Kill the Donkey

No, I haven´t replaced my animosity for the rooster with another animal. One of my readers, Miguel ( a different one than the Miguel who hears the voices, this one is 30 years old and owns a pharmacy) says this everytime he opens his Spanish-English dictionary. I finally humbled myself and told him that I had no idea what that meant. He says it is a saying here that means when you open a dictionary you are ¨killing¨the ignorance and stubborness in yourself. They also refer to the dictionary and other learning tools as ¨donkey killers¨.

Let´s talk about those roosters a minute. When we climbed up to the 3rd floor roof of the house to hang our laundry, we could see into the courtyard of the place that has the animals. There are actually 2 roosters. They have very different voices, one is very high, the other really low. They will forever after be referred to in this blog as Barry Gibb(BG) and Barry White (BW). In the early morning, in our dark rooms, in our warm beds, we can hear them harmonizing, answering each other. I´m getting rather attached.

I promised to tell you about the work. We were discussing in our team devotional yesterday how we have all crossed a line. We now know that when it´s time to come home (which can´t happen soon enough!), we will desperately miss these people and this culture. We still miss home and family like crazy but feel loved and wanted here. Just like every other year, I cry when I leave home, and I´ll cry when I leave here!

Here are some stats from our first 3 weeks:
50 readers
almost 150 hours of reading sessions from Luke or Acts
25-30 attending our Sunday afternoon parties

It´s going great!

Party Peruvian Style

Here we are around the dinner table at "cooks" house. We have some, "lip smackin" good food and the love and hospitality make the food all the more delicious.

This is our main babysitter, Millie. She's just the sweetest thing-ever!

Here are Erin and Marie "posing" in front of our workplace, the church building.

We are welcoming our "friends" to our first party. We had such a great time and made some really great friends as we introduced them to "crazy American" games.

Erin made fast friends with our guests at the first party. They had a great time and so did we!

Here we are playing spoons. We play "American" games and introduce them to some American foods as well. Our first party was really great and a huge success.

Out and about in Lima

This is St. Francis Catholic Cathedral, just one of the many beautiful building we encountered on our trip into Lima. I wrote about this church in a previous post. It was a beautiful day to explore this beautiful city.

Here we are in the City Center. There are a lot of birds. The church in the previous picture is in our background.

The last two pictures are of Erin's and my trip to the Pacific Ocean. It was really great, until she lost her flip flop to a mischievous wave that swiped it. Fortunately we had a knight in shining armor come to our rescue. You can read all about Erin's flip flop adventure here.

Fan Club

We have a fan club. Yes, I can hear your snickers of unbelief from here. But, our neighbors along the walk from the house to the church building are getting used to us. They sometimes even respond with a half-smile now instead of just the blank stare. There is a school near the church and the students, so cute in their uniforms, have our schedule memorized. They know what time we walk to work, what time we leave and return from lunch. There are always about a dozen crowded around the 2nd story window as we go by. As soon as they see us, they start waving and shouting¨hello¨in English. They are so proud of themselves and excited when we smile, wave, and respond. They just dissolve into giggles and wiggles. Sometimes, they are on the sidewalk for a break when we arrive for work and they just surround us, the boys pushing each other in front of us and teasing. It´s a shame we have to travel to another continent to be popular!!

Erin has a bigger fan club than the rest of us. She gets a lot of males yelling and waving from their cars. I try to take credit for their attention but we all know who they are yelling at. She´s very humble about it though. She just credits it to her being ¨half of the white population in Lima¨. For those of you who are slow, I am the other half. Seriously, these people can´t stop staring at, commenting on, and discussing with their friends the color of our eyes. It´s a little disconcerting but I´m glad to have the attention on my eyes instead of the stupid things that come out of my mouth, like in the US: oh, just found the colon by accident. I think I´ll leave it there even though it´s not being used correctly!

Thank you Will Spoon for being my official blog picture poster. I can´t read the Spanish directions on the blog site so he´s doing it for me. Please consider this my disclaimer in case he really does something that would embarrass us all.

Remind me, tomorrow I will write about some reading sessions. We really are working hard!

Show and Tell

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...here are six thousands words, enjoy.

Friends and Family wishing us well as we are about to depart to Lima.

