| Hey guys, sorry about that joke I told about updating this thing every week! went to the uttermost and thought their internet would work! I wrote this email the other day to send out to people, and it captures my feelings pretty well I think!
sorry it´s been so long since I´ve updated you all! I have pretty much been without communication for a month now! I got to use the internet twice in Santiago, but it was so slow that I could only send out like one or two emails, and really I couldn´t check any! Right now I am in a big booming city called Ica, and was able to shower and communicate for the first time in a month!!! So let me tell you a little bit about my summer!
The village I am living in is definitly in the uttermost parts of the world. It takes the public transportation somtehing like 6 or 7 hours to get out to our little village, and this transportation, in all seriousness, is like a seven hour wooden roller coaster! pretty much 15 minutes into the ride, I was ready to give up yesterday! but God is good, we made it to Ica without too many problems, no falling of the mountain or anything! Pretty much when we start out on the way to Santiago, you leave the city of Ica and drive for about an hour in the desert, then you reach the mountains and you basically see nothing but mountains for miles and miles. (and when I say nothing, unless you are in the very front of the bus, you will not see any of the road. I´m talking 5 hours of driving right next to the edge of the road!) It is kinda cool, because you can see all the different ways that they grow food on the mountains, like they showed us in the history books in like eighth grade, with the stair step looking things on the side of the mountain? these mountains are just covered in those feilds! they grow corn, patatoes, and corn, and more corn! I am telling you, in the uttermost, you will eat corn and patatoes and rice until you are blue in the face!
In Santiago, it is the big city in the Andes. We are in a district which is the most poor in all of Peru. Huaytara is an area with just a bunch of adobe houses which don´t have running water or really electricity most of the time. Really, in Santiago we are in the creme de la creme, the richest part of huaytara. There is one computer with internet, and one phone for the entire village. There is a river that runs through the valley below the village (where we wash our clothes and hang them on rocks to dry) and really, we are staying in the nicest hotel there. There is nothing but cement floors (which is actually a tremendous luxery I have found!) and spickets where water comes out to brush our teeth, and ocasionally wash our hair! there´s no showers, if you really wanted to get clean, you´d have to go to the river, which is just akward, so we don´t really do that... it´s mostly the kids who wash in the river, once you hit a certain age, it´s just not so cool anymore! cleanliness isn´t really much of an option. hot water is to drink, not fr anything else. you boil the water for about 20 minutes before it´s safe to drink. Yep, Santiago is the lap of luxery for us, there is no cars, only about 2 that are taxis, and a crazy bus that comes every day to take people to Ica.
In this luxerious town, there are about 700-1000 people, but they are spread out throughout the mountians. Of all those people, there are 40 believers and 2 churches. of all those "believers," 10 probably actually are practicing. But we have seen opposition from one ofthe churches even... so this is our village. that opposition we faced was from a fellow believer. This is not to mention the catholic opposition we have faced. In the catholic churches there, there is idol worship. Then, mixed with the idol worship, there are people who worship mother earth on the side. (just a little side note, right now in our internet cafe in the city of Ica, a group of Hare Krishnas, an evangelistic group of hindus just walked by chanting to their god. my teamate Kathryn and I saw it, and she said, wow, the devil is really trying to work, but he´s not gonna win!) This is really a forgotten pocket, the priests from the catholic church show up like a few times every year. we were basically chewed out by two catholic missionaries there about being in their village and trying to lead people astray. In this village, we traveled to get there, and there is no catholic church even there. there is no church whatsoever. and the woman we stay with in this village (called Sangayaico) has a little 2 or 3 year old daughter who has lots of nightmares and wakes up screaming. After she calms her daughter down, she rubs an egg or sulfur al over her daughter´s body. Afterwards, she´ll crack the egg into a glass of water, and if parts of it float to the top, she believes the evil spirit has left. The sulfur, she will throw into the propane burners she cooks on, and if it sparks up a certain way, she knows the spirit has left. The devil really has led these people into fear, and they don´t know the truth of God. In another village we hiked about half a day to get to (up the mountain and back down, which the villagers would gasp when they heard we went to that annex of Santiago, they would say it´s so far! and a lot of times when you have to climb a long way they will say "¡¡¡¡¡es arrrrrrrrrrriba!!!!!") we had a woman who was a believer tell us that her chickens sing at night when the ghost of her sister comes to visit. pray for these people, they are still so ensnared by the lies of the devil.
