I haven’t explained much of what we have been doing here in Peru. We are staying with IncaLink, the same organization we were with last month in Ecuador doing different things each week. We live in an unfinished orphanage that we are helping to build and landscape. The roof isn’t sealed, the floors are un-smoothed concrete, there aren’t doors in the doorframes to the outside, and the showers don’t have curtains and some of the bathrooms don’t have roofs at all, but it’s home for this short period of time.
Each week we work with a different ministry connected with IncaLink. Our first week we worked at a daycare for kids age 4 to 15. It was interesting because we didn’t really have anything prepared for them when we first started going. My first day there, I was with the 4 and 5 year old kids and we just colored for the afternoon because it was raining. They were mostly just excited that we could flip them over in the air over and over. The next day I was with the 6 to 8 year olds and the teacher thought we were going to teach her class and it was an interesting afternoon. We tried to tell them the story of Jonah and the Whale, but it was a lot harder than we expected. At that point, I was the best Spanish speaker in my group because we had split up and our translator was with a different class, and I definitely do not have the ability to teach a room full of children in Spanish. After the story, we tried to play a game with them, but it took me 15 minutes of trying to explain it to the class with no progress, so I finally had to go get my teammate who speaks Spanish and it took him about 30 seconds. It was a rough afternoon. The next couple of days we just cleaned and painted at the daycare and played soccer outside with the kids. The kids at this daycare aren’t orphans and so I didn’t expect to hear from the director that they need all the love they can get. In my mind, if you have parents you are obviously loved and well taken care of, but these kids have parents who maybe work all the time or who are abusive or who just don’t want them in the first place. It was hard to look them in the eyes and know what they had to go home to even though it was just as hard to work with them during the day.
The second week in Peru my team was doing construction work at the compound where we live. It was one of the most physically exhausting weeks of my life. I’m pretty sure we hauled enough dirt to make a mud hut village somewhere in Africa. We spent a lot of time leveling out the dirt that we hauled so that concrete can be poured on top of it to lay a foundation for more buildings. I also helped to replant some grass (yes mom, I did some gardening). There was a lot of raking and shoveling that week, but there was also a lot of dancing and playing volleyball as well to even out the work load. I felt so accomplished after finishing our week of construction because you can physically see the difference you have helped to make at this place. The intern that we were working under, Tony, also did a great job of helping us to envision what the kids who are going to live here one day will get to experience from the work we have done. We made a place for a jungle gym and helped level the ground for more bedrooms and cleaned out weeds so that the kids who are going to live here will have a real home and not just a bed to sleep on without any real sense of belonging.
Our last ministry here in Peru was Sand-boarding, but I didn’t actually get the chance to go. I got to hang out with the kids there for a bonfire one night, but the rest of the week I actually was asked to help at a ministry called “Helping Hands” to sort through donated clothes for them. It was probably my favorite ministry of the entire month because it was such a relationship based ministry. I got to work with about ten people I usually don’t get to see on our squad and the contacts there were the nicest people ever. They paid for our lunch and rode the bus with us everywhere and invited us to sleep at their facility and just sincerely appreciated everything we did, even though it was just sorting and folding clothes.
This month has been pretty eclectic ministry wise and I loved switching between so many of them because it allowed us to stay on our toes and not get too comfortable or bored with our work. Next month in Bolivia we will be about 45 minutes outside La Paz in a pretty rural area working at a rehabilitation center for kids with different kinds of addictions. I’m pretty excited about it.
