Monday, May 11, 2015

Missions, Mermaids, and Making Disciples- Peru Trip Part 3



The Village of Chembo

In my previous posts, I recounted our time in Huanuco, Peru and  Iquitos, Peru.  To read about our time in Huanuco, click here or Iquitos, click here.  I also posted a set of interesting pictures of Amazon life here. And, if you are wondering why we went to Peru, click here.   Ok, enough links!

Our final leg of our trip focused on the southern part of Peru.  We met up with Scott Doherty and his family, who are missionaries in Cusco, Peru.  Scott is part of a church plant in a city that needs sound, biblical churches.


Cusco is at the southern end of Peru at 11,100'

Sitting at an elevation of about 11,100', Cusco is a testimony to the diversity of Peru.  I had never been in a place where you can go up one flight of stairs and be truly winded!  There was a definite lack of O2 in the air!  We spent a few days with Scott and his family seeing Cusco and peppering him with questions about the surrounding areas.  From Cusco, we traveled into the jungle city of Satipo and on to the village of Chembo deep in the jungle.


Beautiful picture of area around Cusco.

Since we had a recap video of the trip, I will try to focus on some of the highlights of this area.

CUSCO
    Looking at a map of Cusco with hundreds of villages surrounding the city.
There is a huge need to train pastors and missionaries in and around Cusco.  As we looked over a map of Cusco with Scott and Pastor Werner (a Peruvian missionary from Lima) they pointed out hundreds of Quechua villages 1-5 hours from Cusco that have no church.  The few churches that are available are usually at a significant distance from these villages and are led by pastors who have no training.  There are no people that Scott or Werner know of reaching out to these unreached areas or training the few pastors who are in these villages.  There is a great need to give these pastors the tools to shepherd their people!  The increasing globalization of the world is leading many Quechua people to learn Spanish as a trade language.  They are becoming more active in the trade market and they are realizing Spanish is a benefit for their children and their future.  This creates a great opportunity to teach Quechua pastors who know Spanish and can teach in Quechua to others in their village!


View outside Cusco.

There are many more villages, but who will go?  The few local pastors feel ill-equipped to go and yet in many cases they are the  best people to reach out to these villages!  A paraphrase of  Pastor Werner echoes in my mind; come, teach, train, and disciple us.  Come along side us and labor with us! We sacrifice our very lives for this high calling of partnering with local pastors to teach and train them as they take the gospel to their people.

SATIPO
Scott also works in Satipo, a city in the Amazon jungle with a population between 22,000-108,000.  I have searched for an accurate population of this city but it must be difficult to nail down who is actually a member of the city and where the boundary of the city is.


To get to Satipo, we took an overnight bus that required Dramamine for those who wanted to keep their food down!  Unfortunately not everyone wanted or had this luxury.  What a blessing a little pill is!

Ashaninka dancer in Satipo

View in Satipo

6 hours into the bus ride, which goes from an elevation of 10' to 15,700' and ends at 2000', a landslide covered the highway and forced us to wait another 8 hours for equipment to clear a path through the mud.  I'm not sure how close we were to the actual event, but we were only about 10 vehicles back from the start of the slide.

 
Mud slide that blocked our bus

During the delay, we met a Christian woman in her 50's who has been living in an Ashaninka village for the last 10 years as a missionary.  She was so eager to share with us her understanding of the Ashaninka culture and stressed the huge need for workers to come to this vast area of Peru!  What seemed like a huge inconvenience in our schedule turned out to be a perfect answer to our prayer of seeing the needs in Peru and those who are doing the work!  This woman's insights proved valuable as we entered Chembo.


Sweet time with woman who is working in an Ashaninka village.

We met Pastor Miguel, who is a pastor in Satipo with a growing hunger to reach out to the villages along the river systems of the Amazon.  He has started a church in Satipo and is begging Scott to come more often for training.  His desire is to get the few pastors from the rivers the training they desperately want and need.  Miguel has permission to, and has been teaching in, 8 villages with Scott already.  Please pray for Miguel and his family. 


Pastor Miguel

CHEMBO 
Early in the morning of the 16th day of our trip we loaded up in a Toyota pickup truck and headed for the deeper jungle village of Chembo.  Five people sat in the cab and three sat in the bed of the truck with the gear.  A quick stop for bags of rice chaff to sit on and we were off!  Again Dramamine was a great gift!  I knew we were really going out into the bush when the driver spent 5 minutes shaking the truck with all his might trying to squeeze every last drop of gas into the tank!


Early morning ride to Chembo
Not quite as fun as it was 2 hours ago!

    Some of the windy muddy roads
I didn't realize how crazy the roads would be.  It's similar to speeding up a forest service road at 40 mph and skidding around each turn.  These roads gave India a run for their money!  We would stop every 2 hours and switch who was in front and who was in back.  After looking at the scenery whiz past you backwards for 2 hours and being beaten up on the gravel roads and sudden stops for a lone vehicle passing, I realized this would be a tough trip.  When we stopped, there was at least one of us that would need to throw up.  Thankfully it was only an 8 hour trip. 
    This was typical every stop.  Can't even crack a smile!
One highlight of the Tilt-O-Whirl truck ride was being "ferried" across a river in the truck by three boats hooked together and a platform made for three vehicles at a time.  It was actually really cool.  I felt better after it looked like they shifted the weight a bit before we took off. 
    
We go off this "ferry" and took this picture as we drove away.

Sloshing through the jungle!

