Ica

Dearborn team arrives in Peru

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Painting, originally uploaded by katherinebruder.

Week 5 in Peru was spent with some familiar faces. A team from my home church, First Presbyterian Dearborn, arrived very late last Friday night with a couple surprises. Unbeknownst to me, my mother and brother joined the team and are down here for two weeks working with me. They told me that everybody at our church knew that they would be joining me down here, even before I left for Peru! 



We spent a week at the Kawai campsite, which is about 1 hour south of Lima on the Pacific Ocean. Now, even though the site is on the ocean, it is not beach weather. Since it is winter here in Peru, it is almost always cloudy and frequently it mists. I have rarely seen it rain here, it just feels like somebody is lightly spitting on you.
 
Due to a labor strike in the area, we are not mixing cement and doing heavy construction work like in previous years, but rather, we are striping the paint from one of the main buildings and repainting it with a clean white paint. The building really needed to be repainted and looks much better now.

This is my 8th time spending a week in Kawai. Every year, I return to this location with my team from Dearborn to see the boys that live in the Casa Girasoles Kawai. It is great to see old friends, one year older. A few nights ago, our team presented the boys with a quilt that some of the women in our church made for them, and we also made t-shirts with all of our handprints on them. Now, you would think that a 12 or 16 year-old-boy would not want to make a t-shirt, let alone wear it, but they were all excited to participate in the project. Some even put their shirts on right away, even before the paint was dry.

Now, we are in the desert city of Ica, which is about 4 hours south of Lima. Being in the desert, it is nice and warm and sunny! We are one of the first teams to stay at the Ica site in the Casa Girasoles house. There are 22 boys that live here, many of which moved into the center after the devastating earthquake that hit Peru last August (the epicenter of the earthquake was very close to Ica).


We spend the mornings working at the site, the afternoons visiting local schools and the evenings are spent with the 22 boys, who range between 6 and 15 years old. 
 
On Sunday, we visited a local church, El Shaddai, which we have gone to every year for 7 years. It was great to see Nestor & Carolina, who used to work with Scripture Union. It was also a pleasant surprise to see their newest addition to the family, Nestor Matais, who was only 12 days old! 
 


This Friday, we are going to surprise the boys that live at the Casa Girasoles Ica by visiting them at school. The home father, Augusto, explained to me that all of the boys have told their friends that a group of Americans have come to stay with them at their house and want to show us, their American friends, to their Peruvian friends.



First Two Weeks

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It’s been almost two weeks since I left Michigan for a summer of working and traveling around the great Incan country of Peru.

For those of you that don’t know, I am spending my summer volunteering with Scripture Union of Peru, and organization that primarily works with former abandoned boys around the country, but also many other things. As an “intern”, I travel with the various work teams from around the US and UK, who come to Peru to work at the organization’s homes for abandoned boys, in local schools and do construction work. A typical day for a work teams includes a morning of construction work, an afternoon of songs and games at a school, and an evening with the boys that live at the various centers across the country (like an orphanage). (I’m working on uploading photos from this year, but accessing the Internet from my laptop is a rare occurrence – this is the first time I have been able to check my email in 2 weeks!).

Upon arrival to Peru, I joined a group from Southwood Presbyterian in Huntsville, Alabama. The 17-person team was made up high school juniors, seniors, recent graduates, and some parents. I, being the only one from the North, was quickly dubbed “the Yankee” and was also the one with the accent. Any time I didn’t know what they were talking about, or asked for a pop instead of a Coke, or pointed out one of our many little differences, it was explained as a “Northern thing.” I spent a part of the week with the entire team at the SU home in Kawai and a small two-day trip to the desert city of Ica, before a majority of them traveled to another work site in Cusco. The rest of the week, I returned to Kawai with the 5 remaining members to continue working, visiting schools, and playing games with the former abandoned boys.

After taking the Southwood team to the airport, I met up with a good friend, Linda, who is in charge of the entire Scripture Union schools program in Peru. Under Linda, there are workers in each of the regions and major cities of Peru. Each regional worker has many volunteers who visit their local schools everyday sharing positive values such as honesty, respect, integrity, etc. Many of the children that these people work with do not have positive home lives and are not learning these things from their parents or teachers. Each volunteer spends about one or two hours in a school, visiting classrooms and playing with the children.

This week, I am with Linda and a group of school teachers from Southlake Christian Academy in Charlotte, NC in Arequipa (city in the southern part of Peru). We arrived in Arequipa after a 14 hour bus ride from the capital city, Lima and jumped right into working! We are visiting various schools all day along, and at night, the teachers are sharing teaching tips with the SU volunteers and local teachers.

On Wednesday, I leave the group of teachers to head back to Lima to meet yet another team from North Carolina. We will spend the night in Lima and then the next day fly up to the northern city of Iquitos, which is located in the Amazon jungle. It’s quite hot and humid in Iquitos, and should be quite interesting…. After my week in Iquitos, my team from First Presbyterian Dearborn will be here for two weeks. It will be nice to see some familiar faces from home!