Home again

Ann and I arrived at 3am Tuesday morning from our 8 day trip to Lima, Peru.
The Peace and Hope International office in Lima brought us along with Juan and Eva to work together with their help on figuring out the last details of our year plan and to spend a couple days with the Ecuador team talking about a project we will be doing with them. The time was really good for us all to step back and take a look at the big picture for a year. It was also good to work out some kinks in the team and to set our focus straight for all the work coming up. There were times that it felt overwhelming thinking of all the work we have to do. And there were times of peace and relief knowing that we are not alone. God is with us, and the Peace and Hope in Peru has a lot of experience and they are going to be a lot of help. It was nice to know that they started as new and clueless and we are.

It was also refreshing to get out and see Lima in the evenings and on the weekend and it was great to get to know more of the Peace and Hope team personally.

Over the weekend we really took advantage of our free time and walked all over the place, going to the oldest museum in Peru (anthropology and archaeology of course), and walking all over the old city center marveling at the colonial buildings. Thursday night was our anniversary and we went to Barranco, an old, romantic neighborhood overlooking the ocean where we took full advantage of our escape from land-locked Bolivia and ate a whole bunch of seafood on a patio while watching the waves.

Something else we took advantage of on our trip to the big city was Papa Johns. Apparently in Lima it is not just a carry-out pizza place, but a nice sit-down dining experience. They even poured our drinks and served us our pizza slices on nice plates with silverware and all. We happened upon one Sunday night and noticed that is was the third quarter of the Super Bowl, so we decided to take advantage of two American institutions available in Lima that we would not find in Bolivia.

With the overwhelming feeling of jumping into something way bigger than we know and the excitement of visiting a big city like Lima, I think we both began to let out minds wander to think that maybe we could find a nicer or easier place to serve than Santa Cruz. It just felt like all the little things that never go right just keep adding up, how I've been sick almost constantly with one thing or another and now Ann is getting sicker; how we just found out that due to a budgeting mistake by our Bolivian counterparts our salaries will be cut by 30% this year; how things feel so disorganized. I was beginning to feel stressed.

Then, in the last hours we were in Lima before we left for the airport, we went to a park to visit "The Eye That Cries." It is a memorial built to remember all the people who died or disappeared during the two-decade internal conflict in Peru with the Shining Path that just ended at the turn of this century. In the memorial there are stones, over 70,000 of them, each one representing one person who died in the conflict, both victims of the terrorist group and the brutal state repression.

Many of them have names on them, with ages and the date of the year they were killed. Many are left blank, silent reminders of those that were never identified. These stones are stacked in rows which form a labrynth that wind around to the center where the crying eye is located. You are invited to walk down the winding path through the stones, past every single name, every single stone, and remember.

It was powerful. It reminded me as well of how Peace and Hope itself began in the middle of this conflict when a group of Christians decided it was their duty at believers to stand up for these victims and their families. It reminded me of why we came to Bolivia to serve. I thought of how silly my worries and frustrations are. On the way back on the bus, I saw a car with a sign in the window that said, "Quit telling God how big your problems are and start telling your problems how big your God is."

God was there when every single one of those people was brutally murdered. He is there when the girl in Los Lotes here in Santa Cruz is repeatedly raped by her uncle. He is there when there when the Guaraní people are pushed off their land by cattle ranchers and oil wells and are starving. And he hurts for them, he loves them, and he hears their cry for justice and peace. Suddenly our illness and the faucet that keeps breaking and the long line at the bank don´t seem so bad, and our life here is brought back into focus. That is what we are here for and what Peace and Hope is here for. Lord use us.