Our welcoming committee as we arrived in Lima, they were so excited to see us.

Home sweet home!

"These are the people in our neighborhood, in our neighborhood, in our neighborhood, the people that we met as we walk down the street, the people that we meet each day." You know, once you start singing the Sesame Street theme song you just can't shake it out of your head.

This is the neighborhood of the church building where we will be conducting our readings.

This is the church building.

Welcome home!

No, it´s not time for us to come home quite yet. But for those of you who have been praying for my OSU sleep shorts, they have returned to me safely after their harrowing experience being held captive at the laundry. After 3 trips back to talk to the lady, we finally had given up hope of collecting the last couple of missing items. I was not happy about having to sleep in my clothes, I can tell you! I only brought a couple of things to sleep in ( too much information for you?) and while one thing was on the line drying for 3 days, I was sleeping in my clothes! But as Erin and I were playing a mean game of ¨speed¨last night, Raul (one of the preachers and babysitters) came to the house, tossed Erin a bag and said it was a gift. Inside were our missing items. He doesn´t speak much English but I´m sure he understood my joy and appreciation as I squealed with delight and put them on my head for a victory dance. A foreign country is a great place to let loose and do weird stuff like that. They already KNOW we are weird and different so they just chuckle to themselves and think, ¨Those crazy Americanos!¨ So, you´re welcome for my hard work at representing you in Peru. You´re wishing you´d kept me home now, aren´t you??????

Lima!

We have finally seen the ¨real¨Lima. And I´ve found the apostrophe and quotation marks, thank you very much. Actually, we are at a different internet cafe and they are where they are supposed to be so Monday, we are back to being lost.

Our babysitters told us they had a surprise for us today. They took us to the Lima city center and we had a blast. We had our first bus ride, not quite as scary as a taxi but you get to share it with some interesting people! The city is so different than the area where we live and work. Much of the center looks like it could exist in any European city. Huge plazas surrounded by official palaces, Catholic churches, interesting architecture, and palm trees. We toured an ancient building where the Spanish catholics imprisoned, tortured and killed Jews 2 centuries ago and a Catholic church complete with catacombs and bones. There were many Americans walking around in this area and it was good to hear our native tongue. You forget how much you miss it when you are surrounded by another language 24/7.

After we had toured for few hours, we found a place to have a rest and some ice cream. Erin and I shared a banana split, each ordered a hot chocolate which, unknown to us, came with a huge slice of cake (we saved it for breakfast) and the bill was a whopping 12 soles, about $4. We bought lunch for the 4 of us plus our 3 babysitters and the bill was about $10. This was in a nice Peruvian restaurant and the servings are huge. Every meal that we eat at our cook´s house, quit whining Kelli Maynard, costs us less than $2/person and that includes appetizer, huge meal portion (always includes rice!), and dessert. You can quit worrying that we might go hungry! Of course, nothing is staying with us very long as we are still having some stomach issues. Are you still praying?????

We went to the supermarket this morning again. We bought some things so that we can eat at home some this weekend. We got what we are pretty sure is ground beef, chicken breast, and cream of mushroom soup. I know the cans are sweet peas because it says so in plain English! We are scared of most of the fruit. Much of it looks like something that lives at the bottom of the ocean and would eat you if given the chance. We have probably tried a lot of it at the cook´s house without knowing what it looked like raw.

Please keep the comments coming on the blog. I am enjoying them immensely and usually sharing them with the team by reading them loudly in the internet cafe while the place goes totally silent and all of our Peruvian neighbors are listening in while we crack up! They must think we have the most hilarious friends in the world.

We miss you all. It´s hard to be caught between counting the days until we can come home (which we do!) and wanting to be here long enough to really get to know these people and the culture. I encourage each of you to try to find a way to spend more than one week on a mission trip. It is a completely different experience to actually live in another culture instead of just visiting. I am treasuring this blessing of time alone with Erin while my heart is bleeding from missing Pat, Em, Cowboy, Elvis, and the rest of you! I know there will never be this kind of opportunity again to have her to myself.

Thanks for the prayers! A month from tomorrow, we will be on the way to Dallas for our endmeeting, then home to you. See, told you we are counting!