About two weeks before Halloween one of our 7 year-old neighbors leaned out his window and yelled down to us asking if we were going to have a Halloween party this year. So we began planning a Halloween party to give the people what they wanted.
We decided to do something more like a fall festival this year where I planned and made all the games and prizes and we just asked neighbors to help us run each game. Peruvians do not do fall festivals (it’s actually not even fall here, technically it’s spring). We set up 10 different games down the street and ended up having around 30 kids plus parents. They all loved it and it was so fun for us to see different neighbors making connections with each other and spending the evening just hanging out on our street.
It is not common here in Peru for people to know their neighbors well. There aren’t front porches to sit on or front yards to play in so people tend to stay in their homes. So, we try to use opportunities like Halloween to draw people out of their homes, to make connections with the families in our neighborhood but also to help develop a community between the Peruvian families that live on our street. We have developed such a neat community with our neighbors and we thank God for answering this prayer of ours.
