i'll be home for christmas (if the barge gets here in time...)

Hi, friends and family! Weeeee’re baaaaack!! :)

Bryan and I made it back into onto US soil this week, tired out after about an hour of sleep on the plane but well and excited to be back at home for the holidays. It was so wonderful to see IAH airport covered in tinsel, wreaths, and garlands. We certainly got to enjoy a bit of Christmas cheer in Peru over the past couple of weeks, but you can only feel so festive when it’s 90 degrees and raining cats, dogs, and mosquitoes outside every day! So now we’re back, rested up, and ready to celebrate the birth of Jesus in just hours’ time!

Before I go on, I promised pictures from Huaraz, Mancos (near Huascaran, the tallest mountain in Peru and in all the world’s tropics), and Machu Picchu – and these are just so beautiful that I have to show you them first!

 Mancos, Peru from our hostel window

ta-daaaaa!

we bought bread from this precious woman every morning

in the Black Mountains - a local woman walking to town in traditional garb

rockin out to Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack with John on a hike

Huascaran!

a family's farm on the way up the mountain

phew. made it! (well, we didn't actually get to the snow line...but hey, we tried!)



 Llanganuco Lakes 

Machu Picchu with my love

John and some llamas above the ruins

More photos of our time in Iquitos, Nauta, and the jungle, of course, are on their way. Just blame the fact that I’m still on Peruvian time. ;)

Since I last posted, Bryan and I traveled to Iquitos again to get ready to go on “Viaje Navidad,” the annual Christmas Trip where we gifted dolls, play pistols, little wind-up cars, and baby toys to thousands of kids in about twenty-five towns in the Amazon. In Iquitos, we met up with Pastor Jorge, his daughter Grace, and a few church members and friends from the jungle who would help us with preparing the gifts, cooking, and working the motors. Finally, we were on our way! A barge ride and a couple of days later, the group of us was traveling from tiny river town to tinier river town in Jorge’s “mini-barge,” singing with the kids, distributing gifts, and being fed with literally hundreds of manguas (think mangos, only smaller), oranges, passion fruit, mamays (“rose apples”), and avocadoes. Fortunately, I also got to meet many of Bryan’s friends that he hadn’t gotten to catch up with yet (including Richard, the panaderia guy, and his huge family again), paint not one but two churches, and go to over 20 villages.

Two weeks later, Bryan and I left on a barge to get back Nauta a couple of days before the rest of the gang to make sure that we would catch our flight back to the States in time. Good thing we did, too, because Jorge and company actually ended up waiting two extra days for the-barge-that-wouldn’t-come. They only just got back into Iquitos a couple of hours before we drove to the airport! (A bit of a close call, yes?) When we got back, Jorge reminded us of a time when he had waited two whole weeks in the jungle for a barge to pass by…oh, Peru. What are we to do with you? So in the few hours that we were in Nauta, we got to see Chris and the progress she’d already made on her “get-away haven” for jungle missionaries. She already had a wall inside her house half-way up and under construction (YAY!), and she expected to get electricity with a Peruvian month. A couple of days later, we were all packed up and on a night-flight back to the States!

Now, this is the part where I might be tempted to say something like, “I had an amazing time, learned a lot, wouldn’t change a moment of it, and would do it all over again in a heartbeat.” But although I did have a wonderful time and definitely want to go back to Peru someday soon, I’d be lying through my teeth if I left it at that. To be completely honest, immersion was hard. Even though I stayed in Zambia for four months rather than the two we spent in Peru, I wasn’t “immersed” in the African culture at all, really. I could speak English to nearly everyone I met, I taught in English, I lived in the compound with the other South African missionaries and American interns, and we had incredible facilities that worked nearly all of the time. I had a microwave, refrigerator, and grocery store just around the corner, for goodness’ sakes. Please don’t understand me: the amenities we had really did help the long-term missionaries to be productive and (frankly) to endure, and their daily work was intimately connected with widows, orphans, AIDS/HIV patients, malnourished children, and people struggling to survive deep in the African bush. Many would argue that the conveniences on the base were necessary, critical – but even so, we lived in a Western haven with people who spoke English fluently, were used to the American culture, and understood the concept of “personal space.”

In Peru, we didn’t have that bubble. Every morning, it was punctured. “Personal space” does not exist in Peru. It’s not part of the culture. Your skin isn’t even your own. A couple of the women we traveled with on the Christmas trip picked through my hair for lice – not because they thought I had it, but because it’s a demonstration of affection and friendship. The teenagers and kids followed me everywhere. I walked twenty paces away to get a picture of the river, they followed. I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, my roommate followed. I went to the river to bathe, 5 or 6 little ones grabbed their bars of soap and followed. I walked down a sidewalk and in about two minutes’ time, ten or twenty kids followed. I couldn’t communicate effectively (man, am I glad that Bryan’s fluent – jungle Spanish is rough), I was tired of eating rice and carbs all the time (we actually had more meat on our trip than was normal, but my American metabolism screamed for more protein and fiber), and I felt helpless to even cook or do the dishes. Everything smelled like dirty Amazon water, including freshly-washed clothes (we washed them in the river, obviously), the chickens started at 3:30 am every morning and didn’t quit till the afternoon, and the mosquitoes…oh, the mosquitoes. I never have to see a blood-sucking bug again. I just wanted to hide in my mosquito net all the time, away from the people I couldn’t talk to, away from the food I didn’t want to eat, away from the insects I couldn’t shake.

And the worst part? I was certain that I was the most intolerant, spoiled girl who ever walked the earth - and I felt so guilty for it. I was disgusted with myself that I was so annoyed, so done with jungle life, so anxious to get back on that barge and head back to the city of Iquitos. I was finally (and for the first time) going through cultural immersion, and I haaaaated that I hated it. 

However, with a little bit of time, space, and a whole lot of perspective, I’m starting to be able to look back at our trip with renewed appreciation. I obviously still need a few more months to process, but already I can see how God’s going to use my time in Peru to shape me into the servant I want to become. Even while we were still there, in the midst of my intolerance, I began to appreciate the incredible hardiness, faithfulness, and steadfastness of the Peruvian people. I came to understand in my heart what I had already known in my mind: this was the majority world (i.e. “third world”), and the culture and privileges that I was used to in the States, from personal space to opportunity, were in fact not “normal” at all. Protein, timeliness, and clean water are luxuries that most of the world can’t enjoy. Even a seemingly little thing like understanding English puts us far ahead of the curve for getting jobs, making a decent income, and breaking out of confining societal systems.

Most of all, though, my experience in Peru taught me the living definition of grace. As Paul Tillich puts it,

"Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life...It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for hte name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; no not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.' If that happens to us, we experience grace."

Mix that with a little bit of John Piper:

"'God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.' (Acts 17:25) A God who cannot be served is a God who can only be enjoyed. The great sin of hte world is not that the human race has failed to work for God so as to increase his glory, but that we have failed to delight in God so as to reflect his glory. For God's glory is most reflected in us when we are most delighted in him."

It was (and still is) a hard lesson, but my sole object in life is to accept grace and delight in God, allowing him to lavish grace on and delight in me. I learned nothing else over the last two months, understanding just that was worth the struggle.

So what now? Well, now (as hard as it is to hit “pause” on wedding coordinating, gift-buying, and life-planning), it’s time to stop and celebrate Christ! I hope you all have an amazing Christmas Eve and an even better Christmas with friends, family, and loved ones. Thank you, as always, for your thoughts and prayers, and I look forward to talking with yall soon!

Con mucho amor,

Stephanie :)