OH the wheels on the bus go round and round.

So in just an hour we will be leaving ("we", being the NEBC team, Emily, Travis and I) for Lima. It is my official job today to escort the team safely back to Lima and their hotel in Magdalena. As soon as I drop them off and am assured that they will be getting themselves to Cuzco alright, I will be officially on vacation! WhooooHoooo! Please be praying for my family today as they will be spending the entire day traveling to Peru. They will be flying from KC to Miami, to Panama City, Panama, to Lima. And they are due to get in to Lima at 12:30am. Pray for safety, for making all connections and please . . . for NO LOST LUGGAGE :)!!!! I’ll be looking forward to filling you all in on the time with the fam. It’s the first time we will all have been together in two years!

Final Friday

Well the week is almost over and it has indeed been a full week of gospel sharing, workshop giving, translating and mountain climbing! The team has been going non-stop and of course that means that my team has been going non-stop along with them, which is why I am just now able to update the old blog. Today is the final Friday of ministry with the team here in Tarma. We will be going to one more school to share workshops and the gospel, and then tonight will be our farewell event at Chichos, for all of the kids we have met during the week.
Something neat that occurred due to our presence at so many schools in town is that we met a girl who will be having her Quinciñera tonight immediately after our closing even in Chichos, so she invited the whole team! How neat that the group will be able to experience one of the typical cultural aspects of Peru, the all-important quinciñera, the “right-of-passage” of sorts from girlhood to womanhood. It should be a lot of fun.
Also this week has been full of Emily time, and I was also blessed to meet her incredible boyfriend Travis, who came along with the team. They have both spent the week encouraging me, making me laugh, uplifting me spiritually and just being wonderful friends. The highlight of the week for me was yesterday morning when Travis, Emily and I got up early to climb the mountain behind my house. It took us two hours to get up to the peak and make it back down, but the view was absolutely breathtaking. I’m so thankful to have had time to spend with this couple and be reminded of what it feels like to have friends around :)

Updates

So, I finally have more to update.

Life in Tarma is a whirling dervish. The last weeks have been spent preparing for the weeks to come. Now those weeks to come are here.
Tomorrow the team from Northeast Bible Church (TX) will arrive with Meredith and Emily from Lima and we will begin another week of intense ministry in and throughout the city. I’ve been looking forward to the team for a while now because I was so encouraged by the last team (TBarM Camps) that came through. It was great to share our secluded little ministry with “my people”. The past weeks of preparation have been wonderful mainly due the presence of Emily Maddock (picture to come), a seasoned missionary of 26 how has blessed me beyond measure with her wisdom, her humor and her friendship. I have continued on in my daily life in Tarma without friends, and have gotten used to it. But then Emily came and reminded me how wonderful it is to have someone to share life with. I have laughed more in these past two weeks than I have in a while, and have spent a lot of time talking with Emily about ministry, about life in general and about the future. We’ve decided that we are pretty much the same person, and I can’t begin to express to you all how amazing it feels to be understood by someone when you feel like you are misunderstood all day every day :).
Well, like I said, the preparations have all gone really well and the ministry is now upon us. The team will arrive tomorrow evening, and we will pretty much just do dinner and then go to bed. The 6.5 hour bus ride from Lima can really take it out of you, and the altitude often messes with people. So I suppose when I say that the ministry is now upon us I really mean that we’ll get started on Monday. I’ll try to post more in the days to come about how the ministry is going and how God is working. And of course I’ll post pictures too. And maybe even a few videos.

How can you be praying for the week?
- Pray that God would open new doors that would lead to new contacts and new Bible study groups.
- Pray that God would bring men into our circles, men who are ready to commit to something greater than themselves.
- Pray that the team would be safe from accident, injury and illness while they are in Peru . . . I don’t want to have to take anyone else to the emergency room!

After nearly a month . . .

