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!

Revelation

Happy Thursday everybody! Here is the revelation that hit me yesterday while I was speaking to a reader.
age 11-I was baptized
age 22-married
33 years I have been a Christian
44 my age (I have now been married half of my life! Thanks, Pat!)

I didnt say my revelation was profound. Quit trying to read something important into it!

Miguel did not show up for his appt yesterday. Maybe it was one of his bad days. He is scheduled at 3 this afternoon and I am praying that he comes. Marie has a reader named Percy that is really searching and may be getting close to a decision about Jesus. Please join us in praying Acts 26 18 for him and for all of our readers.

There is an LST team here in Lima from Lubbock Christian University. They are 3 students who are here for the exact dates that we are. We actually met them in the Atlanta airport on our trip and we are planning to get together with them while we are here. It will be nice to have easy-flowing conversation with someone! There is another team of adults from the Dallas area arriving next week for a 3 week campaign. We hope to meet them too as they owe us money!

Marcela, our hostess, left last night for Nashville. Her husband, Jacobo, used to be the preacher here at Lucyana but has been preaching at a Spanish church in Nashville for 5 years. They keep their house here and let visiting missionaries and church members use it. We miss Marcela around the house-very weird without her. She may return in about a week to finish up an inventory on her hardware store. But she needed to get to Nashville at least for a quick visit because her children (3 daughters married to Americans and living in different states) were there waiting to see her. They expected her last week when Jacobo returned home (the day we came to Peru) but she had to stay due to the business. Please pray for her. There are problems with her books and she is afraid the business will go bankrupt and she might lose her home. A preacher from another town has been staying at the house to help her and he is still there with us. Very nice guy but we cant speak to him, he has zero English but loves on us anyway.

We dont like laundries. Most of mine and Erins clothing did not make it back to us with the delivery yesterday. We stopped in this morning on the walk to work and got most of the missing items but what a hassle! We kept saying Ours are the only clothes with English on them!! Of course, the laundry lady doesnt understand a thing we say.

If youve noticed, I am not using quotation marks or the apostrophe. Cant find them. These keyboards look just like ours but things are not where they are supposed to be. For example, the dash is where the question mark is, the question mark is shift dash, the / is shift 7 key, the ( ) are shift 8 and 9, and heres the best one...@ is Alt 64. Our little brains are fried after an internet session! So, if anyone knows where the apostrophe and quotations are on a Peruvian keyboard, please help.

Voices

Can I take a minute to tell you about Miguel? He is 21 years old, an electric guitar player in a band (I am keeping him far from Erin!) and one of my favorite readers. We are spending 3-4 hours each week discussing Luke, Jesus, and how to live a Christian life in this world. He has been a reader before so I am stopping at each lesson that he has already done and we are discussing what he remembers about it and any questions he still has about that subject. Today, we spent a long time talking about temptation, prompted by the story of Jesus in the desert with the devil. He loved 1 Corinthians 10 13 when I showed it to him. He asked How do people live without God and the Bible? We talked about hope and that God and His Word give us reason for living.

I want to ask you to pray for Miguel. At the end of our very first reading session, he asked if he could stay a few minutes longer to share something with me. He asked me to pray because he was having a very difficult time with his studies and with concentration because he is hearing a mulltitude of voices in his head. Well, I figured out very quickly that God was going to have to speak through me on this one-a little out of my league! I asked him some questions about what the voices were telling him to do, etc. I told him about a disease that strikes young men about his age sometimes and encouraged him to find a doctor that specializes in these things and get some medicine to help him. Today, I asked how he was feeling (he has 3-4 bad days each week) and he said he was still looking for a doctor but wanted to ask me if I thought that the doctor must be a Christian for it to work. Such a sweet heart in this young man.

So, would you please pray for these voices to leave him alone, let him rest at night? Also that this disease would not worsen before he finds help and that he would find just the right doctor and medicine to help him?

Thank you loved ones. Missing you today!

