Buenos días from Hunter Hill! I love to get above the city, and this is one of my favorite spots to see the city from a different perspective. I didn’t get the chance to take HULA 2024 up here, so I decided to document it with pictures and words for them, and also for you. Some of you have been up here with me before, so for you I hope this is a helpful reminder of our shared prayer in Arequipa.
My first Mother’s Day in Peru (as a mother, see the picture below), our neighbors, Pedro and Frecia, invited us to spend the day with them because they knew we didn’t have family here and wanted to share that with us. Because of the generosity we were shown that day, I wanted to pass it on. So, this Mother’s Day I wanted to have a full table and I knew if I cooked food, they would come. So I cooked a meal and we invited anyone that was a part of our church meeting to stay and eat with us. Those who don’t have a mother living or who don’t live near family ended up staying and eating and we shared the afternoon around the table.
This fall I met with a good friend of mine who has connections to everyone in the city (it seems like) and she said, “Katie, I think we should do a Bible study at the women’s prison.” She also has a way of dragging me into all her plans…or God has a way of using her to push me out of my comfort zone.I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect but I agreed to do it. We went together to the prison to meet with the director of the prison and got things set up so that in November we began a six-week study with a group of 48 women.
The last three months have been intense. In particular, Katie has been doing really special work. In October she went to the Connections conference in Brazil, visited our house church’s missionary in a mountain community of Apurimac, and worked in a medical campaign in Cusco. Between those things we hosted an alumni group as part of Harding’s celebration of 100 years. All of that led into an incredible November. She got to go to two of four sessions of a personal finance course that Paty did with a group called Féminas, a group of women with tough lives, most of whom are sex workers. Katie and Paty have been building relationships with them over the last couple years, and at the end of the personal finance class the women suggested a Bible study as a next step. See more below in the article about CUDA and please pray for that opportunity!
We moved! Our big news from the last few weeks is that we moved to a new neighborhood in the district of Sachaca. October was a whirlwind, and on the 31st, the same day that our kids got to trick-or-treat for the first time ever, we moved a couple miles away from where we’ve been for the last 8.5 years. The month and a half we’ve been here so far have been full of affirmation that we made the right decision, and I ask for your prayers as we start to share life and faith in a new part of the city.
I sit here in my favorite spot on the couch in my apartment overlooking the incredible and vast city lights, writing this and eating my dinner of bread and avocado at 10pm at night. I am alone but on a high from a great evening of climbing with friends and I am hit with waves of emotions as my mind is flooded with so many memories from this past year. There were difficult and challenging times but also new experiences and life giving moments.
When we tried to get back to Arequipa to prepare for our HULA group’s arrival, the airport was still shut down because of the protests which had reignited. This time they had shut down food and gas supplies to the city, which led us to make the decision to start HULA 2023 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). It was an inordinate amount of work to pull that off (and made possible because of my amazing friend Jonathan Hanegan), but pull it off we did and we launched into an incredible semester with an amazing group of students, for whom we are so thankful. By the time we got to Arequipa on February 20, things were mostly back to normal and we launched into a special time of travel, learning, and connection with a place, a people, its history and culture, designed to form us interculturally and grow spiritually.
We. Are. Thankful. The kids have been in school since March, and are loving it. 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 were recently asked a number of questions, to give context for the new Central Church website, so I decided to share it here. Of course some of you have been paying attention to the Team Arequipa story way before we were in the picture. But we’re coming up on having lived here 8 years and it was instructive to me to think about how we ended here, what the mission is, how faith has evolved, and how special it is to see God at work.
¡Hola from Arequipa! We’re well into 2022 and less than two weeks away from our next Harding University Latin America group arriving. There are 30 students coming along with Jonathan Roberts (who directs Harding’s financial aid) and our dear friends Debora and Sira (with whom we spent a significant amount of time in the 2020 lockdown).
