Update

Hi Everybody

Its been about 2 weeks since the last post... It´s really hard to try and find time to do this. We have so much work on. We sometimes wonder if we have een given too much, but it all seems to work out in the end. We run three church workshops a week, one for crafts, one for dance choreography an done for English (at two difficulty levels). We have three workshops at Minimundo´s, a very well equipped private kindergarten - we do wonder wether God wants us there, considering how weatlthy the families who can afford to send their kids there, but who knows what seeds we are sowing there, as we are the 0nly christain christain contact they get. We also have our perment youth service on Friday nights, which seems to be the churches premier evangelical outreach, and it´s certainly the most enjoyable thing we plan for - this Friday invloved getting jelly everywhere, and water balloons (to tell the story of the woman caught in adultery of course).

Saturdays have continued to be our days in our seperate countryside communities. It´s probably the toughest thing we do (at least for me it is), as many of us can´t fall back on the Spanish skills of other team members. I find it really difficult being in charge of the little kids (at least the older ones have some idea of what you are trying to say and help you - the little ones just stare at you and dribble) and trying to get them to colour, paint, stick and teach a song...

We ate our first guinea pig last week too. It wasnt that great.

Joel

Busy week

Hola everyone...

Today is our first day off after one seriously hectic week... We started with meetings with Warmis to discuss our work with them. We have one agricultural day a week, one dance choreograph lesson a week (we have 5 dances and 5 songs to do for the festival!) and we do education workshops on Satudays in groups of 2 to various rural destinantions with Warmis co-ordinators. We visited these on Saturday just to get to know the people, and we were split to work with women or children. Most of us just watched lessons, but I was put in a room of 16 very small Peruvian children with a load of crepe paper. They all just stared at me as I attempted to gather together my few Spanish words. I spent the first ten excruciating minutes praying for some kind of miracle, and to my relief another of Warmis staff members came to to the meeting who knew just enough English to know what I wanted to tell them and to sort me out. Phew.

We have also been given alot of church work. We are completely in charge of the Friday night youth service called Alfa. We did a load of invites and took them out into Cajamarca and handed them out to young people, and we did our first one on Friday, and despite difficult circumstances we had a very large turnout and it went really really well. We had around 25 people and we spent the evening doing silly games as a first session.

We´ve discovered the mall this week to, so we´ve been stocking up on comfort foods and spending evenings with 8 spoons and a large tub of ice cream. We had to wake at ten to 7 Sunday for the morning service (at 7 - luckily we live right next door to the church) as Cajamarca as having a cycle race organised by Warmis and Jesua (our church). It was a big national event and people were really getting into it (more lycra than is ever necessary for a Sunday). Andy and Rob took part inthe race which was 60 laps of the square, which is about 100m square. They got lapped after 5, and were flagged out! It was all topped off with Alice having to hand the prize money to the winning cyclist, beating Miss Cajamarca into handing out 3rd place.

Sunday lunch was dominated by being given a chopped chilli on a plate. All of us decied to have a go for the sake of it and went for a huge chunk. Apparently the screams could be heard for miles as we all made for taps and any source of water we could find. I have honestly never tasted anything like it, and even downing two big bottles of pineapple yoghurt would not make it go away. Silly European pallates.

We have just had our first day off and spent it at the swimming pool (well, more the sauna). All of us feel so clean after 2 hours in it! Now we are off to the mall to see Slumdog Millionaire and eat pizza. yum.

Ciao, Joel

So we´ve just got back from being thrown in at the deep end - we have just spent Thurs-Sat out in the countryside with the youth from the church on a holiday camp. Needless to say, it wasn´t quite what we expected...Our accommodation was a country mud hut - literally all mud; floor and walls (and yet more mud when it rained). We were lucky enough to have a loo though - a most precious little long-drop a short walk away. We had to have a detailed explanation on our first night of how exactly to tackle the bathroom - the trick was to arm yourself with a torch, somehow stay on the narrow path without falling into the large pit next to it, and then somehow fight off the hungry cow that would try to suck you to death before finally reaching your destination and not falling into the hole. And then hopefully you hadn´t forgotten your loo roll.
The poor boys probably had it worst off though - their accommodation was the tiny upper floor of our mud hut, too small to sit up and too dusty to breathe pròperly! We were literally praying the ceiling wouldn´t collapse...Added to this was the fact that we were practically smoked out of the hut in the morning by next door cooking breakfast!
We took part in lots of sports, games, English lessons, dances and we also helped hand out magazines in the village as part of the church´s work in the countryside. Everyone had a good time and it was a great session of bonding with the youth and leaders of the church we´ll be working with. And there´s nothing like waking up to a beautiful Peruvian dawn in the lush green hills, followed by a quick donkey ride before breakfast :)
Love, Alice C & the Peru team

Arrived!

¡Hola!

¡First post! We arrived in Cajamarca this morning after three flights and a night in Lima.

The travelling went better than I could ever have hoped for, apart from the grumpy Iberia check in man at Heathrow... he wouldn´t let us sit together so we asked another person, and she bumped us up to premium business! I don´t think I´ve grinned so much in a long time! I won´t go on about it but the menu was full of veal and we got told off for adjusing the seats too much!! I´ve got to say we did feel a little guilty, but that disappeared with a toch of the massage button!

We were met at the airport by Wilfredo who took us to our hotel in our own coach and generally sorted us out which was amazing. Lima is as you´d expect, busy, bright, hot and smelly. We ate at pizza hut and went to bed.

We got out internal flight this morning and were met at the airport by Miriam and others from Warmis. We have a welcoming service at church tonight and tomorrow we go on a youth camp till Saturday.

I am about to get timed out, so adios for now...

Joel & Team Peru