisingly obedient (even the real street dogs who have no owners), but on Sunday, one dog took it upon himself to interrupt our meeting and incite the other neighborhood dogs (who were perched on surrounding rooftops) to go absolutely crazy. We finally got him out of the children´s club, but he kept trying to open the door and sneak back in. So I summonned all of my dog whispering knowledge and was able to put an end to his mischief with a series of calm, assertive looks and "Shhhts."
This weekend, we´ll be at a marriage retreat, but after that, we´ll be going to Ciudad de Dios on a weekly basis to support the church´s teams there. We are especially looking forward to our work in that community.
Thank you to everyone who has sent us e-mails and even video messages while we´ve been here in Peru! We are so grateful for your friendship and your prayers. Please join with us in praising the Lord for giving us such an amazing opportunity to serve the church in Peru - we have been so blessed here by our new experiences and continue each day in thankfulness for how God is growing us in our faith and especially in our love for missionaries and other evangelists.
Thank you for your patience as we took a short break to allow me to recover from some wicked food poisoning. A few days after arriving in Arequipa, I decided to make myself a nice, leafy salad. Turns out that was a bad idea, as the lettuce grown in Arequipa is especially prone to a particular kind of parasite. Nearly every Arequipan that I have talked to - who knew that I was sick - has been like, "Oh yeah, we don´t eat the lettuce here..." Lesson learned.
Down with health-consciousness! More empanadas, please.
In the meantime, we have settled nicely into our work here. Here´s what our days look like:
7 AM - Wake-up, try not to feel hatred towards insane rooster or barking dogs
8 AM - Danny leaves house for Spanish lessons
8 AM - 12 PM Danny studies Spanish; Anne cleans the house, cooks and reads about missions
1 PM Eat really big lunch (as in Spain, lunch is the primary meal of the day here)
Afternoon Work on church projects
7 - 9 PM Attend ministries of the church (young adults group, a discipleship class, etc.)
On Sunday afternoons, we will be spending our time in Ciudad de Dios, where the church is working on a church plant. We went to Ciudad de Dios for the first time last week and really loved it. Here is a little bit of background on the place itself: Ciudad de Dios is an underdeveloped "suburb" of Arequipa. Many of the city´s manual laborers and domestic workers live there, and although large in size, Ciudad de Dios is comprised mostly of small, one-room houses made out of sillar (a type of volcanic rock). There is no running water in most (if not all) of the houses, and electricity is also seemingly a luxury. There are a few little stores throughout the development - including small restaurants and convenience stores - but not much else.
The church has been working in Ciudad de Dios for years, and has had particular success with its children´s club, which brings about 40 children each week to a small gathering place that the church has built (which is actually attached to the home of the woman who first encouraged the church to come to Ciudad de Dios). It has also expanded to include an adult class and a group for teenagers. Each week, a team of five from the church goes to Ciudad de Dios to run these programs. Our job last week was to help with this children´s club.
As soon as our car drove up to the children´s club site, about 7 children came running out of the room to bang on the windows of the car and greet us. Three stray dogs soon followed (more on that later). I was encouraged by how excited the children were to see the team arrive. We played with them for a little while and then started the day´s activity, which included singing some worship songs with them, helping them memorize a verse from the Bible (1 Samuel 16:7) and telling them the story of David´s election as the king of Israel. We ended the day with a coloring activity. By the way, there is nothing like watching a group of 4-year-olds memorize a Bible verse (in 5 minutes) to convict you that you need to do better at memorizing Scripture.
Cute anecdote about the children - i.e. "kids say the darnest things no matter what country you´re in" : As we were getting ready to start the lesson, a little girl in a red Polartec hat (it´s winter here) ran into the classroom. She was about three years old, possibly a bit younger. So I said hi to her and asked her how she was and she looks up at me with her gigantic eyes and her cute little hat and says, grinning, "I´m fine. My mom just gave me a shot!"
Not-so-cute anecdote about dogs: Although our offical job was to help with the children, my unofficial role at Ciudad de Dios became that of the Dog Whisperer. There are a lot of stray dogs in Peru and especially in Ciudad de Dios. They are surprisingly obedient (even the real street dogs who have no owners), but on Sunday, one dog took it upon himself to interrupt our meeting and incite the other neighborhood dogs (who were perched on surrounding rooftops) to go absolutely crazy. We finally got him out of the children´s club, but he kept trying to open the door and sneak back in. So I summonned all of my dog whispering knowledge and was able to put an end to his mischief with a series of calm, assertive looks and "Shhhts."
This weekend, we´ll be at a marriage retreat, but after that, we´ll be going to Ciudad de Dios on a weekly basis to support the church´s teams there. We are especially looking forward to our work in that community.
