Support for the org

Kelly and I have been volunteering for People of Peru Project for a little over two years. Currently, the organization is struggling financially more than normal. Donations are down, but the financial commintments of this organization still exist. In this past month we have felt the financial strain more than ever. Many workers are paid bi-monthly, but there was not enough to pay them on the 15th of this month. This last week, the majority of our food (which was less than normal) was purchased on credit. Many other bills and expenses, throughout the entire organization, are having a difficult time makeing ends meet. We have all been praying fervently for God to supply, and we feel as though he will. We would like to ask you to join us in prayer for this organization. The power of prayer is incredible. We would like to encourage you to check out the organizations website at peopleofperu.org. If you would like to donate money, there are directions on the website of how to go about it.

With much love,

Aaroncito and Kelita

Baptisms

Our newest girl, Meri, asked to have her baby dedicated...the same day she got baptized!

The changing rooms to prepare for baptism.

Above and below are the beautiful shots of when we were at the baptism.




Nelcy
Lots of people came to the afternoon event.

Before and after shots.

Pictures for your viewing pleasure

Our little Union Church had a potluck. It was really fun! Potlucks are not common down here, so it was exciting. It went so well we are having another one next week!

Gabi (sporting her new glasses) with Mili at the church potluck.

Sarai´s 6th birthday party. We made our own cake since there´s virtually no money. Turned out nice!

As a monthly routine, we kill cockroaches in our storage rooms in the kitchen. We put on the face masks so we don´t die. Above, Meri, Jessica and I are smiling. Below, we have our killer game faces on!

Above and below are pictures when Aaron had to hold Marcos because he was throwing a fit. Here are both reactions.

A typical Aaron and Marcos shot. Marcos does anything and everything that Aaron does. He even dresses like him when possible.

Parenting 101: A Punishment Dilemma

The past two years have been quite a lesson on parenting. We have been trying, through much trial and error, to figure out ways in dealing with so many different situations that it is exhausting. However, we have learned many things and have improved in many ways with God’s help. Just recently, a rather unique and comical situation arose in which some learned skills were put into practice.

One lovely morning our neighbor, Dora, stopped me as I passed her house. She wanted to show me something in her backyard…a very unusual request. Now please understand, my fellow Americans, that a typical “backyard” in our community is nothing like suburbia. We are talking about a very tiny plot of land “enclosed” (much too generous of a word) with entirely rotten pieces of wood, extremely rusted pieces of metal, and other miscellaneous items. At Dora’s, the one good fence is, well, ours. The “storage shed” is actually an outhouse with a drainage ditch going out to the front, joining the rest of the sewage along the road. The large leaves from the trees overhead (which have been known to house snakes) fall and rot on the ground year-round. Dora, in particular, is one to not clean up the leaves in her backyard, thus all is a thick blanket of rotting leaves all over, mixed with trash, scraps of random things, and other things that belong in a junkyard—appearing to have no use whatsoever. This environment is habitat to many snakes, rats, iguanas, etc.

As Dora and I stepped carefully through the “backyard”, a most unpleasant sight awaited us. There in her backyard were a couple items that belonged to one of our girls. I will attempt to be somewhat discreet and say that these two items were the same, very female-related and rhyme with “pluddy thunderwear”. Conveniently located on the other side of the good section of fence is a spot where some of our girls wash their clothes. Apparently, much to my horror and rage, somebody didn’t want to wash a couple things and decided to chuck them over the fence…and gross out our neighbor. I thanked Dora for showing me and promised to return soon.

At the house, I found all the girls eating breakfast. Conveniently locating myself directly across from my main suspect, one of our newer girls, I shared my findings—and not so discreetly—with everyone. I mentioned my surprise at such an act from one of our girls and wondered aloud who it could possibly be—all the while staring at “her” for the majority of my speech. All sat wide-eyed and shocked while she sat smiling sheepishly. Having my subtle confession, I took her over to Dora’s house.

En route, she tried to make up excuses and I calmly informed her that I didn’t care to hear them at all. The “items” were there and she had to make it right. Anything else was not worth listening to.

