We made it! We survived the 60 hour bus ride from Quito, Ecuador to Cusco, Peru!
This month we are living at a small church called Calvary Chapel Cusco. The pastor and his wife are currently visiting the United States for several months so there is a Peruvian man named Henry who is taking care of the church while they are gone. He runs the youth group and lives here with us. I started calling him Sweet Henry. You’ll know why at the end of this blog.
The church is basically located on a runway. Planes fly right overhead all day and all night. All of us sleep on the floor of one room in the church, and Sweet Henry sleeps in a room next to us. He doesn’t speak any English.
Yesterday was our first day working here and he asked us to deep clean the church. We tackled the tool shed/laundry room. It was quite the undertaking, but organizing tool sheds has become an area of expertise for us. Within the first 5 minutes of work, one of my teammates, Bre, stepped in a small hole in the ground and really messed up her ankle. It swelled to the size of a baseball. She was laid up in our room all day icing her poor ankle while we cleaned, scrubbed, and organized.
The very first night of our stay, after attending the church’s Bible study, I went the bathroom to well…poop. To my dismay it was already FULL of poop. Like clogged to the max. Luckily there is another toilet in the church so I went over to that one only to find that it too was clogged to the max. Like. WHAT?! We are still unsure who the culprit was. Also…the church apparently lost all of their plungers.
I pulled Sweet Henry aside and alerted him of the situation. He laughed and assured me that he would take care of it and then walked outside. So I’m thinking, “Ok, I can hold my poop in for another hour or so”. Well several hours passed and Sweet Henry was nowhere to be found. I was getting desperate. Do I go out in the street and poop with the dogs? Long story short, I ended up pooping in a plastic bag, as did one of my other teammates, Courtney. You do what you gotta do, ya know? The rest of my team was asleep at this point and Courtney and I were sitting on the ground outside of the bathroom DYING laughing at the fact that we actually just pooped in a plastic bag. You know those deep belly laughs when you are almost crying?!
That’s when Sweet Henry returned…without a plunger. I asked him about the toilet situation, and he was like, “Oh is that still a problem?” I assured him that yes, it was a very big problem. He then said that he would take care of it in the morning. That’s when I went into panic mode. I was like, “Nope nope nope I am so sorry, but you and I are going to fix this right now.” What if I had to poop again in the night?! We were out of plastic bags! As Sweet Henry was wrapping his head around what his night was about to look like, poor Bre hobbled across the courtyard in the direction of the bathroom. It was one of the funniest moments in my entire life. Sweet Henry screamed and said, “Oh my gosh! I feel like I’m living in a horror movie! Poop everywhere, people hobbling around!”
That’s when the real fun began. Sweet Henry and I scrounged through the tool shed until we found some gloves and a metal clothes hanger. In between bursts of laughter, while jamming the clothes hanger down the toilet, Sweet Henry was crying out to the Lord asking why He had asked him to take care of the church while the pastor was gone. He kept saying, “Why me, God?! Why me?!” We also made a lot of deals that night. If Sweet Henry unclogged the toilet, we had to cook all of his meals for the rest of the month. 30 minutes later both toilets were unclogged and dear Sweet Henry was exhausted and traumatized. I honestly don’t know if I have ever laughed that hard in my entire life.
Sweet Henry said he will never forget that night. The next morning he left and returned with a toilet plunger saying it was our Christmas present. Ya know what they say about the importance of forming relationships with the locals? I think I nailed it. Nothing like belly laughing over a toilet full of poop.
Also Sweet Henry doesn’t know I pooped in a plastic bag. Sweet Henry, if you ever read this blog…I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.
