¡Hola from Arequipa!
We. Are. Thankful. The kids have been in school since March, and are loving it. (Reminder: the school year here goes from March to December. Winter break is at the end of July, summer break starts just before Christmas 😁) Kinney wasn’t speaking much Spanish in March when he started, and he chose not to speak Spanish for his first two months. He would come home from school and tell us that everyone spoke Spanish that day but that he had spoken in English. It’s an amazing process. After two months of school, he came home one day and told us he spoke Spanish that day. And since then we’ve gotten to hear him switch into Spanish when he plays with friends, speaks with neighbors, worships with the church. Adileen has been learning to read in both languages. What a gift language is, and the chance to use it as we learn about others in God’s diverse world makes language sacramental. Through my kids I’m challenged to continue learning how to speak goodness into the lives and spaces around me.
We’re excited, too! Lots of goodness coming to Team Arequipa. In a couple of weeks, our dear friend Ella Tappe is coming to spend a month with us. She’s going to work on Spanish, help with our kids, and bless a retreat with other missionaries here in Peru! We’re excited about that retreat; in a month we’ll get to spend a few days with the Onofres (Huancayo), Coopers (Lima), and Jonathan Hanegan (Buenos Aires, Argentina). At the end of August Caily Moore is joining us for a year-long apprenticeship, learning Spanish, working with CUDA, and finding ways to bless the church and share faith and hope in our city. Then, sometime in September, our family from Peru’s COVID lockdown, HULA partners, and Adileen’s best bilingual friend Debora and Sira are coming to Arequipa! Please pray for them and their plans and transitions and visas. They will be a huge blessing to people here and I’m thrilled to get to see how God uses that power-duo to share grace and life with many, and to work with them to do it!
We have some prayer requests as well. Please pray for Michael and Emily Daniel and their baby Rose. Rose is waiting for a liver transplant and has been through an absurd amount of procedures in her short 5 months of life so far.
Pray for Cory Crabb, a HULA 2022 student who is in the hospital in Denver following seizures and unusual brain activity. They're still working to figure out what is going on and we pray for healing. He brought immense joy to our group.
Prayers for immigrants and refugees all over the world, of course, but I’m especially thinking of those in Arequipa. During HULA we met a family who had just arrived to Arequipa, 3 year-old boy and 6 month-old baby girl with their parents. They invited us to a birthday party that they scraped money together for, and invited their neighbors (there’s a lot in the Bible about banquets and the poor and celebrations…I'm seeing all that in a new way). The next day, driving through a nearby part of town I ran into several of the neighbors, some washing windshields, others selling trash bags. It’s all so tenuous. These are beautiful people. Prayers.
And we ask, always, for prayers for our church, prayers for our neighborhood, prayers for CUDA and the schools we’re working with and the women that Paty is mentoring. We feel like we’re on the cusp of a lot of things. Kingdom work is slow. New creation is breaking in in the form of salvation, reconciliation, resurrection and life. But it’s slow. May God speed its coming.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your love, prayers, and support. Your prayers for Adileen and Kinney mean the world to us.
