We´ve been trying to update this site with the newest version of Wordpress, but have had no luck (if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!). As a last ditch effort, we opened a new site, with a very similar address: opencircleperu.wordpress.com. Just click on the link to go to that site.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Be bless in all you do!

We´ve posted some pictures on our picasa site of our first few weeks in Peru. If you want to see them, click aquí.

There is a way we can easily tell the time here. At least we can twice a day. Every day about 1 PM and then at 6 PM we see a wave of boys (hundreds of them… thousands of them) wearing the dark pants and maroon sweater of their school uniform walk home from school. They are two different groups of students. A morning session and an evening session. There´s a lot of them, and they are hard to miss.

Audra and I asked somone about the school. It´s a public school called Santa Isabel and is located about four blocks east of us. The primary grades have both boys and girls, but the secondary school is all boys (the girls go somewhere else). “How many students do they have?”

“5,500,” she said. “They are in sections from A through Z. Some grades even have to start the alphabet again.”

“I can´t imagine that,” I said. “How many kids are in each classroom?”

“About 50. Sometimes more,” she said, not really surprised, I think.

“With one teacher?”

“With one teacher. There are two sessions of school each day.”

“With the same teachers for each session?” Audra asked.

“Yes.”

“That´s a lot of kids to try to teach…at least a 100 students.”

“Or more,” our friend said. “Because the teachers not only teach two sessions, they also teacher three or four classes during each session.”

As I look back on my time as a school teacher (a time I look back on with joy), I can´t help but think at just how blessed I was!

Recently I wrote about the park around the corner from the house. Among other things, I mentioned the stone pillar with words in three langues that say: “the peace prevails in the earth.”

Since then, I have been reading about the background culture of the area (and there is tons of stuff to learn about the area). This region was once part of the Incan empire and the relgion of the Inca still has a presence here. One of the gods I read about was named pachamama, or “mother earth.” A tradition of those who worshiped her was to put a stone bar or pillar in the earth as a way of ensuring a good harvest and fertility. The more fertile the field, the more they felt the goddess had blessed them.

The pillar in the park was of stone, and the quote concerned the earth, the ground, the soil. It was located in a garden. What I thought was a neat saying in the corner of the park has a message under the surface. It seems as though the goddes Pachamama is still being worshiped today…