The Days are Long - A Peru Team Update

It seems like just yesterday we kicked off Training Camp with the students in the midst of flood weather and a tornado warning… but that was two weeks ago! Our travel “day” was long: we drove away from Training Camp on Sunday night at 7pm, spent a few hours sleeping in airports, flew from Chicago > Miami > Lima > Arequipa, and finally arrived at our home for the next few weeks at 10.30am Tuesday morning. And boy have we hit the ground running! It is truly amazing what can be accomplished over the course of a day when we are intentional with every hour that we have (and we have accomplished quite a lot since our arrival).

We spent Wednesday and Friday from 10am-9pm working with our friends Fernando and Sybil at Iglesia Cristiana Concordia. Morning work projects saw our team scraping several walls of old paint, priming them for future painting, organizing closet storage, washing windows, and clearing out an old garden for planting (Airlie was a paint scraping machine!). On Friday morning a few of our guys like Ransom and Noah helped out some local missionaries by using their muscle to dispose of heavy, old bathtubs, navigating them over a narrow spiral staircase and carefully lowering them to the ground.

In the afternoons, we did a lot of ministry prep for evening events such as creating balloon arches, planning games and activities, and practicing our puppet and drama performances. And then on Wednesday night the church combined their men’s, women’s, and children’s ministries, for a hybrid family event. Our Royal Servants started the program with two puppet performances (Cade and Lily are particularly animated with their puppet friends), followed by our drama team sharing the Gospel through story. Then our students took the kids into another room to play games and do crafts, while Kelsie and I along with Fernando and Sybil hosted a forum on biblical parenting. On Friday, our team hosted a casual night of fun for ministry kids in the area. Being a missionary/pastor kid can be a difficult role, and the heart of this event was to make sure that these children know that they are loved and of significant value. We hosted up to twenty children from the area (my kids included!) and our team loved them well via face painting, arts and crafts, card games, and an epic war with hundreds of ball pit balls. Naturally, much popcorn and Inca Cola was consumed during this event.

As I type this on Saturday night, our team is in the middle of hosting a multi-church youth event for high school students. They just finished performing their Gospel drama and followed it up with Ivy sharing her testimony of learning to trust God as her loving Father. Frankly, she totally killed it! Over the next hour we will be concluding the event enjoying smores at a campfire, and continuing to build relationships with our new Peruvian friends. Our team has been working so hard this week to serve the local church and I am very proud of their effort. Tomorrow, we will enjoy a local church service in the morning followed by an afternoon of well-earned rest.

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Jack Becker

Peru Mission Trip Leader