A Breath of Fresh...Dust?

Entrance to the Incan Ruin we visited with Raul and the LST team we met in
town.

So much has been destroyed, yet there still remains some glimpses of the grandeur of this great civilization. It really was amazing to visit this great site. With a little elbow grease and some curtains it could be good as new in no time!

The gangs all here! The six of us were joined by some very happy Peruvians who wanted to be in the shot.

Erin and I outside of the Palace.

A beautiful view of the countryside. The circle in the background is a bullfighting arena, Ole'!

A little better view of the fighting arena. Just beyond the arena is a working farm. The white dots are tomato pickers.

Better view of the tomato pickers gathering their harvest.

This is what took us home from our outing. Couldn't pass up this photo!

American Pie

Starbucks, Papa John´s Pizza, Incan ruins. Where else could you experience all of these in the same day? Erin and I left the house with Raul, preacher and weekend babysitter, at 7am Friday morning. We walked about a mile, caught a small bus, and an hour later arrived at the El Olivar church to meet up with the LST team from Lubbock Christian. They are Mark, Erin, and Brittany, all 19 years old like our Erin. We all caught a big bus and rode for another hour, all of this travel is through town, by the way. Raul told us to get off and surprise! We were standing in front of a real, live Starbucks! Can´t tell you how
great it was to enjoy a decaf mocha, a choc chip orange muffin (yum) and the real furniture in that shop. We stayed and soaked up the familiar atmosphere for about an hour. Then it was 2 more buses and 1 1/2 hours more to the site of some Incan ruins that date back to 1100 a.d. We walked, climbed, hiked, broke a sweat
for several hours, had a great time. My favorite part was the palace ruin. There
were these big seats where the leaders sat to enjoy the view of the ocean and
this huge formerly covered terrace with another beautiful ocean view.

When we were tired of breathing dirt, we rode back into town and Raul found a Papa John´s for us for lunch. We
walked to another church and visited with a team of Americanos (not lst) here to
conduct Bible studies in Spanish. Then 2 1/2 hours home on the bus, dropping the
LCU team off on the way. We were bushed but had a great time speaking our native
language at a normal speed with our countrymen. This was the first time I´ve had
contact with another lst team while on site since my college days and I highly
reccommend it. Halfway through a project is the perfect time for a day like
that. We are having a bit of culture shock set in and are tiring of hearing a
foreign language all around us all the time from all the people. It will pass in
a few days and we´ll be back to enjoying it and knowing that we´ll miss it when
we get home to you.

Today, we did our laundry in the outside sink, takes
forever, and did our grocery shopping, also not a quick venture. But we had a
very cliche´moment. Here we are crowded in a taxi (Marie is sitting in her usual
spot on Booker´s lap) in South America, and the song ¨La Bamba¨comes on the
radio. Erin and I just cracked up!

Gotta go. I´m going to try to download and send some pictures
of this day to Will for posting. By the way, glad to have Will´s friend Donna as
a new friend of my own. Welcome to my life and thanks for the nice comments
about my sweet Erin. Hope

to meet you soon.

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.