13 meses...

Greetings from Chimbote,
(Author`s note: After writing this entry, I realize that I have rambled in a haphazard, stream of consciousness type manner. I hope you will forgive the disorganization as I share with you a dumping out of some of my recent thoughts.)

Time seems to go by quickly here, just passed the 13-months-in-Chimbote mark this week, and my time remaining here seems short now rather than long. I am celebrating events and seasons for the second time around now, from a perspective that can only come as a result of the intervening months. A year ago I was still in a sling from my dislocated, looking for where I might be useful, Emily and Nicole were doing my laundry, and I was going on four weeks without a shower, getting ready to start English classes the first week of November, and not really knowing enough people to to have a birthday party. Now, Emily and Nicole are back in the US, I have three great new missionary companions, we have grown in numbers and organization in our English courses, my arm is good and strong, and we just had about 70 people over, with a live band, to celebrate my birthday at 9:00 on a Sunday night. It was actually visits from the two choirs last year for Emily and I`s birthday that began a process of meeting more people in the parish. I have ideas for more projects than there are time for, I have adapted more to the flexible rhythm of life, and have gotten a lot better at subjunctive verb forms. I still miss fall and its rites -- football, leaves, crisp air, etc -- but not as poignantly as last year. I have found a few good friends that I know I will miss, even as I also know I will be excited to return to the US to see and be with family. I missed being with Suzanne, Ryan, Michelle, Mom and Dad as they gathered in Redding during this week when my dad had a major surgery, but the marvels of modern communication have also helped keep us in better touch that we imagined before I came. I am enjoying the guitar lessons from Roger, finally getting a little grasp of the theory behind it all, and still pick up the quena and zampoña now and then. Our JUMIFRA youth council has big plans for advent and Christmas -- posadas, Christmas play, Christmas music concert, Christmas party and gifts for parish children, our own website through a free program offered by the archdiocese -- I`ll be sure to share stories and photos from all this as it comes along. On Sundays, instead of running out into the fields as I do most mornings, I continue my custom of walking past downtown to the ocean (about 30 minutes each way) -- past the honking cars, the combi assistants drumming up business, the elderly ladies selling all shapes and sizes of fresh-baked bread from huge baskets on the street, the greasy feel and smell of the sidewalk along Galvez Street near the market, people stopping for fresh-squeezed orange juice at street stands where the reuse the glasses after a perfunctory rinse, the smell of meat frying and fresh fish all mixing together. There were Sundays last year at this time when, upon arriving at the (very polluted, I now realize) bay, I wondered to myself what the heck I was doing here. Why had I come? I still might not know exactly the end purpose of my stay here in this desert port city, but thoughts of regret stopped coming to me a long while back. I know I have -- and will be -- changed when my time comes to return to the US, even though I struggle when asked to define the exact nature of this change. In a discussion with my housemates this week about our spirituality as missionaries, we agreed that in some ways we are not challenged as much here in our faith: sermons are only occasionally engaging or inspiring (aside from the language issue) and faith of people as a generalization tends to be less intellectual and individual than we are accustomed to in the US, instead the focus being on community, ritual and feast day celebration, and music. The parish here, we are discovering in our survey conversations with youth, has a huge potencial to be a place of gathering for youth: to learn (faith based and otherwise), develop skills (art, music, carpentry, baking, etc), socialize (a safe place to interact with others in a neighborhood and city that holds so many potencial dangers and detours for young people), and work toward societal change (environmental pollution and conservation, less corruption and better use of resources, etc). We have thus far taken a few small steps toward addressing these potencial roles, but so much more could be done (I am finding that even writing this reflection is newly inspiring me to keep striving onward). Though I am sometimes not challenged or inspired intellectually as I might be in a US parish, we agreed that just living here daily challenges us to solidarity, to simplicity (those cold showers will never be easy), to self-reflection on priorities, to a weighing of this new culture -- its positives and negatives -- that I am immersed in. I pray each day that I might be open to what God might want to teach me, that I might have eyes to see and take in even the small details of this gift of an experience, and that somehow I might be able to plant seeds that will someday grow into a harvest of a better, saner, healthier and more just life here in Chimbote, Peru.