Chincha

This week out team made the trip from Tarma to Chincha in order to attend a conference on using the Gospel to teach literacy. Chincha is roughly a 10-hour bus ride away from Tarma, which we decided to make in two days. Monday we make the 6.5 hour trip to Lima and stayed the night in our apartment there, rising the next morning to make the final 3.5 hours to Chincha. The two day conference focused on the basic steps to teach illiterate people how to read, later incorporating Bible verses and scripture in lessons and homework thus allowing the Bible to be the first book the newly literate read. It was a fascinating process to see how you first take sounds and associate them to pictures, and later to letters and words. While we only work with a handful of illiterate people here in Tarma, it was definitely a worthwhile training to attend since our ministry could (in the future) extend past Tarma and into the Quechua-speaking regions.
While we were in Chincha we were blessed to spend a bit of time with Gordy and Bear Grover, TouchGlobal missionaries working with the earthquake relief by building houses for the desperately poor. Working alongside Gordy and Bear are Felix and Nancy Zavala, the other Peruvian missionaries that the ADIEL sent last year with Elsa and Julio. The Zavala family has been working closely with Gordy and Bear in the compassion ministry and Bible teaching in the area for the past year, and have seen a lot of growth in the people in their ministry. It was a blessing to spend some time with them and encourage them in their work as well. Now all of the Peruvian missionaries, along with Meredith and myself, are certified to teach literacy to Spanish-speakers in our areas. It will be very interesting to see if God opens any doors to use this training in the coming months. Until then, we will keep plugging away at the work at hand. Keep praying for us as we are entering into some busy months of ministry in Tarma.