I will try to briefly recount the comical conversation with Dora and the girl:

By the “items” in question, I ask Dora to explain how she found them. From there,

Me: Dora, how does that make you feel to see something like this in your yard?
Dora: It makes me feel bad, señorita..
[girl tearing up in guilt]
Me: It would make me feel bad, too, if someone used my yard as a trash can. You know, this is a problem all of us women face. What advice do you have for our young lady to learn to be able to wash this type of thing?
[We converse about washing techniques because we can’t just throw away everything we stain. That then leads to some scary stories from Dora about washing at the river during “that time” and having chameleons and snakes and eels and other creatures notice and scare her to death; once one tried to climb in her boat. All stories that I would never imagine as a sheltered gringo with machines or at least sinks to wash clothes in. We all bonded in our story hour.]
Me: (to anonymous girl) Do you have anything you would like to say to our good neighbor, Dora?
Girl: I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Please forgive me.
Me: Thank you so much. Now that you have apologized with words, how can you apologize in actions?
Girl: (looking at me wide-eyed) An extra job???
Me: What a great idea! So, after breakfast you can come back with several big black trash bags and clean Dora’s yard for her! Thank you so much! What a wonderful way to apologize and help our neighbor at the same time!
Dora: Gracias, señorita!

I had a hard time keeping a straight face the whole time. Cleaning that disgusting backyard was the perfect punishment, and it was “her idea”. Ha! She ended up doing a great job and has never done anything like that since. She cleaned for a long, long time. She and Dora are now friends, too.

Seriously, though, it was also a great opportunity to show an example of loving discipline to one of our neighbors in the community. The norm here would be to yell at them, tell them they are stupid and disgusting and then hit them…and probably never get around to making them do anything about it in the end. The experience brought out a lot of good…and made me laugh.

Rat Video

Rat Killing

A few nights ago, while tutoring Rosany in the sala, we saw a rat crawl in through a hole in the screening! Interestingly, Aaron had changed the screening, having noticed a hole earlier, the day before! The rats had chewed a hole through our screen! If they can chew a hole through that screen, they can figure out how to chew a hole through the kitchen screening and then we’ve got the bubonic plague on our hands. The rat must die!

Within a few minutes another rat crawled through the hole! We had two somewhere back behind the TV. We no longer have any cats, but our little white dog, Sucia, loves to chase, kill and possibly eat rats and mice, too. Rosany, Lauro and I, armed with brooms, buckets, Sucia and a license to kill, we trapped the two rats under the buckets (when I say “we”, I mean they did the trapping and I did the screaming). We weren’t sure how to kill them, but we took a chance on taking them outside and releasing them with the dogs and us ready for a fight.

In the end, the dogs finally got them both. It was exciting.

Pictures

A wonderful family that invited us over for lunch today. Flor was in Aaron´s second loan group and has had great success in creating a business with the loan. Her husband supports her with her business ideas and is very loving to her and their children. We will miss them greatly.
Flor´s daughter and their kittens...the future rat hunters.

A beautiful sunset a few nights ago. Pictures never do justice.

A Gift from Loca Tara

We recently received an awesome package from a short-term volunteer that came a few months ago. She was known as "Loca Tara" because she is...loca. The girls were excited to get handmade t-shirts that had a random piece of fabric shaped as Peru with a button sewn at the part that marks Iquitos. They proudly wear their new shirts almost every day. Thanks Tara!

Final Meeting -- Loan Group 2

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon for the loan group in Santo Tomas. After spending over a year together, group number two (8 ladies) completed their program. It was a beautiful and emotional meeting. We had Teresa (a lady from group 1) supply the fried chicken and rice -it was riquísimo. It is sad to see them go, but I have high hopes for their future (and their kids). God has been working, and continues to work, in Santo Tomas!

Here we are eagerly awaiting the scrumptious food.

Here is the loan group with most of their family (they were invited as well).

The Return of the Queen

Kathi is back! We were very excited to welcome her back, along with Kristi and Matthew, her two youngest children. Later they will reunite with the rest of their family, but in the meantime, they have come back with joy and goodies from the US-of-A. The girls are very happy to have the presence of the very tall and very blonde family and so are we! Now we have some more time to do blogs!

Meri’s Birthday

Meri had her first birthday party here at POPPYS House. She turned 16 on September 2. We celebrated with some cake, soda and singing of “sapo verde” (which is their joke of pronouncing “happy birthday”). The tradition is to smash an egg on their head, but we recently have been replacing that flour, instead. It is much less stinky. Here are a couple photos:

Here is Meri with her adorable daughter, Vivian.

Our pet peeve…opossum ≠ fox

Our night watchman, Lauro, was able to kill an opossum during the night. When we have chickens, they will eat the chickens. Some grow to be quite large. They have a horrible stench.