Thank you to everyone who has sent us e-mails and even video messages while we´ve been here in Peru! We are so grateful for your friendship and your prayers. Please join with us in praising the Lord for giving us such an amazing opportunity to serve the church in Peru - we have been so blessed here by our new experiences and continue each day in thankfulness for how God is growing us in our faith and especially in our love for missionaries and other evangelists.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Interruption
Regularly scheduled blogging will re-commence after I am done battling a nasty case of food poisoning. I am on the mend and looking forward to the positive side of intestinal illness - counting how many pounds I've lost over the past four days!
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Mi casa es su casa.
Welcome to our Arequipan home!
We have been truly blessed to have found a "piso" - an apartment - that is very nice and in a safe part of town. We live in the district of Arequipa called "Centrado," which means center. We are very close to all of the tourist attractions, such as the Cathedral and the Monastery of Santa Catalina, but not TOO close that we actually run into tourists or have to deal with the hawkers who abound in that zone.
We are living in an apartment building that also houses two other members of the church, Favian and Patricia. Favian is Arequipan, but Patricia, his wife, is Brazillian. Together, they run a Portuguese language school called "Casa Do Brasil," which is right down the street from our house. They came over to welcome us on our first night in Arequipa and were very friendly and helpful. Our landlords are an older married couple who have retired from their original careers (as a teacher and an engineer) and are taking on apartment management as a sort of "encore career."
Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of what our place looks like.
The living room:
And the kitchen:
This is the view from our laundry porch (see below for more information):
We also have three bedrooms - way more than we know what to do with. For now, one is our sleeping room and another is our dressing room. The third, we just closed off because it's not needed.
The biggest challenge of living here (which is not so bad) will be that, like many other Arequipenos, we do not have a washing machine - and of course, a dryer would be unheard of. So this weekend, we are going to roll up our sleeves and do our first load of laundry by hand. Once its clean, we will hang it out to dry on the roof of our building, just like everyone else does. I think that I will feel very accomplished once that first load is done, although I admit that I am not 100% comfortable drying my underwear for the world to see.
The more humorous part of our living arrangement is that there is a veritable menagerie of animals living around us. And we know that only because of the unending noises that they make. At last count, there were:
1.) A hyperactive rooster who starts going at 4:30 AM (which is when the sun rises here because we are so close to the equator) and doesn't stop cock-a-doodle-dooing until, oh, 6 PM.
2.) Two small but loud dogs whose barks are set off by the rooster. I was able to snap a picture of these scoundrels yesterday morning - it was the only way I could think of to get revenge on them.
3.) One cat who generally starts meowing at 2-minute intervals at about 10 PM each night. Thankfully, we can sleep through the meowing.
We also ran into a number of extremely stinky cows on the street today (being herded by their owners through car traffic), but that wasn't so much in our neighborhood. Let me just note that the smell of those cows made me REALLY grateful that I'm living next door to the rooster and not the cows.
So that's our casa in Arequipa! We're grateful to have such a nice place to call home.
We have been truly blessed to have found a "piso" - an apartment - that is very nice and in a safe part of town. We live in the district of Arequipa called "Centrado," which means center. We are very close to all of the tourist attractions, such as the Cathedral and the Monastery of Santa Catalina, but not TOO close that we actually run into tourists or have to deal with the hawkers who abound in that zone.
We are living in an apartment building that also houses two other members of the church, Favian and Patricia. Favian is Arequipan, but Patricia, his wife, is Brazillian. Together, they run a Portuguese language school called "Casa Do Brasil," which is right down the street from our house. They came over to welcome us on our first night in Arequipa and were very friendly and helpful. Our landlords are an older married couple who have retired from their original careers (as a teacher and an engineer) and are taking on apartment management as a sort of "encore career."
Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of what our place looks like.
The living room:
And the kitchen:
This is the view from our laundry porch (see below for more information):
We also have three bedrooms - way more than we know what to do with. For now, one is our sleeping room and another is our dressing room. The third, we just closed off because it's not needed.
The biggest challenge of living here (which is not so bad) will be that, like many other Arequipenos, we do not have a washing machine - and of course, a dryer would be unheard of. So this weekend, we are going to roll up our sleeves and do our first load of laundry by hand. Once its clean, we will hang it out to dry on the roof of our building, just like everyone else does. I think that I will feel very accomplished once that first load is done, although I admit that I am not 100% comfortable drying my underwear for the world to see.
The more humorous part of our living arrangement is that there is a veritable menagerie of animals living around us. And we know that only because of the unending noises that they make. At last count, there were:
1.) A hyperactive rooster who starts going at 4:30 AM (which is when the sun rises here because we are so close to the equator) and doesn't stop cock-a-doodle-dooing until, oh, 6 PM.
2.) Two small but loud dogs whose barks are set off by the rooster. I was able to snap a picture of these scoundrels yesterday morning - it was the only way I could think of to get revenge on them.
3.) One cat who generally starts meowing at 2-minute intervals at about 10 PM each night. Thankfully, we can sleep through the meowing.
