Time is a weird thing. While many of our friends and family just experienced their longest day of the year, we just experienced our shortest. The difference in times and rhythms of the year continues to throw us even as we’ve lived here more than ten years. In this liminal space of disorientation, we trust God’s spirit to continue working on us, in us, and maybe even through us.
So much has happened this first half of the year that it’s hard to know where to start. We continue to be deeply thankful for life and work right here where we are. We have found good rhythms of family life and ministry. The kids have settled into their new school. It’s been a huge challenge for them that they’ve responded to incredibly well, taking steps to learn French (most of their classes are in French, the rest in Spanish, except for English class) and make new friends. Adileen is doing 5th grade math in French when at the beginning of the school year (March) she could barely count to 20 in French. So we’re proud of them. Kinney is playing soccer and happy with World Cup fever.
Surely you know by now the devastation that two recent earthquakes left in their wake in the northern part of Venezuela. This comes while Venezuela remains in crisis-mode, 10+ years and running, which means that the Venezuelan diaspora spans far and wide. Some of our closest friends are from Venezuela, and when the level of destruction was made clear to them, they quickly responded by asking our church to help gather some funds to help in their hometown, also impacted, but forgotten in the wake of much bigger cities that were getting most of the attention and aid.
If you’ve read this newsletter for a while then you know all about Living Libraries. If you’ve ever come to visit Arequipa we’ve probably taken you to one of the schools that we’ve worked in to improve reading comprehension with kids by training teachers over the course of two years with new strategies and skills based on the science of reading. There have also been plenty of opportunities over the years to share about challenges and pushback—whether that be the simple fact that development in this area requires a lot of extra work from the teachers, or pushback to our methods which break the cultural norms of a more militaristic way of teaching. In the face of that pushback we maintain a humble, confident approach, trying to do all we can to help teachers overcome the obstacles, be they cultural or time-related, in order to be successful—all for the sake of the kids and because of Jesus and his reign.
Katie, Adileen, and Kinney have collaborated in this issue to provide a directors’ commentary to the newsletter in the form of this 5-minute video interview. Since you don’t usually get to hear from our kids (we see you Team Bills), we thought our friends, family, and supporters might enjoy this.
As is the case with a lot of things in Peru, our church retreat started off being planned months ahead of time, and was only finalized in the hours prior to departure. We’re so thankful for the 21 people who were able to spend three days and two nights down on the coast. We stayed at a guesthouse that belongs to Paty’s family who is from Mollendo. That had an extra layer of specialness baked in because Paty and Lola are longtime hosts of the church, and getting to see them in their “happy space” where they grew up was special.
This renewed description of our mission was the beginning of a committed three-day strategy session with Chad Smith of CI Solutions, Clint Davis of Kibo Group and the Tulsa Christian Foundation, and CUDA board member Easton Proffit-Davis. The CUDA team was incredibly blessed to get to work with this trio and dream toward the future as we worked toward a 5-year strategic plan. Read on for an idea of what this looked like, the result (our strategic plan!), and our hopes for the future.
¡Hola from Arequipa, Peru! We’re Jeremy and Katie Daggett, on the cusp of 11 years in Arequipa. Along with Adileen and Kinney we make up the current version of Team Arequipa since 2019. This is “The Daggetts in Arequipa” (née Team Arequipa Newsletter), a collection of stories, articles, pictures and prayer requests which we also publish out to the Team Arequipa blog. It’s here for those who can’t handle another email in their inbox—just come see us whenever you’d like.