Well, a pet peeve of ours is that the girls keep referring to this animal as a zorro which means “fox”. Opossum says zarigüeya in our dictionary, and besides there are no foxes in the jungle. We kept trying to correct the girls, explaining what a fox was and that they are much more beautiful than opossums. They insisted that this was a type of “fox”. We were getting frustrated, feeling that it was such a disgrace to the fox species, being grouped with a stinky opossum. The girls were frustrated because we are the ignorant gringos that don’t know their language as well as they do. Oh, to all the foxes out there, we are sorry. It is a hopeless case…just like a previous case we had last year trying to convince them that iceberg lettuce was lettuce and not cabbage. Oh man, that is a different story, but replace fox/opossum with lettuce/cabbage and you know exactly how that conversation went as well.

Jessica, our new volunteer!

Jessica Ewing came to POPPYS House late August (a few weeks ago), as a student missionary through Southern Adventist University and as Kathi Jensen’s friend. We are so excited to have her here. She is going to learn a lot of Spanish in her time here, especially since there are now very few of us volunteers out here now (anyone interested?). It is so wonderful to have her help out here. She came very unexpectedly, at least, for Aaron and me, but it has been a good surprise.

She’s a hard worker and has been learning the ropes of our life here at POPPYS. We look forward to our last six weeks here with her. The Jensen family will be back in a few days, so we will have to get some final training in for our incredible group of volunteers. We can’t believe our time is almost up! It has gone by fast!

Fire Fighting

We’ve had some excitement this past week. Aaron has been able to brush up on his fire fighting skills. Some guy decided to burn his back field –which is adjacent to ours –but the wind decided to kick up at the most inopportune time. With the help from some of our girls, along with the neighbor kids, we were able to put out the fire –our dog Bobi got his paws burnt because he too wanted to help with the fire.

This last Saturday, we again had an opportunity to help put out a fire –but one much closer. Apparently some of our neighbor’s kids were playing with matches when their straw mattress caught on fire. This then led to the roof catching on fire (most everyone has dried leaf roofs) which we happened to see. I ran over to assist where I could but it seemed out of control and moving towards the next house, and then on to our chicken coop. We were finally able to get the fire under control showing us that only God stopped the fire from moving on. It was a little stressful. Thanks be to God that no-one was hurt and only the families roof was lost –apparently their propane tank, which was surrounded by flames, was making some weird sounds (another blessing from God that it did not explode).

Here are three of our girls, Nelcy, Mili, and Gabi assisting in the firefight.

Our field is on the left, theirs on the right.

Trying to get the boots off of Gabi proved to be challenging.

Here you can barely see the flames shooting up finishing off the roof. Our building is what is pictured to the left.

When all was said and done, here is what was left of their roof.

Paramedic Practicum—Our terrifyingly exciting ride to the hospital

Our girls went on a youth campout on the weekend that would have been Labor Day weekend for you gringos. Nine of our 11 girls attended the campout at Delfines with the district D youth. Aaron used the organization’s pickup truck to take our girls and their things out there (about 10 kilometers beyond the outskirts of town). We were ready for a very relaxing weekend with Olga, Meri and Jessica, having just sat down to supper, when the phone rang…

Mama Teresa was at the campout and called us to pray because one of the teenage boys from our Union church was unconscious. What?! I wasn’t sure if I had heard correctly, and so I asked if it was a joke or a medical emergency. It was the latter. Thanking God that, with no 911 type of system out here, we still had the truck—a much quicker means of transportation than the motofurgon—we raced out to Delfines. En route, we tried to find out what had happened and only understood something about how he accidentally got hit hard in the chest—directly on his heart—with a heavy metal object, complained that it hurt, then passed out.

When we arrived—after many “please hurry!” calls—the situation did not look good. Tony, maybe 15 or 16 years old, was unconscious, and when he lapsed into consciousness, he was incoherent and in excruciating pain. Two of his friends came with us to help carry him, comfort him and explain to the doctors what was going on.

It was a somber car ride as the boys in the back worried over their writhing friend while Aaron and I were trying to decide which hospital to go to: the closest hospital or the best quality hospital, the Adventist hospital on the opposite side of town? We also had to decide which of the only two roads to take into town: the slightly more out-of-the-way main highway Quiñones, which is wide (4 lanes) and more developed, or the more direct route along Participación, which is narrow (2 lanes), heavily populated and more dangerous? As we came upon the fork in the road the situation turned for the worst in the backseat and we decided—closest and most direct!

