Chicken - Yeah, Dis How We Do

Faithful blog readers, today you have the privilege (the mouth-watering privilege) of seeing how we eat chicken Peruvian-BBQ style. It was delicious.

Monday and Tuesday of this week were feriados - holidays - so our young adults group planned an outing to a campground in Yura, a rural area about 40 minutes away from Arequipa. We left early on Tuesday morning and came back Tuesday night fully exhausted, but it was fun and a good time of fellowship for the group. Amongst the things we did were the following:

Danny climbed a mountain while Anne took pictures and read her book.


Anne tried really hard to convince Edgardo (Joel and his wife Jaky´s son) to take a smiling picture, but Edgardo was feeling sassy.

A lot of people went swimming in the thermal baths that they have at the campground, but after spending about 30 seconds in the suffocating, enclosed, sulfur-emanating pool room, Danny and I decided that we would pass.

Other than that, we´ve (I´ve) spent a lot of time this week getting ready for life back in the States. We found out earlier this week that Danny´s law school orientation has been pushed up to be Monday, August 16th instead of Thursday the 19th. Since we are moving to Charlottesville two days before that, I´ve been trying to organize as much as possible now.

Amongst the moving tasks, I have:

1.) Finally booked the UHaul to take our stuff to Cville.
2.) Created a month-long meal plan to get us through August.
3.) Wrote shopping lists to correspond to said meal plan.
4.) Finally figured out our health insurance situation.
5.) Re-wrote our monthly budget because of said health insurance (health care reform please kick in NOW).

I will also begin the following shortly:

1.) Investigating removable wall-paper (we´re not allowed to paint, but I don´t think I can stand an all-white place for too much longer).
2.) Exploring the city´s artisan markets to see what kind of decorations we can bring home (Life-sized stuffed alpaca? YES PLEASE).
3.) Hounding Bryn Mawr and American for our immunization records so that UVa can rest assured that we will not contract measles or polio.

More posts to come soon...

Picture Post

Danny is back in Ciudad de Dios today, but I am stuck at home, recuperating from our work day yesterday, where we spent about 6 hours in the (very strong) sun cleaning up the land that El Camino has bought to plant a church in Ciudad de Dios.

Yesterday confirmed that I am not cut out for manual labor (to my credit, I´m only on my fourth day of antibiotics). But Danny had a great time working with the other guys to clear massive stones out of the earth.

Most interestingly, since the land that the church bought used to be a slaughterhouse, as we were cleaning out the rocks, we would periodically find bones/packed manure/cow hair. Yum yum! I will be thinking about that next time we have hamburgers.

Here are some pictures from the great Father´s Day event that was hosted at Ciudad de Dios:


Judy and her dad - they were both very excited for this picture.


Ivana - my little helper, who accompanies me everywhere in Ciudad de Dios, always holding my hand, and likes to hog the prime spot of sitting on my lap.


Mr. Antonio - this gentleman came alone to our event and we adopted him as everyone´s grandfather. He took special care to have a very dignified picture taken of him, and I appreciate that.

Into the Woods...

As I write this, Danny is currently trekking through the ¨Forest of Rocks,¨ which is a large volcanic structure outside of Arequipa, located at about 13,000 feet. Right about now, he and the group from Wisconsin should be sitting down to have a sandwich lunch. I´m at home nursing a sinus infection, so oh well. Danny´s taking pictures of beautiful rock formations; I´m cuddling a Neti Pot.

It has been a blessing to get to know and work alongside this group. They have done really well this week, especially for all of the culture shock, travel exhaustion, etc. I have been very impressed at the maturity of the teenagers on the trip and how it seems like they are really using this experience to think critically about missions and what it means to leave your country (family, culture, favorite foods, etc.) to go spread the Gospel to another people group.

On Sunday, we all headed to Ciudad de Dios to present the dads with a special Father´s Day event. One difference between (certain) lower-class cultures in the U.S. and in Peru is the presence of dads. For example, amongst my 130 students in inner-city DC, only two actually had their dads at home with them. Here, about half of the poorest children live with their fathers and about 25% more at least know who their fathers are and see them periodically.

Only about four dads showed up for the event, but we also had a number of moms come as well, which was encouraging. We started with prayer and a welcome to the dads and then, the children performed a song that I had taught them last week. The (very simple) lyrics are: ¨Children, obey your parents as unto the Lord, because this is right.¨If I were a parent, I would like that song.

After that, a number of the students from Wisconsin performed a mime to music. The mime centered around the story of a girl who originally loved God, but who was distracted and pulled away from Him by other things (each of these played by one student)- i.e. a boyfriend, money, drunkenness, physical beauty. At the end, death comes to try to convince her that she should convince suicide -and she almost does - but God breaks through and saves her from her sin and self-destruction.

I wasn´t sure how many of the kids in attendance would get the symbolism of the mime, but when we asked them what it meant, they were like, 100 percent dead-on - including the 5-year-olds and younger children. We are hoping that the mime will have a strong effect on the adults in attendance and convince them of their need to have Christ in their lives.

Finally, we played a game with the kids and then the children served juice to their parents as a ¨thank you¨ to them.

All in all, a very successful event, and as soon as Danny is back with the camera, pictures will be uploaded too!

Strike!

The south of Peru is on strike today to protest the country's policy of exporting gas to other countries. The exports make gas in this region more expensive, so naturally, people are mad.

All schools are closed, many businesses are closed, and some streets and bridges are also blocked off (by protesters). This, however, is not the strongest type of¨paro¨ (strike) that exists - when paros are really serious, people don´t even go out in the street. And - we have heard - if they do, they will have stones thrown at them.

Don´t worry, I went to buy laundry detergent today and nobody threw any stones at me (and our local bodega was open, which tells me this is a strike for wussies).

Anyways, in honor of said strike, let´s look at some pictures of the adorable children we have been working with in Ciudad de Dios:


Here is a picture of our friend Luis drawing. Luis is 6 years old and is very proud to be in first grade. He is very mischievous and always has something funny to say.

The day that I took this picture, we were learning about God´s protection and as a part of that, he had to draw something that he was afraid of (but from which God protected him). Problem is, Luis isn´t afraid of anything. We tried to help him think - (¨How about when your mom gets mad? How about sharks?¨) - but to no avail. Finally, a few minutes after we´d given up, he called me over and said, ¨Actually, I am afraid of spiders. Tell me what they look like so I can draw one.¨I guess Luis is more ¨theoretically¨ afraid of spiders.


Here you also see Judy (covering her face with her picture!) - another big personality in the kid´s club and also six years old. I taught her how to say ¨hello¨ and then told her, ¨Look, now you speak English!¨ She looked at me and said, ¨Don´t be silly, that´s just one word.¨

Ahhh, children. :-)