Well my friends, family and blog readers, it has been nearly a month since I have last posted anything on my blog, and I apologize if you have been waiting for an update. I guess there just wasn’t too much to update this past month. It does happen. We are, as you know, in the midst of Bible studies and discipleship groups, school devotionals, kid’s clubs and English classes.
We are hitting a new barrier in ministry as we have had a presence in Tarma for almost a year now, and yet our groups are pure women. There are no men who have taken a consistent interest in our ministry, and therefore we can only advance so far in the work at hand. We need prayer support here because the lack of men is a result of the culture, of time-management/priority issues and of lack of interest in religion. We have several groups of women who are growing and seeking to know more, and we have a successful children’s hour every Saturday morning, but if our goal is to “Develop, Empower and Release” we can only go so far with women and children (and I say that with all the respect in the world). I have been meditating on 1 Timothy and Titus, and Paul’s counsel for the standards of Deacons and Elders and Overseers in the church. These leaders are called to a higher standard, men of respect, humility who are above reproach. But men like that do not exist here in Tarma, and the ones that have the potential to grow into this kind of leader don’t see God as a priority in their lives. So please be praying for our team and the future of this ministry because God and the Holy Spirit are really the only ones that can turn the hearts of these men.
Thanks.

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.

Mothers Day

Wow, what a HUGE deal Mothers Day is here in Peru. I won’t lie that it continues to be a fascinating to experience the “same” holidays we celebrate in the States but on a different level here in Peru. Mothers Day could possibly be classified as one of the biggest days of the year here. I think it would be in the line-up with Christmas, Easter and the Peruvian Independence Day. Due to the strong Catholic roots, and the importance placed on the Virgin Mary, this sacred attitude has extended upon all mothers who are in turn lifted up in glory on Mothers Day. Here it is expected that you not only give a gift to your own mother, but to EVERY mother you know. And that gets pricey. Almost every school puts on an extravagant Mothers Day event involving dancing, singing, theatrical performances and cookouts. So knowing that Mothers Day (MD from here on out) is such a big deal, we as a team had to decide what to do. After some creative thinking we decided to pull from my North American roots and copy the traditional Sunday school teacher Christmas gift – a ready-made-mix-in-a-bag! This past weekend we spent a few hours mixing up 50 batches of basic pancake mix, and then added chocolate chips (thanks to everyone that has been sending chocolate chips!) to make it more special. We printed out recipe cards for the liquid ingredients that would need to be added, and placed a poem about mothers on the backside. We then spent several hours on Saturday handing out the bags to EVERY MOTHER WE KNOW in Tarma. Our pancake bags were met with delight, and it was a blessing for us to be able to bless the women we’ve gotten to know here.

In addition to our own MD gifting, I was obligated to participate in Stephen Hawking’s MD event (the school where I’m teaching English); obligated because I am a Stephen Hawking teacher. But more than feelings of obligation were feelings of delight because I am falling in love with my kids more and more as I spend more time with them. The kids have been working hard over the past months preparing dances and songs and plays to present to their mothers on their special day. It was a strange experience for me on some levels because MD is not as highly emphasized in the States, and it was interesting to see these kids put so much work and preparation into the event. On another level I was amazed at the pride I felt for my kids when I watched them dance. I had absolutely nothing to do with the preparation of this event, (beyond helping put invitations together) yet I was beaming with pride as I watched these kids perform, almost as if I was their own mother. I am wondering more and more if God is going to use Stephen Hawking and these kids as my key role of ministry for the remainder of my time in Tarma. I have confessed before that I have been frustrated over my lack of emotional bond with Tarma and its people, but for the first time, because of these kids I’m starting to feel joy in the work that I’m doing. I’m interested to see what God will do with this new excitement for ministry in the months to come. But so that you can see what a typical Peruvian dance looks like, I’ve placed some links to a dance in three parts. This group of students are my 1st graders (a 7th grader equivalent in the States), who danced this typical dance for their moms at the MD event. I filmed it in three parts because it’s a bit long, so you'll have to watch them in order. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayKnQZrXfrg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPHQuFd793U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a62hJ75FPps

One Year in Peru!