We have to hike quite a bit, we go to sleep early at night and wake up early in the morning to screaming children, chickens, donkeys, goats, `pigeons that land heavy on our tin roof, they sound like someone threw a dog on the roof, and when the dog landed it started frantically digging. it´s such a funny thing, every morning Kathrine and I wake up laughing, and telling jokes about the uttermost to each other!!! It´s not easy to be an american in this place!!! we are adjusting though, we are learning quechua (the ancient incan language that is probably harder than chinese to learn), learning to be greatful for all the food they give us even when it tastes real bad or we saw it die just that day. Fresh food, right??? don´t get that in the US! hehe, the best was these past few days, when our man of peace and his wife were celebrating their birthday, and Zenon (our man of peace) came in dancing and saying something to us in quechua. He jokes with us and speaks in quechua when we speak in English. Then his wife turned from the stove and, laughing, said "he said we´re killing the pig for some birthday ribs, it´s gonna be delicious! do you want to come watch us kill the pig?" I love our man of peace, Zenon, and his wife Nelie, I wish you all could meet this brother in Christ! He would teach us all a thing or two about service!! We are so blessed to have him!
We have a children´s service every friday night in the plaza in Santiago at 6:00. This friday was amazing, because like 6 boys accepted Christ! They are working on memorizing Romans 10:9, and they shouted it through the dark streets at night to us, when we saw their school teachers getting drunk. God is so good!!! He is our light, even in the darkest night!!!
We also had an amazing thing happen in Sangayaico!!! When we met this woman we stay with, Mery, we talked to her about the gospel, and she imediately said that the town needs to hear this, so she took us around to introduce us to the people of the village. She toook us to a store of a very old woman, named granny Sara (abuelita Sara) She later told us that this woman was one of the hardest in the village, she had a very hard heart because her children, even though they lived in the same village, never visit, ignore her, etc... all 7 of her kids never visit, she´s all alone. But when she heard the gospel, she kept asking us how you pray. The way she said it was like she was asking how she could talk to God, but she never liked our answers. We would get frustrated by her responses to our answers, and we would tell her we´d pray for her and come by the next day. Well for three days she asked us how to pray, and finally on the Third day, Kathryn said "do you mean how to pray to accept Jesus?" and the granny just sighed a sigh of relief, and was like YES! So we have a believer, a granny in Christ in the village of Sangayaico now. THe funny thing is that God used a woman who was trained by the Jehovah´s witnesses to he`lp explain why she doesn´t have to pray to saints or the idols in the church. It was amazing, because when she did, it was so right on, we thought she was a believer, but didn´t find out until later that she was trained in the Bible by the Jehovah´s witnesses. She only believes what they believe though because they actually took time to teach her about the Bible. To me, this was encouraging, because the people seem so standoffish, but when they heaR that we´re here to share about the Bible, they want to listen! They want to know God´s word, they don´t want to be forgotten!! They are in such a lonely place where life is so hard, and they really have nothing to live for but beer and the next meal. God loves these people, and even though we don´t see much fruit, I know our presence is so encouraging to them, and so threatening to the darkness they live in. Our God is so BIG! So strong and so mighty, there´s nothing our God cannot do! 
one thing I think i forgot to say in this email is the kids program on friday nights. at 6 on friday nights we have a kids program and the kids came last week in the dark because the power was out. well, we could tell the Spirit was moving, and Elliot was giving the message while I translated, and before I could even get teh words out that we would pray with whoever wanted to accept Jesus, the boy in the back raised his hand! I wasn´t even asking! And so it was cool, because we were going to teach them a verse, and so we sent the other kids with Kathryn to pray for Jesus, and she led them while Elliot and I taught the verse. well only two kids stayed behind, and one was like Ï´ve already done this, I´m the pastor´s son. It was so cool! then as we were teaching the verse, the kids were getting loud and excited about learning this verse (Romans 10.9) and we heard the teachers just a few feet away getting drunk. These kids were listening to their teachers getting waisted. as we were walking away, the kds walked us to dinner, and we asked them if their teachers were getting drunk, and htey were like ¨´ yeah, but it´s ok, we kow better because we have the word of God!¨ and they were yelling the word of God that they had memorized at the top of their lungs on this dark, drunken street. God is so good, isn´t He???? He is so big and mighty, even in the little people! |
hehe! Pray for the discipleship of Philemon, Zenon and his wife, the Abuelitas and Mary. Pray that people would give us time to teach them the Bible. Pray that we´d take the opertunities that God gives us! and for health! 