We also ran into a number of extremely stinky cows on the street today (being herded by their owners through car traffic), but that wasn't so much in our neighborhood. Let me just note that the smell of those cows made me REALLY grateful that I'm living next door to the rooster and not the cows.
So that's our casa in Arequipa! We're grateful to have such a nice place to call home.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Day One: Arequipa, Prepare Yourselves.
Here is a picture of what Danny and I looked like when we arrived in Arequipa this morning after an 16-hour bus ride through the Andes:
Haha! That's not actually us. What you are looking at is two Peruvian dogs, who are revered for their high body temperatures and used therapeutically to treat arthritis and other joint problems. People who have those kinds of health issues will sleep with the dogs either in the bed and/or hugged close to their chests - to let their body heat penetrate and heal their joints.
But they sure aren't lookers.
Here are some better-looking people:
That's us in Lima yesterday at Huaca Pucllacna, a pre-Incan site that was basically the "town center" of the Lima people. You can see a lot of the skyline of the city behind us.
We arrived in Lima Sunday morning at 2 AM, but got ourselves out of bed at 7:30 to go see the city. Huaca Pucllacna was where we spent the majority of our day, but we also went to el Parque Kennedy, the central park in Miraflores, the neighborhood where we were staying.
Our favorite part of the Parque Kennedy was these signs:
I tried to find an angle that would allow me to take a picture of that sign while ALSO showing you the dozens of stray cats that were running around, but to no avail. Danny wanted to pet the cats, but I implored him not to contract rabies on our first day in Peru.
Lima was awesome, though, and I loved looking out from the window of our hostel and seeing the ocean (filled with surfers)! I am really looking forward to spending more time there before we come back to the States.
Then, at 5:30 last night, we hopped on our "bus-cama" - the bed bus - which would take us to Arequipa. The bus-cama was excellent. The seats were leather, extremely large, and reclined a full 180 degrees. That's not to say that we had the BEST sleep last night, but it wasn't bad.
I had hoped that riding the bus-cama would allow us to see more of the landscape, but unfortunately, those dreams were crushed quickly, since driving along the Pan-American highway is the equivalent of looking at a dirt wall for 16 hours. That was basically the view from my window - so lesson learned.
So now we are settled in in our beautiful three-bedroom apartment, which is much nicer than our place in DC or Charlottesville. Pictures to come soon. Craig and Sue, the TEAM missionaries who have been here the longest and have been our primary contacts, were incredibly hospitable and helpful in getting us settled today. They had us over for lunch, took us on a mini tour of the city and took us grocery shopping - all very necessary.
Tomorrow we go to our first meeting at the church and meet the rest of the team. Please be praying for us and the rest of the church team as we learn how we can serve them during our time here!
Love from Arequipa,
Anne
Haha! That's not actually us. What you are looking at is two Peruvian dogs, who are revered for their high body temperatures and used therapeutically to treat arthritis and other joint problems. People who have those kinds of health issues will sleep with the dogs either in the bed and/or hugged close to their chests - to let their body heat penetrate and heal their joints.But they sure aren't lookers.
Here are some better-looking people:
That's us in Lima yesterday at Huaca Pucllacna, a pre-Incan site that was basically the "town center" of the Lima people. You can see a lot of the skyline of the city behind us.
We arrived in Lima Sunday morning at 2 AM, but got ourselves out of bed at 7:30 to go see the city. Huaca Pucllacna was where we spent the majority of our day, but we also went to el Parque Kennedy, the central park in Miraflores, the neighborhood where we were staying.
Our favorite part of the Parque Kennedy was these signs:
I tried to find an angle that would allow me to take a picture of that sign while ALSO showing you the dozens of stray cats that were running around, but to no avail. Danny wanted to pet the cats, but I implored him not to contract rabies on our first day in Peru.
Lima was awesome, though, and I loved looking out from the window of our hostel and seeing the ocean (filled with surfers)! I am really looking forward to spending more time there before we come back to the States.
Then, at 5:30 last night, we hopped on our "bus-cama" - the bed bus - which would take us to Arequipa. The bus-cama was excellent. The seats were leather, extremely large, and reclined a full 180 degrees. That's not to say that we had the BEST sleep last night, but it wasn't bad.
I had hoped that riding the bus-cama would allow us to see more of the landscape, but unfortunately, those dreams were crushed quickly, since driving along the Pan-American highway is the equivalent of looking at a dirt wall for 16 hours. That was basically the view from my window - so lesson learned.
So now we are settled in in our beautiful three-bedroom apartment, which is much nicer than our place in DC or Charlottesville. Pictures to come soon. Craig and Sue, the TEAM missionaries who have been here the longest and have been our primary contacts, were incredibly hospitable and helpful in getting us settled today. They had us over for lunch, took us on a mini tour of the city and took us grocery shopping - all very necessary.
Tomorrow we go to our first meeting at the church and meet the rest of the team. Please be praying for us and the rest of the church team as we learn how we can serve them during our time here!
Love from Arequipa,
Anne
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