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…

I´m am sitting in the park just around the corner from the house. (I am writing this by hand and will type it later when I get home.) The park is called Parque Tupac Amaru. Althought the sun is shining, I need a sweater. The thinner air at this altitude means the sun has to work harder in order to warm the earth. In front of me (and behind me for that matter, because we are in a valley), rise a part of the majestic Andes Mountains. Because we are in the dry season, they are brown. Mostly bare of trees (again, because of the altitude), a few patches of what appear to be evergreen trees cover the gullies and draws on the hillside.

Parque Tupac Amaru is not a park designed for playing games of volleyball or soccer. Instead it is a place for walking and talking and sitting with family and friends. In the corner opposite of where I am sitting is a tree sided column with a saying in three languages: La paz prevelezca en la tierra — Allin kay pacha niñaypaq kachun — The peace prevails in the earth. The gardens of the park–and they cover all the space not taken by a concrete pond or a water fountain we have not yet seen in use–remind me of an English style garden (with Latin influence, of course), and they are very important. In one of the trees is a hand painted sign with the words, “La planta es el alma del jardín. No lo mates.” (The plant is the soul of the garden. Don´t kill it). In another tree is another sign simply stating, “Cuida la naturaleza” (take care of the natural environment). For the most part, people say on the wide sidewalks and plazas. A group of school kids (probably around 13 years old) play an improvised game of volleyball, without a net and on the concrete space near the three cornered sign. They are loud with their cheers and groans, which is a bit out of place in the quiet culture of the people of the mountains.

Across the street to the south of the park is a catholic church. Using modern archetecture, it looks much like a three cornered hat. It´s cross rises high above the surrounding buildings on a square pillar. It´s bell tower twisted outward like a baby´s building block. On the face of the church are the words, “Paz y Bien” (Peace and well-being) in large German style letters. On the left, a painting of Saint Francis of Asissi welcoming the animals and on the right a painting of Jesus hanging on a Byzyntine style cross. Just to the right of Jesus´ feet is a scroll with the words, “Francisco: Anda y repara mi iglesa” (Francis, I want you to come and repair my church).

A man pulling a bicycle cart loaded with grass and hay for animals passes in front of the church. A woman in traditional quechua clothing sits in the shade of her cart of the corner of the church square. She sells candy and cookies and drinks to the few who stop. Three yoiung men wearing the maroon sweater and blue slacks of a local school pass through the park on their way home for lunch. A business man in a suit and talking on a cell phone sits on the bench near me in the gazebo where I am. A man barely opening his mouth when speaking to me shows his identification and invites me to buy a few hard candies for a sol (about 30 cents) as a way to support a drug and alcohol program in Lima. A man takes a picture of his young son who is holidng a pink stuffed animal. A group of school girls in blue uniforms and braided hair sit in the sun near the non-functioning fountain.

In the raised garden, the words “Beinvenido a Huancayo” (Welcome to Huancayo) are carved deeply in the dirt so that grass and weeds will not grow to hide the greeting.

It was very hard to leave Costa Rica. Over the past year, we had made a number of great friends, many of whom we know we will not see again on this side of heaven. As the plane lifted off from the airport in San José, we watched out the windows as the green fields and mountains became smaller and smaller. Because of the size of the country, we had not even reached cruising altitude when we found ourselves over the Pacific Ocean. A little more than three hours later, with the majestic Andes Mountains rising above the clouds in the distance, we saw the brown and grey costal deserts of our new home country. We had arrived in the capitol city of Lima.

Billy, Laurie and Sarah Drum, members of our team whom we met when we were applying to become missionaries with The Mission Society, met us at the airport. (The rest of the team, the Ivey family, would meet us in Huancayo.) Following a day errands, contracts, and record checks for our work visas, we took the seven hour bus ride from Lima to Huancayo. The ride starts just a few feet above sea level, and as the desert and the city fell behind us, the mountains rose dramatically in front. Three hours or so later, we were catching our breath as we crossed the continental divide at more than three miles elevation (three times as high as Denver, Colorado). A little further along we passed through the sixth most polluted city in the world, La Oroya, where 95% of the children have elevated levels of lead poisoning due to copper (and other mineral) mining in the area. Two hours later, we entered our new hometown.

A mixture of adobe, concrete and steel, this city of around 500,000 people stood in stark contrast to the city in which we´d lived the past year. It is a city of cultural diversity in which women in traditional clothing eat ice cream cones and talk on cell phones on the city square in front of the Spanish Cathedral. A modern mall has appeared since our first visit, and it may have one of the only food courts in the world where a person can buy cow heart on a stick for dinner. Right next to the mall is the traditional market where one can buy anything from charcoal with which to build a fire to plants to plucked chickens hanging by their feet to fresh (or not so fresh) alpaca meat.

We´re here. We have a lot to learn, no doubt about it, but we made it. Thanks to all of you for all you have done to get us to this point.

¡Qué Dios los bendiga! May God bless you!

Just a quick note to let you know we made it to Peru. The flight was easy and the food and movie were really good. We are in a hotel right now in a suburb of Lima. Tomorrow morning we will be heading to start our visa process with finger prints and dental records…

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers.

Kia, Aylis´, and Ash (yeah, even me) learned how to do some traditional Costa Rican Dances. These videos are from when we danced at a culture day for the school. The following night we danced in the street outside the school for the local neighborhood. The girls are in first video. They are the two tallest with the blue dresses (dresses that my mom made while visiting here a few weeks ago). This dance is called “Que linda Tica” or “Pretty Costa Rican girls.” The girls got some complements from some ticas who said they were wondering who´s children they were becuase “they move like Ticas!”