Encouragement

Thank you so much for your responses. We are hearing from so many of you and it carries us through our days. So glad you are enjoying our adventures and mishaps! We want nothing more than to be used for your entertainment!

We are feeling more at home here as we begin our second week. At the moment, we have run away from our babysitters to spend some time on the internet. Hope it doesn´t cause an international incident. If you read in the papers that we are missing, it is an exaggeration. We miss you all, can´t stand the thought of being away from you for 5 more weeks, but aren´t suffering from homesickness. It´s weird though how you can be tootling along just fine and something will hit you. I was feeling great this morning, ready to get busy with my readers and took a minute to look at my love cards for the day. There was one from my sister and her family and I just lost it. In a good way, but unexpected. I wish I knew which days to bother with mascara and which ones not to!

Our first party last night was a success. We started 40 minutes late. You think people at Park Plaza are late? These Peruvians have you beat hands down. We had about 25 readers/visitors in addition to many church members. We played a mean game of ¨spoons¨ (has nothing to do with Will) and then played ¨take a hike¨. They loved both games, love to compete. Several students stayed for the worship service afterward and 3 other visitors scheduled reading sessions with us for this week. I made choc chip cookies from a mix that I brought from the States and they were a hit. Our desserts are too sweet for them but they inhaled these cookies!

Okay, let´s talk about our living conditons. To picture our street/neighborhood, envision what you´ve seen on tv about Harlem. It´s not that dangerous and we are never alone but that´s what it looks like. Every building is a store front, all covered by iron bars. Even when they are open, the bars are closed-you just knock and they let you in. Most people live above, behind, or next to their business. Marcela, our hostess, runs a hardware store with a walk-up window. There is a little door next to the business that goes to the house. You walk down a dark, short hallway and enter the living room. There is a dining room and a very small galley kitchen. Up some narrow stairs are our bedrooms and Marcela´s. Erin and I share a small room with bunk beds. Booker and Marie have adjoining rooms at the other end of the hall. All of us share a bathroom. We have a shower but not always hot water-I was a little shivery this morning! Behind the dining room, outside, are some stairs that go to 2 more floors with rooms that open to the outside. These are all usually full of visiting Christians, etc. Sometimes church members spend the night here since many live 1-3 hours away by bus. We are really appreciating the comforts we have in our US homes! Sarah and Deborah, it´s about as clean as the apt. in Kiev used to be.

They are such sweet people and loving toward us. Millie (age 18) spends every morning with us and our readers. This morning, she showed us how to take our laundry to the cleaners, another new experience.

Not through with all my thoughts but out of time. We have readers in 15 minutes and must get back to the church. Thank you all again for your encouragement of us. Sorry I can´t answer each email, we only have about 30 minutes/day on the internet. We miss you and are already looking forward to seeing your faces again.

HERO!!

Funny story. Yesterday was our day off for the week and a couple of the brothers from the Lucyana church took us to see the Pacific Ocean. It was an hour´s taxi ride away which, in this culture, is enough to age you 50 years. The cars, buses, 3-wheeled motor taxis, etc get within INCHES of each other. Apparently, as long as you honk, you can drive anyplace in the road that you choose. AGHHHHH!

We went to a district of Lima called Mira Flores (means look at flowers) where many Europeans have summer homes. It is lovely. We climbed down stairs for about 30 minutes, no kidding, to get to the beach level from the shopping level. It is winter here and only in the sixties so we didn´t plan to swim. While Booker and Marie stayed up on over the wall with our babysitters, Erin and I climbed down onto the black beach, rolled up our pants, and waded a bit. Luis, one of our babysitters, wanted to take our picture and made us stand there long enough for a gigantic wave to soak us from behind. Very funny, Luis. Glad you enjoyed that.

