Update from Peru

Howdy all.  John and Katie here, still doing well here in Trujillo, Peru.  Since we last wrote we have hosted our first mission team, from a Florida church, for about a week.  This mission team was great.  There were 8 adults, many of them from their church's Celebrate Recovery ministry.  One morning we spent a good hour hearing each of their testimonies, and they each had powerful stories of redemption and restoration.  Many were new to mission work but excited to learn about God, the culture, and us.  They worked hard, laughed a lot, and brought a lot of encouragement to us all.  Katie was one of the assigned leaders of the team, so she helped lead devotions, work projects, and debriefs.  She did a great job!

With the team, we got to experience a lot more ministries.  We got to see ELIM, the ministry outside the garbage dump, for the first time.  It's an exciting time with the kids and mothers.  We also got a peek inside the garbage dump itself, walking through the piled-up trash and giving out fruit and peanuts to the workers there.  They are pawing through the garbage, looking for "recyclables" - things they or their bosses can sell.  It's a tough life for them there.  I missed a couple events because I (John) sprained my ankle pretty badly one day, but the team also went out to a nearby neighborhood to put on a VBS and hiked into the sand hills to sandboard.

Katie and I are feeling well-settled in here in Trujillo.  We're more comfortable getting out just the two of us and getting places in town.  We're used to life here at the albergue, and have a special fondness for the three dogs here - an aging momma and her two 4-month old pups.  We try to take care of them, though mom has been pretty sick as of late.  We are still enjoying serving the team of interns - many of them look to us as the older ones and call us mom and dad.  We enjoy serving them in various ways, so we're quite okay with that!  Big changes and updates from our workplaces back home distract us somewhat, so we do ask for prayers that God would guide both of our workplaces and guide us as we stay updated from afar.  We need prayers on how, if at all, to serve our workplaces from here.

Cooking our own meals when the teams aren't here is a wonderful break for us right now.  Peruvians seem to have a thing about enormous meals - the plates of food are colossal sometimes.  Even I usually struggle to finish them.  The food is mostly pretty good (there was one meal that featured canned tuna...yuk), but it's just the portions that are massive!  This week, I tried a new one - chicken tortilla soup.  I used Katie's mom's recipe, more or less, and added beans.  It was fantastic!  Tonight I am doing migas with chorizo.  Hope they come out well!  A large team of Canadian high schoolers come in tomorrow morning, so that should keep us busy.  Thanks for your prayers and thoughts, we love and miss you all!

Making Comparisons

At Inca Link, we speak to short-term teams about five stages of reverse culture shock - the process of returning from a mission trip to your home culture.  The stages are:

1. Fun - the honeymoon of enjoying all the things you missed about home
2. Flee - you enjoyed the mission culture so much you miss it and feel like you don't fit in at home
3. Fight - you get angry at your home for not being more like the mission field
4. Fit In - it becomes impossible to keep standing and fighting, so you give up and return to "normal"
5. Fruit - as you learn and process, you begin to bear fruit based on your experiences

Each of the first four stages are almost guaranteed, and they all have a common theme.  They are based on the process of making comparisons.  Comparisons aren't unusual or necessarily bad.  They are how we make sense of the world and what is happening around us.  We compare one thing to another thing that we know, and it allows us to understand it.  During reverse culture shock, we're making tons of comparisons.  We are comparing things at home to things in the foreign country, those around us to those we knew in the mission field, and even ourselves in one place to ourselves in another place.  That's natural, but it leads us directly into making value judgments and deciding which is better than the other.

When we elevate one to the status of "better," we are in trouble.  In the field, there were certain things that were better about home, and that leads to the "Fun" stage.  When you get home, things were better back in the field, and that leads to "Flee" and "Fight."  In "Fit In," you tire of the comparisons and give up, regretfully remembering how good things were "over there."  I believe that these comparisons end up causing us to divorce the two worlds, separated by a long plane flight, and that immediately allows our minds to divorce what we learned and how we grew from who we are at home.  Game over, you never reach stage 5.

Short-term trips unfortunately lend themselves to all sorts of these comparisons, because you haven't been in the foreign country long enough to settle into a new "normal" where the comparisons cease.  I believe it's important, however, to try to avoid them from the start.  When you first transition from one culture to another, everything seems strange.  It's important to try to avoid the "strange" categorization and the comparisons and simply see the things in their own context.  For me, it helps to remember that there is one constant throughout - I am the same person moving around on the earth.  I'm continually growing and changing through my experiences, but it's still me.  I try not to be overwhelmingly different in one place versus another, to help avoid making comparisons.  It's all one big earth, and there are a variety of different contexts.  Each exists simultaneously, and none is better or worse than another.  They're just different contexts.

