Scripture Union

Party in Urubamba

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Tonight Billy and I walked down to the main square in Urubamba, where we are staying with a team from Dearborn and North Carolina, to a little cafe for a chance to hang out and a little quiet time away from work teams. On our way to the cafe, we were sidetracked by the crowd that was growing in the main square of Urubamba. After stopping to ask what was going on, we found out that in about 20 minutes, there were going to be fireworks and a band playing to celebrate some sort of festival in the town.

Well, as it is Peru, 20 minutes quickly turned into 2 hours before the fireworks actually started. The firework show we saw tonight would never have been allowed to happen in the States.

The night began with 7  papier-mache bull heads with fireworks loaded on top of them. Each bull head had one person underneath it who ran through the street while the fireworks were going off. We were sitting with the rest of the crowd, just 20 feet from the men running with the fireworks. Each bull started off with sparklers and various colored fireworks, and then quickly turned into shooting fireworks, which frequently landed into the crowd. It could have been described as firework roulette. Definitely not something that would ever happen in the States.

While it seems like the bulls would have been the main attraction, the biggest firework attraction was next. Instead of launching fireworks traditionally like we would do in the States, they had built a tower, or castillo, (castle) of fireworks which were lit one by one. Just as dangerous as the aforementioned bulls, the tower was not even 20 meters from where we were sitting on the steps of the church. Somebody lit the first fuse on the tower and it lit up the sky with shooting sparks and twirling colors. Shortly after lighting the first of six fuses, many little boys ran over to the fireworks and tower to play in the sparks and throw lit fuses and sparklers at each other, which was quite hilarious to watch.

After the firework finale, the band continued to play a few more selections that sound exactly alike and even ended with the same three note progression and people shot some other small fireworks into the sky.

It was a party in Urubamba!

New Soccer Jerseys

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Soccer Jerseys, originally uploaded by katherinebruder.

Today the team from Dearborn distributed new soccer jerseys to the 43 boys that live at the Casa Girasoles Valle Sagrado (the Sacred Valley home located 1 hour outside of Cusco).

It was a joy to watch Héctor, the house father, distribute the jerseys to his boys, and to see the boys excitedly put on their new jersey.

The team brought over 200 jerseys this summer to be distributed between the Valle Sagrado, Ica and Kawai homes.

Thank you to the Dearborn Soccer Club and all of it’s players that donated a jersey to the boys in Peru.

Two Days in Lima

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After returning from Iquitos with a Scottish school group from Kyle Academy, I have two days of freedom in Lima before returning to the airport to pick up some friendly faces from Dearborn.

While most of Peru is considered by foreigners to be rustic, rough, underdeveloped, or any other adjective that is along those lines, it is very easy in the city of Lima to live an “American” lifestyle.

For my two days in Lima, I was able to stay by myself at the apartment of the General Director of the entire Scripture Union organization, which is located in Miraflores.

I feel pretty comfortable walking around Lima and the rest of Peru, but in Miraflores, I feel like I’m back in Dearborn. I don’t stand out as much since this is where many other foreigners live. Not only is Miraflores a nice and beautiful city, it’s fairly quiet, whereas the city of Lima has a lot of noise pollution – lots of car horns all the time.

Since I had two free days in Miraflores, I indulged in a little “American living” and went to the movies last night, walked around the neighborhood where the apartment is located, went to a delicious restaurant that is comparable to Au Bon Pain or a Panera, and even killed some time at the local Starbucks catching up on emails and updating this website.

I even managed to see quite a few Coach handbags being carried around in Miraflores – a few fake but most of them real.

Amazon Hope 2

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Amazon Hope 2, originally uploaded by katherinebruder.

One of Scripture Union’s six programs in Peru is a medical mission, mostly based at a clinic in Belén, which is the slum neighborhood of Iquitos. In addition to the clinic, SU operates two medical boats, the Amazon Hope 1 and Amazon Hope 2, which are exclusively funded by the Vine Trust, a non-profit organization located in Edinburgh, Scotland.

