**SORRY, my computer won’t allow me to put pictures on here, I have to figure out why…until then, keep up with my pictures at markstratmann.com, I just posted more pics in the Peru 2 Folder**
Our time here in Chincha Peru has drawn to an end. I sit with my thoughts, and try to process what all I’ve seen, and put it into some words. Peru is an interesting country thus far, and we have one more Peruvian environment to see, the Jungle / Amazon area. Here are my thoughts, not necessarily in any chronological order.
We landed in Lima, Peru on January 6th, 2008. My thoughts of strange customs searches and headaches of problems with visas were quickly dismissed as I got the random search of sending my bag through an x-ray machine and moving on to immigration. That headache was gone, and soon enough, a man speaking only spanish looks loosely over my passport and stamps my first stamp on the shiny new passport. OK…that was TOO easy…there must be another search or something..nope. It was all too easy of a process.
Our first night started off in a hotel in Lima…a city of 9 million people. I found my first thoughts in Peru thinking about how hot it was at 2 in the morning. Not being a huge fan of the heat and humidity, I was glad that I was too tired to care, so I sucked down some water out of the box of filtered water, and drifted away into my room. My room was perfectly crafted with a window that was jammed open, a fan with no guard on it, a hard bed, and my personal bathroom. The bathroom was clean, complete with the trash can to place used toilet paper in…apparently you don’t flush that here! It was 2:00 AM, and the buzz of the fan allowed me to drift off to sleep…we had to be awake by 6:00 to get breakfast and be on the “race” around Lima and on to Chincha…our ministry destination for the month.
Race day was just too exciting…I never imagined that 6 people could fit into a small taxi with the driver laughing as he drove us into the mystery of our next location…and the taxi is a car that 99% of the people in the States would have placed in the junk yard! We buzzed around without any sense of security as traffic lights and turn signals are obviously replaced with honks and hand signals. I wonder what side of the road they drive on here…it took a long time to decipher that they still drive on the right side of the road, but it’s merely a suggestion in Peru.
On our bus ride from Lima to Chincha, a short nap was gotten in the midst of watching the landscape. I was not sure what I thought the landscape of Peru was going to be, but desert like conditions were not on the horizon. Poverty stricken huts speckled the side of the Pan-American highway. These are the huts you only see on television, why am I seeing it? Is this really where I’ll be living for the next month? Yes…it is. We arrived in Chincha with only one thing on my mind…food. We had eaten in Lima, but the excitement and exhilaration of being in Peru didn’t make my appetite do much of anything, but now it was time to eat.
We got to the end of the race destination, and found our contact…rested for a moment and finally got some food. My first meal in Chincha was Pollo a la Brasa…Chicken with fries…YAY! something I can eat does exist here in Chincha. We made our way to Iglisia Emanual, the church we would set up our tents for the month…and set up camp in the back of the yard…right next to the goat pens. It was just wonderful.
Our team has spent our time here in Chincha working in a new community called Los Jardines. It is a small village that was devistated by the earthquake last August, and is still very young in the rebuilding stages. The homeowners nearly all lost their entire village made of adobe (bricks made out of mud) and have gotten some assistance from Japan to build temporary homes out of thatch. The problem is that none of them are in a financial position to perminately rebuild their homes. These “temporary” homes are slowly becoming perminant homes. Throughout all of this, they have had only one spigot of running water for approximately 30 families, a few privet bathrooms (which equate to a hole in the ground with a few rotten boards overtop of it), and only about 4 young trees…and a LOT of dust. Most homes have a plastic roof covering the ragged shelters, leaking water in whenever it rains. Another of my blogs describes our time and projects there, so I won’t go back into it here.
My first couple weeks here I found difficult personally. Living in a desert really works on me, and I realized the need for green plants in my life. I didn’t mind our living conditions, taking showers out of a bucket, living out of a tent, it’s all fine, but the heat and dust got too me and gave me a bad attitude, and I often found myself complaining all the time about one thing or another. I needed an out, so a few of us went to the highlands…high in the Andes mountains. It was a wonderful trip…I wrote a blog about that as well, so I won’t get into that trip either. After that trip I was refreshed and ready to take on the rest of our time here in Chincha. My mood improved and my outlook was much better, still can’t say that I loved the desert, but I had a refreshed look on life!
Peru has proven to be a really interesting place. From day one, I realized that people don’t measure distances in miles or kilometers, they measure it based on how long it will take some form of public transportation to get you there. Nobody owns cars, everyone takes either a Moto (a small 3 person vehicle), a taxi (a small station wagon typically), a Combi (a minivan like bus), or a full fledged bus. Ask someone…how far is it to ___(fill in the blank)___, and your response will be a measure of minutes or hours, not miles or kilometers. People here are extremely welcoming. Our first time in Los Jardines was filled with people welcoming us into their homes, and offering us food (which they had very little of) or drinks. Children here are the next best thing to community children. Kids generally play all over the neighborhood, playing consists of soccer or volleyball (volleyball often is played without the net…maybe a line in the ground, usually just bopping the ball around for HOURS). I recall one instance of a child carrying around a baby, and when asked who the baby was or who the parents were, the child had no idea who the baby was…and that was not only OK, it was normal.
Poverty here isn’t the same as I have experienced in the U.S., here having a cow stolen or lost means much more than an inconvience. They don’t have a loss and end up at the insurance company to replace damaged goods, or to the mortgage company to borrow money to start fresh again. It instead forces you to depend more on your friends, family, and neighbors. Without strong relationships with them, hard times could easily turn into devastating times.
It doesn’t take much to see the variety of lives here. Just blocks from the president’s palace will take you to some of the most painstakingly poverty stricken areas I’ve ever seen. The people of Peru seem to work to survive, not work to prosper…it’s a different mindset, and I have yet to decide which is better. I see many sadder faces than happy faces while sitting in the plaza in the middle of Chincha. Not that they don’t have happiness, as MANY of the people here are filled with joy and welcoming lifestyles, but I see many sad faces here. I loved serving God alongside Pastor Nester as his smile would turn any frown upside down…and the children are a smile waiting to happen at all times. Simple things that you do for people…a home visit, a greeting with a friendly smile, and smiles emerge from the faces here. Happiness is often hidden just below the surface in many cases.
Here at the end of this month, I will indeed miss Chincha in my own way…I know that my personal struggles with the landscape and the change in lifestyle will drift away as the bus leaves and be replaced with thoughts of Pastor Nester and Pastor Desi and his wife, and the accommodating ways of the Chinchian people.
Interesting facts:
Gas is approx $4-5 US Dollars per gallon here
Rice is served with everything, including pasta
Ice cream in the Mountains is special
Sublime candy bars are the best (kinda like a hershey bar with nuts)
Morochas cookies are yummy, kinda like Keebler’s fudge stripe cookies..kinda
Chicken is a main staple with rice
I don’t like any of the sauces I’ve had on the chicken
I like the K-Fe restaurant with Crapes with Nutella
A Mixto-Completo is yummy (sandwich with ham, cheese, and EGG…yummmm)
My favorite form of transportation is a Moto
Learning other languages is very difficult for me
Inca Kola is the beverage of choice here
Large cash transactions in Peru require US Dollars (which is available at most ATMs)
Something in the air/water/environment makes our team sick a lot
The Andes Mountains are amazing
Goats snore
In Peru wedding bands are worn on the right hand instead of the left
Volleyball is a street sport, and is played often without the net
Sandboarding is fun
The two main languages here are Castellano (Spanish…main) and Quechua
Rumor is that spanish movie translations often use Peruvians because of their clear dialect