We are trying to rinse our feet off and get our shoes back on when one of Erin´s flip-flops gets eaten by a wave. It is carried out with the tide and we just have to watch it go. It deliberates for a few minutes and decides that it will not ride the waves back in to us. So, is she going to go barefoot all the way up 30 minutes of stairs and into town to Payless (there really was one)? Luis, wave boy, starts looking for someone to help. Next thing I see is this gorgeous, buff, blonde guy in swim trunks running down the stairs like he´s on tv, right past us, and dives into the surf to rescue that shoe! He comes out, hands it to Erin while we are just cracking up. We make such a big deal about thanking him that he says he feels like he saved a life! He is from South Africa and was on vacation. I took a picture of him with Erin, can´t wait to show it to you all.

We spent some time listening to native music in a park and then spotted a modern cinema. Yes, we got to see Pirates of the Caribeann. The movie was in English but the crowd was definitely enthusiastic South Americans!

Many of you are asking about our daily schedule, where we live, etc. I just have a few more minutes here in the internet cafe so I´ll tackle our daily work schedule. On Sundays, we worship with the church for about 3 hours, have lunch, work on party preparation and set-up. Sundays at 6 pm are our parties where our readers can bring their friends and interact with the church members. We want them to have a relationship with the brothers and sisters so that when we leave, the church can follow up and our readers are not only attached to us. Monday thru Thurs, we work with our readers. We are out of bed at least by 6 30 am, if not at 5 with Mr. Rooster. We get ready, have quiet time, breakfast, and meet at 9 in Marie´s room for a team devotional. At 10, we are at the church to meet our first readers. Each session is 45 minutes long, meeting one-on-one, discussing Luke or Acts. Many of my readers have been LST readers in the past (2 of them have read the previous 4 years!) so I am reviewing Luke with them right now, just discussing some of the stories, what they remember, and any new ideas we find. At noon, we walk to the cook´s house for lunch, then have a few minutes rest, which we are usually spending in an internet cafe, staying in touch with LST and our families. At 2, we are back in reading sessions until 7 when we go back to the cook´s house for dinner. We are finished at 8 except for Thurs evenings when we go back to the church for Bible study/worship. At home, Erin and I usually stay up and play cards or read while the Murphy´s go to bed! Sometimes we spend time visiting with our hostess, Marcela, or others that are at the house. I´ll write about our living conditions on another day.

We miss you all and are thoroughly enjoying your cards/emails. That is so important to keeping us going! Thank you for all your prayers, we feel them in a physical way.

One more thing...
All of my girlfriends are whining about us having a cook. I just have one thing to say..... nana nana boo boo.

Committment and Spoilage

Our readers are so precious. We have new ones walk in every day that we are working at the church so that they can make appts. We each have 5-7 readers, most of them come every day. So we have full reading schedules and are getting great time with each reader. They are so incredibly eager to meet with us. Some of them travel 2 hours by bus to get to the church. One of my readers works 8-8 and cant make during our reading times so she is using her vacation time for our meetings. What committment! They are so friendly and loving. We are being well taken care of.

We even have our own special alarm clock. About 5 am each day, there is a rooster outside our window that begins helping us wake up. Some days he just goes on for a little while, other days he goes on for hours because other roosters down the street are answering him. We have no idea what they are talking about but it better be how to escape because we are going to introduce him to the ax soon!

Have I told you about our cook! Yes, I said cook. Her son is a member of Lucyana church and she is cooking for us in her home which is located between our house and the church where we work each day. She cooks traditional Peruvian food and it is really delicious! We are eating more than we do at home since she makes us a large meal for lunch and dinner each day. And it costs us less than $2/person/meal. Patrick, I am coming home spoiled. Consider this your warning! Someone tell Kyle Graham that we had ceviche for our appetizer at lunch today. Yummy! Will Spoon, cant wait to talk recipes with you.

We are on our lunch break now. We had our meal and stopped by the internet cafe on the way back to work. We all have full schedules this afternoon and a Bible study with the church tonight. Our stomachs are bothering us today. Please join us in praying that God will block the tiny germs that are attacking us!

We miss you all. Dios te bendiga. (God bless you)