This viewpoint helps to avoid culture value judgments too, by the way.  It helps us to serve cross-culturally with sensitivity.  It also helps to avoid the huge shocks of highs and lows - it's common to get upset at the wealth back home, or to get upset at the poverty in the foreign country.  People back home often say, "You know there's poor people here at home, too!", to which missionaries often talk about how much worse the poverty is in the foreign country.  They have a good point, though - poverty exists everywhere, and it's best to avoid comparison judgments.  The context is different, but the Biblical commands the same.  If you serve the poor in a foreign country, but don't much think about the poor at home, it can't be said of you that you have compassion on the poor.

The things we learn on the mission field can serve us back at home.  They are different contexts, but that's okay.  We can keep that in mind and not make unhealthy separations between places, people, and things.  Avoiding too many comparisons, and especially value judgments, will help to avoid culture shock on both ends of a mission trip.

Construction

One more quick update from us because we have a day off...perhaps our last "true" day off for the next week and a half.  We're taking a vacation today because it's my (John) birthday!  Thursday is our day off already, and since it's my birthday we left the albergue (orphanage) to head out on the town!  It's about a 40 minute public trans ride to Real Plaza, the largest mall in town, where we've been relaxing at Starbucks, Bembos (hamburgers), and TGI Fridays.  Wonderful for a day of relaxing and getting some stuff done online, and enjoying some fantastic food that feels like home.  Tonight we'll go to a nice restaurant in town (it's called Chelsea), and then to a hotel in Huanchaco (the next town over, on the beach).  We had a nice dinner with all the interns last night, and cake from scratch!

The last few days have been nice.  Lots of construction - painting and assembly of bunk beds.  The work isn't bad.  Making lots of progress and getting stuff done.  It's not glamorous, but it's good work.  One positive note since our last post - the leadership has decided to lift the previous restriction on creative projects so Katie and I are back on the market for a ministry-related project.  Katie is leading worship now for our 6:30am morning team devotions, and also helping with another year-long intern's sewing and baking ministry with local ladies.  I am still interested in being involved in something in the community, perhaps helping with an income-generating business idea or something like that.

We are sure enjoying building relationships with the other interns and looking for ways to serve them and invest in ministry here.  Cooking for everyone has been lots of fun, but for the next 10 days we won't even be cooking breakfast.  A team comes in tomorrow morning and while they are here, we hire a cook for breakfast and lunch and go to a local church for dinner.  We'll be doing manual labor around the albergue in the mornings and visiting all the ministries in the afternoons.  We're looking forward to it!  Thanks for your prayers, and we'll be updating again once the team has left!  We've got lots of pictures up on Facebook on my page - check those out!

Settling In To Trujillo

Hey everyone, it's time for another update.  It's Sunday here in Trujillo, and we're excited to be finally going to church for the first time in South America.  The first two weeks we've been here, we didn't have room in our training schedule for church.  Although Katie helped lead worship for the team twice, we're really looking forward to evening service tonight at America Sur Alliance church here in Trujillo.  We'll be worshiping there all summer, and possibly even joining a cell group.

We're settled in here to Pasitos de Fe, the orphanage-in-construction that Inca Link is working on.  There's five of us interns here, plus an intern with the extreme sports ministry named Maddie, and our construction intern who had helped lead us in training.  Another year-long intern is here with us, Marion, and  she's involved in various ministries around town, including sewing and baking, the garbage dump, and more.  We're living in what will become the kids' rooms, and we're kind of co-op-ing our meals.  I (John) have taken the lead on cooking team dinners, so we're pooling resources to eat together in the evenings.  I'm really enjoying cooking for everyone and figuring out what meals will work with the things here in the supermarket.

One piece of very discouraging news - Inca Link has put all their ministries here in Trujillo on hold in favor of construction this summer.  This orphanage has been under construction, I've learned, for some 4 years, and numerous delays and setbacks have prevented it from being completed.  Even now, it looks like it needs a lot of work to me - it will be technically functional this summer, but it needs more furnishing to be more appealing, and in safer for kids.  Their goal is to have it open for kids by the end of this summer, and if it isn't, the leaders fear that it will be shut down completely.  Therefore, all of us interns have been instructed not to do any other major work this summer other than construction and manual labor to get this place ready.  Even our "creative project" that we were supposed to do will be focused on construction projects that need doing.  The 10-day teams that are coming will be spending a half day every day working on the orphanage as well.

