The past month and a half has been crazy busy and also crazy amazing. We started our trip by almost immediately leaving Lima for Iquitos, a city surrounded by rainforest. We went to prepare for the YMI explorer team that we´d be working with just a few days later. The six-member team (Lynn, Cindy, Max, Katie, Cobi, and Emily) was a ton of fun. We also had a few English/Spanish translators there: Marveli, Daniel, Jonatan, Elizabeth, and Liz. During the week-and-a-half trip, we worked in kids programs and aided ministry lessons in order to provide support for the YMI team. We both grew very attached to some of those we left in Iquitos and were very sad to return to Lima. We don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully describe the impact Iquitos had on us.
We got a few days in Lima to rest and help serve food to a Chinese team that was with Julio’s church at the time. During these few days we also met our English/Spanish translators for our Amazonas trip: Anthony and Leyla. After the weekend was over, we met the next team we’d be working alongside. This seven-person team (Carl, Robin, Tim, Beth, Ben, Zach, and Kevin) was from Maryland. They’re pretty awesome, and also pretty tall. We felt like dwarves. Then we boarded a flight to Chiclayo, where we stayed in a hotel for a night. The next day, we got on an eight-hour bus ride to a city called Bagua where we again spent the night in a hotel. The final day of travel was a six-hour ride in trucks to the side of a river where we were picked up in peque-peques (motorized dugout canoes) for a short ride to Hope Mountain, the seminary/church/whatever-else-it-was where we’d be staying. For the next five days, we worked with churches up and down the river to minister to youth, which involved a lot more trips in peque-peques. Of course, lots of other fun things happened too. We ate zuri (grubs), achuni (monkey), armadillo, and some sort of hawk. We played frisbee, had water fights during boat rides, and grew very close as a team. Amazonas had some peculiar challenges as well. The largest was probably the double-translation. Everything was translated first to Spanish, then to Awajun (a local language of the region), so messages had to be short. Overall though, Amazonas was also amazing, and we were sad to leave there too.
Now, we’re back in Lima for the remainder of the time. We can’t believe that we have only a little over a week left! For right now we are preparing to teach a Sunday school class at Julio’s church and mostly just hanging out. We’ve also gotten to see Leyla and Anthony a few times, which we really enjoy. Rosario’s cooking should be a national treasure, and we’ve lost count of how many desserts they’ve brought home for us. We’ve also tried cau-cau and cuy in the last week! We are a bit like helpless puppies, staying where we are told and eating everything, but we are certainly enjoying it!
Our question for our last week is this: what’s next? What changes when we get home, and what doesn’t? We have to ask ourselves what God has in store next and how our experiences have been preparing us for that. We will be continuing to ask these questions in the coming weeks and months, and we would love it if you would pray with us about this.
That’s all for now, but we’ll probably be updating one more time at the end of our trip!
~Jenna and Ashley (Team Peru)