Here I Am!

Well, I am four days into my three year term in Peru. I have said this many times, but it just has not completely sunk in yet that I am here to stay. I have been down here so many times that this trip feels rather temporary at the moment. I am glad to be here though. Right now I am staying at the home of Paul and Marty Clark. Paul is the director of Scripture Union Peru, and they are both very kind and very hospitable people. I hope to soon move into an apartment on my own, but they have offered me a room to stay in during this transition time until I find an apartment where I can get settled.

One challenge of living with Paul and Marty is that they live relatively far away from the center of Lima where the Scripture Union offices and the street boys' center is located. This has forced me to become acquainted very quickly with Lima's public transportation system. Unless you have been to Peru before, I don't think I could explain it to you. The best way that I can think to describe it is if you were to take a city the size of New York, and replace each taxi with a very old 15-20 passenger van/minibus. Each minibus has the name of a destination painted on its outside, and from there you just have to figure it out. Oh, and during rush hour there are easily 25-30 people on the same vehicle with you. Anyways, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but I have good friends who have helped me out, and I have made it all of the way back to the house on my own the last two nights!

Hopefully within this next week I will have found an apartment in a more central location, and I will be able to have a little bit more independence. I looked at a couple of places today, but the first was more apartment than I need (3+ bedrooms), and the second was a room within a family's home. Living there would mean sharing a bathroom with an entire family and possibly sharing a bedroom with one of the sons who lives there. At this point I think I am looking for a little bit more independence. I think I will keep looking...supposedly all of the classifieds and apartment listings all come out tomorrow in the Sunday newspaper. Please pray that all of that works out smoothly.

Lastly, I now have an idea of what the next two months are going to look like for me. As you may have guessed, I will be living in Lima and working with Scripture Union's school program. There are four full-time staff people working with Scripture Union in Lima's school system, and the enter classrooms on a weekly basis to teach the kids family values and Christian principles. I am excited to start partnering with the school workers, and I will enter my first classroom with them starting on Monday.

Whew...this post is already getting quite long, so I think that I will stop there for now. Look forward to stories of the schools and maybe some more pictures in my upcoming posts!