We're disappointed by this news.  We had known construction was some of what Inca Link did coming in, but we hadn't known that we would be doing a lot as well.  We don't feel like this is what we're gifted for, or what we came down for.  We were really looking forward to investing in some cross-cultural ministries, learning a lot about culture, mission, and ministry, and finding ways to apply our strengths.  As of right now, we aren't going to be doing much of that, which we realize is also very different from what we told our donors.  For that, to each of you, we do apologize.  The leaders here believe that this will be the most significant use of our time this summer to help the ministry here, so you can take some comfort in that.  Regardless, Katie and I are looking for the best in the situation and looking for what God is trying to do in us through this disappointment.  We're trying to find ways to minister to our fellow interns, and looking forward to having some investment in the teams that come through.

Overall, we are beginning to get the lay of the land and how things will best operate this summer.  We're starting to settle into routines and systems that will work for us this summer, and we're looking forward to learning more.  One thing is for sure - we've both lost a significant amount of weight, and with all this manual labor this summer, we probably will keep it off!  At least it's forever spring here - the temperature moves between about 61 and 69 every day, with sun during the day and fog at night.  There's hardly a green thing in sight in this desert, but we're seeing the beauty in the sandy, dusty landscape...and in the mountains on the horizon. Our days off this summer will be Thursday and Sunday, so we hope during those times to see some of the beautiful areas, like the beaches of Huanchaco and downtown Trujillo.

Thanks for your prayers - we miss you all terribly, and hope the best for each one of you!

Headed to Trujillo

Katie and I have finished the initial part of the training for this summer internship.  It was just over two weeks of intense travel and experiences.  We spent time in Bogota, Lima, Trujillo, Quito, and Huaticocha.  Inbetween we had about 50 hours on busses from place to place.  For Katie and I, it's hard to say whether the training or the travel is more draining.  Right now, I'm (John) writing from Tumbes, a town near the border of Ecuador and Peru.  We are waiting between busses - it's 3 busses to get from Quito to Trujillo, another 24 hours plus layover, so we'll end up near 75 hours total on busses in 3 weeks.  It's been very challenging on me because I have a hard time fitting in the seats, and I get up with pinched nerves and tight muscles.

We spent our last few days in Quito for training.  While the team finished up their Race, Katie and I had a day off to explore Quito - we shopped for the team at a mall and had a relaxing lunch and cappuccino, then went downtown to see the sights and stopped for a slice of chocolate cake at a small cafe.  Then we, and the team, spent 3 days at a Christian camp in Calacali (45 min drive), Ecuador, doing more teambuilding and summer-specific training.  We did everything from high ropes challenges to team-building games.  We also spent the afternoons in seminar-type training talking about Strengthsfinder 2.0 and the specifics of how the summer will work.  In the meantime, I sprained my ankle pretty well - it's very swollen but I only had one day of limping.

The biggest culture shock for Katie and I has been the shock from our experiences of mission work and Inca Link's model.  It really makes me think about mental models.  We all carry these models around in our minds, based on experiences and training, and we often don't communicate them.  When one person's models clash with another's, frustration results that could be cleared up with better communication.  One example is with packing.  Katie and I have somewhat nicer clothes, based on my experience with spending time in the community and wearing what they wear.  Inca Link's teams spend a great deal of time doing construction and manual labor (as well as schlepping suitcases along sidewalks from one bus terminal to another) and so they need different clothes.  Katie and I can adapt, but my experiences and training with mission work have been very different than our experiences this summer so far.

We are looking forward to settling into Trujillo and starting to figure out what the bulk of the summer will look like.  Training has been challenging on Katie and I, in a variety of ways.  It's more physical than we're used to, and more unstable (constant travel, planned surprises), plus being the only married couple and the aforementioned different mental models.  We are here to learn and to serve the community, so we're trying to maintain an attitude of humility.  We are trying to figure out how our skills, gifts, and training fit in here, and are useful here.  No answers yet, but hopefully they are coming soon.  Our desire is that, having left two ministries to come here and serve, that what we learn here will empower our ministries back home.  Please pray for that!

Blessings to you all, and once we figure out the internet situation in Trujillo we will be in touch again!