I am currently sitting here at 10:00 pm on Sunday night listening to N squad worship. I love the times when we are able to get together as a squad and worship as a corporate body. This night completes our first week in Peru. This month looks a little different ministry wise because our entire squad is together. So we will be serving with a different ministry each week. Inca Link, the ministry organization we are partnering with this month, has several ministry opportunities available so we will be able to experience most of them during our time here.
This past week we were able to serve with a guy named Joca, a guy who has such a heart for the kids around Victor Raul (the neighborhood we are staying at in Trujillo) and who runs an outdoor ministry called Inca Thakhi. Monday afternoon we had a meeting with him to get some information about what we would be doing and to meet in intercession for our time together. He gave us some background information behind the ministry and what we are doing. Trujillo is the 3rd largest city in Peru and also the 3rd most dangerous. Gangs are very prominent in the area but they stay hidden by using kids to do their dirty work. They find locals and demand money from them; if the local gives excuses they’ll send someone to kill that person or a family member. If someone under 18 kills a person he is sent to prison for 8-10 years verses a lifetime for an older person so they recruit kids around 13-14 years old. A short time ago, a missionary family left Peru and gave Inca Link 3 sand-boards that they had never used. Inca Link had been praying about an outdoor ministry using the natural resources that God has blessed the area with so sand boarding ministry began. Their goal is to get the kids involved before the gangs can get to them.
Joca wanted us to pick a boy when we met them on Tuesday so we could write letters to them each day we were with them to give them encouragement and to make them feel important. The boy that I ended up writing to was a 15 year old named Pepe. He met us on the walk to the dunes and followed us to our location, he stayed apart from the group the whole time, never really conversing or communicating with us. The one time I got brave enough to board down I was having a hard time climbing back to the top of the dune, he came over and took my board (very quietly) making it a little easier for me to climb up. Joca said that this was one of the first times that he had actually came with them and that he had never been able to have a conversation with him because he was so shy.
Isaiah 43:19 “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”
