CHE training and a funny story

Meredith, Elsa and I just spent the past three days attending CHE training – Community Health Evangelism, which is a program based on working to prevent disease, promote good health, and spread evangelistic teachings of the abundant Christian life. This is a program/platform that our team is considering using to open the doors for our ministry in Tarma. This is a program that is based on meeting both physical needs as well as spiritual –is exactly how my heart is wired! The last three days we have been learning about the importance of multiplication, that our goal is not just to teach, but to transfer these healthy living practices in a way that once learned, the people will then transfer on to their own community (not altogether unlike the vision of ReachGlobal: multiplying healthy churches among all nations through developing, empowering and releasing national believers). We also learned a lot about the diseases of the area, and how the majority of diseases are preventable with good hygiene and basic health knowledge. Apparently this is actually a 5-day seminar that the leader squeezed into 3 because none of the attendee’s could give up that much time. The majority of attendees were pastors and American missionaries. There was actually a pastor and a missionary already from Tarma that attended so it was fun to get to know them a bit. The whole thing was in Spanish, which I was actually enjoying, but after a couple of hours I had to concentrate on concentrating on what was being said. It was just too easy to daydream and let my mind wander after a few hours of listening.

Now for the funny story – on the last day of our training Meredith, Elsa and I were going to have to leave a little early, and we were just planning on catching another bus back to Jesus Maria (the province where we live), but one of the guys attending, Carlos, had a car and offered to drive us back! He was there with Nabe, a 21 year-old Japanese kid who was doing a 6 month missions trip with Carlos’s ministry. I found out that Carlos (a native Peruvian) had lived in Japan for a few years and knew how to speak Japanese, and Nabe who was just starting to learn Spanish, had already learned a lot of English in school. So here are the five of us driving through rush hour traffic, and the three of us are speaking Spanish with Carlos, English with Nabe and listening as Carlos and Nabe spoke Japanese to each other. What are the odds of this ever happening again!?!