Hormones and Yo Quiero Ver Te: Peru Day 2

After our long night of planes, claims, and buses, we were able to sleep in until 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. I decided to forgo a shower, which turned out to be a good idea since all the water was cold. We had a nice breakfast of a fried egg, two hard rolls, and this drink that tasted like a combination of oatmeal and eggnog. Thankfully, we had nothing planned for the day other than going to a church around 6 o'clock or so. We headed down from breakfast and decided to play some soccer.

Let me tell you a little something about soccer. First of all, people from other countries typically know how to play soccer. It's wildly popular pretty much everywhere. Secondly, soccer requires a whole lot of running. I played football in high school and absolutely hated days when we had to run. The great thing about football was that you would run really fast for about 4-7 seconds and then get a break until the next play. Not so in soccer. In fact, the vast majority of soccer is running. So, we played for about an hour and a half or so. It was great fun, although our Peruvian friends made us look like fools. We eventually played a pretty good game of ultimate frisbee as well.

The place where we stayed was a Baptist camp type place. There was a cafeteria up at the top of the hill and a bunkhouse down the hill where we slept. Thankfully we were able to room with our spouses while we were there. It was a pretty funny sight, Laura and I had our own room of 5 bunk beds. Right outside of our rooms was a nice sized field with two soccer goals, as well as a basketball court set off to the side. What caught us most off guard when we stepped out from our rooms that first day was the mountains all around us. We had come in so late that we weren't able to see them through the darkness, but we were surrounded by huge mountains. We could not have asked for a better place to stay.

We ate all of our meals for the week there in the cafeteria since we knew that it was "clean" food. Eventually it turned into one big guessing game. The breakfast edition was "How will the egg that accompanies our two hard rolls be cooked this morning?" Lunch and dinner was a contest to see how many ways we could eat rice and chicken (though there was some beef in there a meal or two). All the food was very good though, even if we were sick of rice by the end of the week.

That night we were able to celebrate the fourth anniversary of a church in Huaycan. We arrived at a park downtown and jumped out into our first experience with the Peruvian people. Laura and I followed Jim and Betty around, eventually meeting the pastor of the church. He led us up onto the roof of the church where most of the women of the congregation were cleaning dishes that had just been used in cooking a serving the bull that the people just enjoyed. The people were friendly and obviously very curious. Most sat and stared at us for a while, though we were able to talk with a handful through an interpreter. The question of the day came from a lady that Laura and I started talking with about our parents and other things. She asked, "What animal do you kill when you want to celebrate something in America?" Jim explained that we bought our food, which was mind blowing to her. We ended up talking about the pros and cons of injecting chickens with hormones, which is probably the thing I would list as least likely to talk about on a mission trip. Regardless, the people were absolutely wonderful and hospitable to no end.

The church service was very different in a lot of ways from services in America, and even different from the church service I attended in Venezuela. Lucho, who was our contact Jim and Betty have worked with over the past three years, led worship for half an hour or so. The band was an eclectic mix, sporting traditional instruments such as guitar, drums, and keyboard, but in addition to these instruments there was an assortment of different Peruvian flutes, a saxophone, and a tiny stringed instrument that looked like a mandolin. Lucho was the lead singer, and man did he have a great voice. They sang several songs that none of us were familiar with, but we did sing Open the Eyes of My Heart. If you have never been in a service where there are multiple languages being sung at the same time, I highly recommend it. When God promises in Revelation 7 that there will be people from every tribe, nation, and tongue around the throne in heaven, it is a beautiful picture to catch a glimpse of that here on earth.

Jim was the guest preacher for the night. He preached on the Parable of the Lost Coin, Luke 15:8-10. He did a great job of preaching and our friend Emanuel interpreted. After the sermon, there were a few questions for our group, as well as prayer. We left about an hour and a half or more after the service began, and the people were still singing when we left! It was an awesome experience and encouraging for the work that we would be doing in churches later in the week. We all went to bed that night excited for the work that lay ahead of us, knowing that God has been at work in the Peruvian church long before we landed.