We love working with students. There’s something so special about the liminal space of studying abroad: a voluntary displacement for the sake of formation. Students choose disorientation. They choose to leave the US and ask big questions about God and the world as they spend a semester looking through eyes and living through the experience of another place, people, and culture. And of course they get to travel to some pretty amazing places as well.
¡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).
Paty is a servant leader in our small house church network. She hosts one of the churches, leads our church in the service of loving our neighbor, and has worked full-time with CUDA for the last ten years. Six years after sunsetting our microlending program, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to resurrect it, paying special attention to Arequipa’s marginalized populations—including current and former sex workers and an abused minority community.
It’s springtime here, but Peruvians call it “Arequipa summer” because our true summertime (i.e. January) is the coldest it gets because...rain. This month we celebrated 7 years in Peru! There is so much to be thankful for. We love the house churches. We love our neighborhood and friends throughout the city with whom we get to share life and faith. We love partnering in sustainable community development with CUDA in schools and with microloans. We love guiding Harding students through a process of intercultural learning through the history and culture of Peru.
Getting to be in relationship with Paty as a Christian follower, leader, and servant has been one of the great joys of our 7 years in Arequipa. The last year and a half, in particular, has been a formative time of shared faith, discipleship, and formation for Jesus’s mission and partnership in the gospel. It’s as if God’s work in Paty’s life—which has included so many spiritual mentors, and in which Katie and I personally got to share for years of reading the Bible and breaking bread with Paty and Lola in their home—had all been leading up to the moment where God would call Paty to minister to a very marginalized part of Peru’s population, a group beautifully made in the image of God yet abused by society, including women involved in sex work, and men and women abandoned by their families early in life either because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
As a reminder, we are Living Libraries, a branch of the Christian Urban Development Association’s work in Arequipa, Peru aiming to break cycles of urban poverty and make way for justice, wellbeing, and joy because of Jesus. We put a library in a public school where there were previously no children’s books, and train the teachers with reading comprehension strategies over the course of two years to get that school ready to function on its own with a reading program. We do this because we believe that when the kingdom of Jesus comes into a community, things get better.