For three weeks a month, the boats travel up and down the tributaries of the Amazon River where they treat people in the villages along the rivers with minor medical and dental care. The ship is staffed by Peruvian and foreign medical teams from the US and UK that spend 7-10 days living, eating and working on the boat.

36 hours: 5 buses, 2 boats, 1 airplane and very little sleep

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In the past 36 hours, I used almost every form of transportation possible in Peru. Short of riding a train, I traveled down from the Casa Girasoles Kusi home nearby Yungay/Huaraz, to Lima and then up to Iquitos to the Casa Girasoles Puerto Alegria home – all in 36 hours.

The long day started Saturday morning in Kusi. My Scottish team, which was a school group from Kyle Academy in Ayr, Scotland, spent Saturday morning making hundreds of adobe bricks and preparing to depart Kusi later that day. Midday, they broke from working to participate in the traditional Pachamanca meal that ends each week with work teams. Pachamanca is a delicious meal that is cooked in the ground. The fire starts at 4am the morning of the meal and food prepared and wrapped in banana leaves are dropped into the pit to cook on the hot coals for 1 hour. The pachamanca is traditionally followed by the Peruvian vs. American/Scottish soccer game, where Peru always wins.

Around 5pm, we boarded two combis (which are Peruvian minivan taxis) to head down to Yungay, to meet our bus fletado (private bus, like a Greyhound), which would drive through the night and take us directly to the Lima airport for us to meet our 4am flight to Iquitos. Typically the trip between Yungay and Lima takes 8 or 9 hours, depending on how many stops you make and how fast the driver takes on the winding mountainous roads.

Miraculously, it only took 7 hours for us to descend from the Andes into Callao and the Lima airport. This meant we arrived at the airport at a prompt midnight, four hours before our flight was supposed to depart! Thankfully there was no line at the LAN counters and we were able to check our belongings without much hassle. By 12:30 we headed upstairs to the restaurants and stores. All that was left to do was wait for our 4:35am flight.

We proceeded downstairs to the domestic departure waiting room, where we were told that there was bad weather (which means extreme rain) in Iquitos and the flight would be delayed 1 hour. After 20 minutes, the flight was delayed yet again for another hour. Surprisingly the team of students was unusually upbeat and having a grand time talking back and forth, watching One Tree Hill (apparently it’s quite popular among some of them), and playing mind/card tricks with their teachers.

We finally made it out of Lima around 6:30 in the morning, two hours after our original flying time. You would think that after this ordeal we would have easy travels the rest of the way to Puerto Alegria.

Not quite.

Once we arrived in Iquitos, we met an English couple that would accompany us during the day in Iquitos and few days at the Casa Girasoles home in Puerto Alegria. Our first stop in Iquitos was to drive 1.5 hours to the port of Nauta, where we would meet up with a Scottish medical work team that was heading out on the Amazon Hope 2 for ten days. One of SU’s six ministries is a medical mission, which takes place primarily at a clinic in Belen (the slum neighborhood of Iquitos), and on two boats the organization owns, the Amazon Hope 1 and Amazon Hope 2.

Before we even reached Nauta, the bus that we were traveling on managed to overheat – from a mixture of the long distance, extreme heat in Iquitos, many hills we climbed, and old machinery – causing us to switch buses and join the medical team that was traveling ahead of us. Finally, we made it to Nauta.

The boat, which has capacity for the 10 medical volunteers, a staff of Peruvian doctors, and ship crew, departed Nauta and took us on a 45-minute journey down the river. The scenery was beautiful, and seemed very exciting to travel down one of the Amazon tributaries for ten days.

After Nauta, we returned to Iquitos (in a bus that didn’t overheat) to have lunch at the traditional Ari’s Burgers – one of the only gringo (a name for a white person, non-Peruvian) friendly restaurants in Iquitos. By this time we were all exhausted, hungry, and hot from the hot and humid weather. A cold water and frozen lemonade were desperately needed.

Following Ari’s we re-boarded the bus to take us to the port where we would meet the boat owned by Puerto Alegria. From this port, we made the 45-minute journey down the River Itaya to the Casa Girasoles home in Puerto Alegria.

36 hours with 1 plane, 5 buses, 2 boats and we finally made it.