Tony’s two friends were panicking, crying for their friend—“Come back!”, “Breathe!”, “God, no!”, “It’s all my fault!”—like a death scene. He had stopped breathing. Aaron floored the truck while I jumped into the backseat, desperately trying to remember all the CPR classes of the past. He wasn’t breathing, but in all the panic, I couldn’t tell if there was a heartbeat. I am not a medical professional (so those of you who are, please don’t judge…) but all I could think of was, “It is better to do something than nothing! He doesn’t have time to wait! Go!”

In the front seat, Aaron laid on the horn (swerving around buses, motorcars, dogs, people, cops, stoplights, etc.) and yelled back to me, “15-2!” I began to shove his chest, yelling the countdown in my panic. I gave him mouth-to-mouth and kept pumping while yelling out to God to clear the road for Aaron and keep this kid (and everyone else in our path) alive. Still unsure if he heart was pumping, I figured it was better to error in hitting him relentlessly for no reason—and hopefully wake him up!—and say sorry later, than to error the other way.

After a minute—or a lifetime!—he gasped for air and opened his eyes. His eyes moved everywhere, but seemed to not be able to focus on anything. Now I just wanted to keep him awake. I began asking him if he knew where he was or who he was with. After a bit he was able to barely breathe out one of his friends’ names. They tried to encourage him through their fearful tears. I told him to stay awake or I would start beating him up again. Then I tried to calm him and all of us by assuring him that God was in control and that we would be okay, we were almost to a hospital, he would be taken care of by doctors, etc. He looked at me and nodded with hope and fear. I felt his pulse and I calculated about a million beats per second.

The lines are long and numerous in the public hospitals. I had always wondered how they dealt with a real emergency situation where a victim can’t wait in 10 different lines, get copies, stamps, initials and fingerprints from every corner of the hospital. I figured I would soon find out.

Iquitos Hospital threw open their gate as our truck careened in to the emergency entrance. By then, Tony had become unconscious again, but he was at least breathing. They rushed out with a gurney and Aaron pulled his body out of the truck. As they rushed him into the hospital, my adrenaline rush collapsed and I began shaking all over and practically hyperventilating in my “What just happened!” shock. The two friends came over to comfort me and tell me everything would be alright and to not worry. I couldn’t help but thinking, “Hey! I was comforting you guys just moments ago!” Boys…gotta be all “manly”.

If you’ve read this far, I believe you have an idea of the thoughts and feelings we had at the moment. We were so thanking God we had made it and ready to stick around for the long haul when, after about 10 minutes, someone came out to tell us that the doctors said Tony had been “really stressed” and that he was calming down and would be ready to go home within the next 5-10 minutes.

Our thoughts were, “What?! That’s it?! No tests?! No…nothing? Did a doctor even see him? Did they just wheel him inside the door, give him a lollipop and a gold star and tell him he was a trooper? Did none of the previous events seem a bit worrisome to anyone else?” Within 10 minutes, Tony slowly walked outside to us and his family, who had been notified and arrived by that time, and was regaining strength. He announced he wanted to go back to the campout.

Needless to say, for us Americans, it was a shock that the doctors didn’t begin an onslaught of tests and monitoring of things. After a while of waiting around, someone brought word that a doctor wanted him to get an x-ray to see if maybe there was some internal damage. Since it was late Friday night (about 10 pm) we were sent to a clinic on the opposite side of town.

When we arrived, Aaron and I waited outside for about 15 minutes then they all came out again. The doctor didn’t want to do anything because he was fine and sent him with a couple shots of painkillers and penicillin, just in case he needed it later. That was it. Nothing happened.

With an oddly surreal feeling, we all returned to our respective locations, whether it be home or the campout. Yes, Tony returned to the youth campout (they were having an all-night prayer vigil and fasting). Aaron and I came home about midnight and just…just…had no idea what to think. We began looking around in the Merck Manual Lisa had left in Peru and tried to guess what had happened—maybe a heart attack? I guess everything on the hospital end was cost effective. Congratulations.

We just found out that a couple days later, Tony did get an x-ray at the hospital and they found he has an enlarged heart. Aaron and I don’t know if it was a previously existing, but unknown, condition or if the heart enlarged as a reaction to the whole ordeal (like, maybe if it was a heart attack). I guess we will find out in due time.

The end.