Today I woke up and realized that today I complete one full year in Peru. (Check out the "Then and Now" pictures!) It’s a little hard to believe that the time has passed so quickly, even though each day passed by rather slowly. One year ago today I was on a plane headed toward the unknown, toward my future ministry not having a clue what to expect. I suppose that’s really how it goes in every part of life: the first day of school, the first day at a new job, the first day of marriage, the first day of being a parent. Well, after a year in Peru I feel completely different and not so different at all. I am a year older, I am more independent, I am closer to being bilingual. I’ve traveled and lived on my own, I have participated in spreading the gospel and fulfilling the great commission through loving, serving and discipling the people of Tarma. Yet I am still the same small girl that left home a year and a half ago. I am still that dreamer who loves laughter more than anything, the girl who yearns to do all that God has asked of her, the girl that loves her home in Lincoln.
I went back a year in my blog to see what I had written that first day in Peru, and I thought I would share it with you - - -

“On May 4th I flew from Dallas to Miami, then on to Lima and arrived in Peru at 10:00pm. I had so many people praying for me as I passed through customs, which always makes me a little nervous. In Peru they use this random traffic light system where, after you’ve picked up all of your luggage, you pass through another line until you reach this post with a red and a green light. You push the button and if the light shines green you can pass through and make your way to the airport exit. If the light shines red, you are escorted off to the side to have your luggage searched. Thank you all who were praying for a green light for me, because after packing my luggage to the brim, I was worried that if they searched through it at the airport, I wouldn’t get everything packed back into my suitcases :) But again, the little graces from our Lord – I received all of my luggage, (3 suitcases, a backpack and a computer case) loaded it up onto a cart, passed through the line and received a green light. Meredith McAllister my teammate was there waiting for me when I exited the airport, along with Bethany Leach, a short-term intern that has been with the mission for the past two months. We loaded my stuff into a taxi and made the journey back to the apartment I will be sharing with Meredith and our two Peruvian roommates for the next 2-3 months.
When I had informed Meredith of my flight details a month ago, she warned me that they had already planned on making the six hour trip to Tarma the day after I arrived. So long story short, I got “home” around 11:30pm Monday night, had time to repack my duffle, went to bed, and at 8:00am Tuesday we were on the bus to Tarma. I feel like “whirlwind” is the adjective I will use to describe these few days I have spent in Peru. We were in Tarma from Tuesday thru Thursday, meeting with the people Meredith has gotten to know from here many trips there, teaching English classes, and looking for leads on potential apartments. Because we didn’t have internet, it has taken me a lot longer to get my blog updated for you all. While it was crazy to arrive in this new country and right away make a three day trip six hours from Lima, I was really thankful for the chance to visit the city where our ministry will be focused. I quickly fell in love with this quaint little town that reminded me so much of Lincoln. Obviously the culture and appearance is about as different as you can get from Lincoln, but the size of the city, the small-town feel was a breath of fresh air after living in San Jose (population 1 million) and now Lima (population 9 million). I am excited to get settled and begin our ministry. The next few months will be transition months as little by little we get ourselves from here to there. We got back from Tarma Thursday around 4:30pm and the last couple of days have been spent getting acclimated to the city, meeting the pastors of the ADIEL (the Evangelical Free Churches of Lima), getting meetings set up and learning about the ministry. I will admit that these last couple of days has been information overload for me, but after this weekend things will settle down and hopefully I will be able to catch up with myself. Part of the problem is that Bethany Leach (the intern) has been living in the room that will be mine, but she doesn’t leave until next Tuesday to go back home – so I have been sleeping on the couch and living out of my suitcases. I tend to like to settle and organize myself, so until I can unpack and settle into my room – my brain and life feels cluttered and unorganized and it is harder for me to be at peace because I have this big thing that needs doing, but I can’t do it yet. Does that make any sense? Maybe I’m a little weird here.
Overall, the week has gone well, and quickly too. I am so thankful that I am finally in the place that I have talked about going for so long. God was and is so faithful to bring me every step of the way, to provide for my needs and to grace me with His love and affirmation. I look forward to keeping you posted (more regularly :)) on the coming weeks as I get more settled here. Thank you all for your many prayers and your emails of encouragement.”

So that was me a year ago, just starting out as a missionary in a foreign land. It is amazing how far God has brought me, and I know that it is only because of Him that I have made it to this day. It is because of Him and because of all of you who are continually praying for me and lifting me up to the Father. It is your faithful support, your emails and care packages. I am so thankful for all of you and I hope that I have done a decent job at helping you to feel more like an active part of this ministry. So how am I celebrating today? With BBQ Chili and cinnamon rolls! I’ve invited our close friends Denise and Martin to share a typical North American lunch with me and my team. Nothing like the taste of home to help celebrate surviving a year away from it! I know have 8 months left in Tarma and 9-10 months left in Peru. I have no doubt that God will remain faithful to the end.

In Him,
Bethany