Trip Completed

We are done with the trip and back in Rochester again, except for the 4 who stayed on to tour Machu Picchu.

I apologize that I haven't been able to blog for the last several days. I haven't had time or computer access.

Since my last blog we traveled from Huancayo to our 3rd site at La Merced.  En route we stopped at the Vista Hermosa children's project in Tarma for a couple hours to eat lunch with the staff and pass out Dress-A-Girl dresses and baseball caps to the kids.  What a joyful experience! We had to work quickly with the portion of the kids that were there on lunch break from school. Vista Hermosa is a Compassion International site but goes beyond what Compassion officially does.  Compassion provides meals 3 days a week for the kids but the crew there privately provides them the rest of the week as well.  With Compassion only one child in a family can be sponsored but Vista Hermosa provides services to many more children...Basically, Compassion International is just one of their main resources.  They are in a building project that includes tiling the dirt floors, building steps instead of muddy paths and hopefully adding 6 new classrooms sometime soon when God provides the money.  Additional classrooms will allow them to serve younger children.  We left the remaining dresses, caps, dolls and Beanie Babies with the teachers to pass out to the kids who would come after we needed to be on our way. While there our team was treated to a pachamanca, which is a traditional Peruvian meal cooked in a pit in the ground.  We all had heaps of delicious food.

The drive from Tarma down to La Merced was beautiful as the vistas changed from high sierra to mountainous jungle terrain with fruit farms planted up the steep mountainsides.

Our time in the tropics of La Merced, with temperatures in the high 90s and no AC, was quite a contrast to the dust and crowded conditions of Huancayo.  When we dropped by the site at 3:15pm to scope it out and leave our supplies for what we expected to be dual evening sessions with the women and children, we were surprised to learn the children were already arriving for a 3:30 session instead of an evening session.  (Change in schedule meets a communication glitch). It was truly by the grace of God we happened to be there with all of our supplies, but this was the schedule we all preferred.  We were delighted that our full team of 4 women could work with the kids and then work with the women later.  Everything was so much more relaxed and it allowed for plenty of one-on-one contact which we missed with the crowds in Huancayo.  We only had about 18 children and 31 women, but our work with them was more relaxed and felt more productive.  With the heat and humidity large numbers would have been unbearable. Because we were in the same location as the men we were also able to meet some of them before and after the teaching.  I loved hearing them share some of their worship music with us.  The Peruvians love to sing!

While in La Merced we women had time to go hiking to some waterfalls and see lots of butterflies and flowers.  Before driving out on Saturday and heading back over the mountain pass we made sure our men got to go on a waterfall excursion as well. We got back late Saturday night after having to drive slowly for quite awhile through fog on the mountain pass.  Sunday we slept late, packed, went to the big Miraflores church, had lunch with some of the leaders, and spent time touring and shopping before flying out about midnight.