I´m the guy who is saying something at the start of this dance. What is happening is that the men and the women are flirting with one another. These poems that we are shouting are called “bombas” and are fun flirts with the other (or taunts of mother-in-laws). Mine was “Qué bonita esta la luna, con su cielo azul-celeste. Me he de casar contigo, aunque la vida me cueste”. Literally, it means “How beautiful is the moon with it´s blue colored sky. I will marry you, even if it costs me my life!” Her response is that her mama doesn´t want her to get married and that she doesn´t want to marry me either… All the men in the video are students. Three of the women are teachers at the language school and one is a student (and she is very pregnant, as well).

This final dance that we were all in is about a bull fight. Near the end, I become a horse and the matador on my back ropes the bull and we pull him off the dance floor. During the victory celebration, the bull escapes and gores the matador. ¡Qué triste!

[Ash] In our house, there is an upstairs room. The land lady thought we’d use it as a bedroom, but it’s usually too hot up here, so we just use it as a common space. A place to which any of us who wanted to be alone, could be. If we catch the breeze right and open the windows and if the sun’s not shining too hot, it can be comfortable. That’s what it’s like today, and that’s why I’m sitting up here writing. The room has two windows. One faces east toward the language school, a volcano and the sunrise. The other faces south. We can’t see as much that way because of our neighbor’s mango tree that blocks the view, but beyond the leaves we know there are more mountains, the neighborhoods of Desamparados (which means hopeless) and a river.

As I climbed the stairs a few minutes ago, I paused at the window looking south. Most of the windows are louvered glass panes that we rotate to circulate the air in and out. This window is different, though. It is on a hinge that allows it to swing wide open like a shutter. Standing there, I welcomed the cool refreshing breeze as I gazed at the nearby mountains. “Looks like it’s gonna’ rain,” I thought, noting the hazy clouds at their peaks. Not a surprising prophecy during the rainy season, I know, but one nonetheless. The view was peaceful, even though it is a city. But I signed, thinking about the work I had to get done. Turning away I noticed the sun break through the clouds, casting a spotlight on a verdant green field on the side of one of the mountains.

It’s hard to believe we will be leaving soon. In less than a month, our bags will be packed and the jet plane will be en route to Peru. We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and it is almost here. But with the goal in reach, why is it so hard to let go of Costa Rica?

I think about growing up in southeastern Montana on my grandparents and parents ranch. Through the years we’ve worked a variety of livestock, but for most of the time I remember, we had sheep. Sheep aren’t the smartest animals God ever created. They’re cute, soft, and wooly. I admit they are these things, but that “soft and wooly” could be a good description of their thinking skills, as well. I remember one time in particular. The flock had been living down by the river under the trees. Life was good there, but they’d eaten most of the good grass and weeds, so it was time to move on. The next field over was full of lush green alfalfa along with fresh water and shelter. They’d have everything they’d need in their new home. We shepherds (my family and I) spread out under the trees along the river and gathered up the flock before gently coaxing them toward the gate leading into their new home. They moved easily, but as soon as they saw the opening in the fence, they baulked. They stopped. They put their hooves in and would not move. Occasionally a brave one would step forward, sniffing the air for hints of what lie ahead, but as soon as we through she’d pass through, she’d spin around and run back into the safety of the group. In desperation we tried to use force and dragged one through the gate, but as soon as she was free from us, she rushed back through the gate to the flock. I don’t remember what we finally did, but eventually one went, found the grass was indeed greener on the other side of the fence, and the others stampeded through to join her.

Here we are in Costa Rica and the gate is wide open. It’s not that all the food to eat is gone—there’s still plenty of missionary work to be done here—it’s just that it’s time to move. But for the first time in the nearly 20 years since we were moving sheep to the new pasture, I understand the sheep’s hesitation.

We’ve made this place home for the past year. We set up a house. We paid bills. We made friends. We got involved. We learned the culture (at least parts of it). Before coming here, some of the people in the Mission Society home office jokingly said, “Okay, now don’t go falling in love with Costa Rica so that you want to stay there.”

“We won’t,” we replied. After all, God had called us to Peru, right? But how can one not fall in love with Costa Rica. That’s what it means to be a missionary, isn’t it? To be fully present wherever we are. To learn a language and a culture. To learn to love the people. To discover what God is doing and then move forward from there. To learn to love God in a whole new way.

The gate is open and we know green pastures and still waters are waiting for us in Peru. But still, it is hard to go.

The sun’s spotlight on the hillside has been replaced by low clouds. The rain is coming, I know. On the street outside I hear the incoherent ramblings of a man on a drug induced high (he doesn’t bother anyone, just walks the streets every few days babbling the same cadence). The sounds of a fiesta in one of the neighbor’s houses waft in. I see the familiar buildings on the hillsides. I hear the car alarms and the police sirens. I smell someone cooking dinner: greasy empanadas, picadillo and beans and rice. Sounds and sights and smells we’ve come to know so well. I know I’m home…

…but the gate is open.

We had friends from Georgia visiting us last week. They came down here to help with a Vacation Bible School (okay, they came to do the VBS and we were there to help). They were members of the last church we served and tremendous friends. During our time together, we had a chance to talk about the past few years, dream together, and take a few trips to see other parts of Costa Rica. To see some pictures, click here to go to our web album.