Made it to the boats!
Once at the end of the road, literally, we carried our gear and the food/water for the trip a half hour through a muddy, water-soaked trail.  I have never felt heat and humidity like that before!  And that's saying a lot living in southern Texas for 2 years!  At the same time, I couldn't help but think how cool this was!  This is a hard place to get to!  We are sloshing in the Amazon jungle to teach a few believers and share the gospel with the community!  Amazing!  It was then that I really just sat back and took it all in... but the mosquitos were huge and vicious so I quickly kept moving.  After resting for a minute next to some amazing butterflies, we loaded into two dugout canoes and were taxied across the river for about 1/2 hour.  


This was great.  The river is so wide.
The river is high and the canoes sit low in the water, probably 5 inches from the rim of the boat.  It is a sobering feeling crossing a high, muddy river with trees floating down it, looking a mile across it to the shore on the opposite side.  Thankfully our guides were experts and never had a moment of anxiety other than when a member of the group stood up to take a picture! 


My fortress of solitude.
The village itself was a mixture of traditional grass huts and a new school made with cement blocks.  We slept in hammocks with bug nets and I was so grateful for these fortress of solitudes!  I distinctly remember shining my headlamp up into the grass hut roof and seeing the shining eyes of unknown creatures living with me in this hut.  Most of them were little spiders or lizards, but there were some BIG spiders and I'm sure other unsavory characters sleeping with me each night.
Yep, that's a tarantula in my roof.
Yep, that's a huge spider in my bedroom!
    Pastor questions after preaching.
We were able to worship with the pastors that came for training and the few believers in the village.  I was able to preach from Hebrews 12:1-2 on the running the race of a Christian by looking to Jesus.  It was a great time.  After, the pastors asked Scott some practical questions such as:  - What is temptation?,  What is biblical marriage? How do you discipline your children?  These were great questions from pastors that just didn't know.  They need and desire training and discipleship!  What a joy to be here doing just that!

As we were getting ready for the training the first day, we were told that every man in the village was required to attend a community meeting.  The reason was that 9 people in the village were sick and it was determined that there was a witch in the village that was causing the sickness. 

The result was to have the curandero or "good witch" come to the meeting to determine who the "bad witch" was.  We were told the curandero takes a hallucinogen, then over the course of the next several hours, identifies who the bad witch is.  The meeting lasted the whole day and the person identified was kicked out of the village .  


As we were waiting for the meeting to end, Wilder, a pastor that hiked 8 hours and travelled by boat 6 more hours to get to the training, told us a little of the beliefs of the Ashaninka people in this area. Here is some of what he said:
    • Chewyachakee- This is a person who looks like a relative or friend that asks you to follow them into the jungle where you are lost or killed.  Only by running away can you be saved.  The only way you can know if it is the real person or the Chewyachakee is that the Chewyachakee has a limp.  The people are VERY afraid of it!
    • Mermaids- Wilder and his wife have both seen mermaids as they travel the rivers.  Apparently the one they both saw at the same time was a "good" mermaid that only presented itself to them.  He said that there are "bad" mermaids that lure you into the river to drown you and they make most of the men and women on the river very nervous.
    • There is also a person called a Face-peeler.  This is the belief that a gringo looking person comes in to a village to take the faces of the children in the village.   So we were instructed to be careful not to touch any of the kids.  This is more prevalent the deeper you get into the jungle.  
These beliefs are very serious and not a laughing matter.  There is fear, even in the Christians, about these things.  We know that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. We have not received the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we as Christians have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry Abba! Father! These men need training and discipleship! 

The next day we were able to teach all day and it was great to talk about the Word and encourage the believers. 


Teaching during the day

The trip back was uneventful except seeing a vehicle just like ours off the side of the hill and come to find out that one man died in the crash the night before.  This gave us all pause and the reality of the hardness and danger of going to these places struck each of us.

Truck crashed the night before we left

It's easy to talk about sharing the gospel, teaching, training and discipling people.  It's even possible to do all of that.  But is it changing YOU?  Is the Word of God affecting YOUR heart?  But the true test is when you yourself get bumped.  When something happens that isn't according to plan, what spills out of your heart?  It usually comes out of your mouth.  We were "bumped"  when we got back to Satipo and found that a huge landslide had covered a town and blocked the way back to Lima and home to my family.  Instead of prayer for the victims or thankfulness for our safety and the work that we were able to do, I immediately became frustrated.  My heart was exposed and it was ugly.  God, in His love, reveals our hearts to us, the blind spots that we don't see until we are bumped.  I don't like it, but I need it.  Yes, missionaries are not anything special.   We sin and have our hearts exposed in our attitudes, actions and thoughts just like anyone else.  We desperately need Jesus daily!  Thankfully God uses these weak and broken vessels for His glory!

On the way out.  What a God we serve!

A delay of two days,  extra fees to reschedule missed flights, and another plane ticket from another town we weren't planning to go to 8 hours away and all was fixed.  There was more "bumps" along the way, but God was so merciful to get us home.
The summary of the whole trip was answered prayer!  From the trip planning, travel, meeting missionaries and nationals who helped us understand more of the need of Peru, safety along the way, protection from sickness when we ate "whatever" was set before us, to sustaining Brita and the kids over the long 24 days!  Thank you so much for your partnership with us!  What a joy to serve Christ alongside you!  Please pray for the work in Peru and our desire to serve in Peru long term.  There is so much to do but God is so faithful!  Thank you for reading!!


Teaching and Training in Chembo

FUN STUFF
One of our kids favorite pictures! Chembo pet monkey.


Not sure what to say... We were "encouraged" to try these on!

And the rumors were true.  There were bats in the latrine!  This was taken during the down time in the village.  Be warned, there is a latrine, and there are bats! 



1 comment:

  1. Awesome review of a God inspired adventure.

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