Tuesday, March 31, 2009
New IWM Website
Just a heads up that the Incarnate Word Missionaries volunteer program, of which I am a participant, has recently launched their own website -- videos, information about mission sites, how to apply, information about current missionaries, etc. Check it out using the link above right.
Retiro Anual, etc.
Greetings from Chimbote! I write this new blog over several days from Wednesday, March 25, to Monday, March 30 – with still one written blog yet to post from earlier this month. I´ve had some technical difficulties transferring from our home computer to an internet connected site using floppy disks, but am hoping to post them both soon. I have, however, succeeded in posting some music from our choir on our music site, link at right, from a wedding that we sang at in January (songs with ´W´ preceding the title). Also, the photo site has some images from March, including our yearly retreat in Tortugas. Before going on to summarize recent life, I wish you a happy feast of the Incarnation (9 months before Christmas). March 25th is the patron feast of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, so we four gathered with the local sisters, IW lay associates, and others from the parish for a 7:00 mass and then a compartir – a simple sharing of food – at the sisters´ house afterward.
VISITS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
Elmer, an acquaintance from the parish who is finishing his studies to be an English teacher, asked me to accompany him on two visits to classes at a local public high school. As part of his student teaching, he has to do some communal work and asked me to present on the importance of learning English, the school system in the US, and bring a song in English to look at the lyrics. We visited a fifth grade class – students were about 16 years old, since high school here is five years – and a fourth grade class on two separate days (see photo of the fifth graders below). Impressions: a scarcity of resources and amenities within the rooms themselves, which were basically concrete with desks, a few tables and a whiteboard; students all wore uniforms; the first day we tried to have them do group work without much success; not a lot of respect for the authority of their teacher, though I know this depends a lot on the teacher´s work beforehand; all students in public schools wear uniforms; curiosity about school system in the US; they really liked hearing the U2 song, though didn´t understand much of it since their English is really basic, maybe similar to the Spanish of many US high school students. We arrived in the second week of classes for the year, and were told that some students had still not started attending for the year. While waiting for the watchman to let us out the second day, I had a group of 7-8 second grade youth gather around me with tons of questions about the US, why I was here, etc, realizing at that moment that in their enthusiasm youth in various parts of the world are not really that different.
ANNUAL IWM RETREAT
A couple days following the visits to República Peruana high school, we four joined Sister Leonila – a recently-arrived IW sister from Mexico – for the 45-minute ride to Casa Galilea, the retreat house owned by the Diocese of Chimbote on Tortugas Bay, where we held our yearly Incarnate Word Missionary Retreat. Though the rest of the IWM´s in Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas gathered together for a joint retreat in Mexico, travel distances oblige us to make our own retreat, united in spirit. Like last year´s retreat in Lima, this five-night experience was restful and fruitful spiritually and personally – but the site was definitely an improvement in my book. For one, we avoided the eight-hour trip to Lima and instead of being in a compound within the city, we were right on the water of the bay, the most consistently heard sound being that the small waves coming ashore down the stairs from the nice covered patio. We had a small, simple house with six bedrooms and a living room, pretty good food served three times a day (lots of rice and potatoes, not surprisingly), lukewarm showers if you waited until the afternoon, a swim most afternoons, and a refreshing ocean breeze. Tortugas itself is mostly vacation homes with a handful of hotels/hostals and a few restaurants. Though on the coast, there are few signs of greenery about – rocky shores and beach, mountains of sand and rock, dirt roads. It felt fairly abandoned with the summer over, schools back in session, and most of the families from Chimbote, Lima, or Trujillo gone for the year until next summer. There is no electricity anywhere except for 6:45-11:45 in the evening – weird to see all the lights in the homes across the bay come on at the same moment. Water is delivered by truck to private tanks which feed each individual home or complex, and a guy with a big basket strapped to the back of his small motorcycle makes bread deliveries each morning. Our schedule included prayer and scripture sharing at 9:00 at 4:00, one interview each day with Sister Leonila, guides for personal reflection, lots of personal time for journaling, reading, thinking, etc, and a time of sharing about the day with the group after dinner each night. I did some running around the bay or climbed the mountain behind the house each morning, and one afternoon we all four climbed up to watch the sunset. I went to bed early, took a short nap each afternoon, and generally caught up on a lot of needed rest (although three days back in Chimbote I felt very tired once again), and had plenty of time to play the guitar. Themes for my own reflection included my personal relationships, how I´ve grown in the past year (helped to read my journal from last year´s retreat), and priorities/hopes for the my final six months here in Chimbote. My list of last project ideas and goals from our 2008 retreat was, I now realize, quite naively over-ambitious – though I might very-well look back on my revised goals for this period as a bit far-reaching as well. I guess better this tendency than the opposite – see next headings for discussion of ministry goals.
CHOIR
I still much enjoy being a part of my choir, Trovadores del Evangelio (Troubadors of the Gospel), though we admittedly are suffering through a bit of a transition period as a group. Several veteran members have dropped out – at least temporarily – largely due to time restraints from studies and/or work commitments. As it happens, those 7-10 of us left are all guys, several being quite good musicians on guitar, percussion, and/or wind instruments. Ginno, our repeat coordinator, is deeply committed but at times lacks a little tact in managing the group and stimulates unnecessary tensions. I have taken on the role of typing up the lyrics every two weeks of the songs we will be singing at mass, and still have the goal of playing the guitar with the group, but would also like to help more. What we really need, maybe, is to invite new members for a new group make-up, though we need to work a little on creating a welcoming environment for new people. This may be an area of focus for my ministry – to help strengthen the choir an provide a place for new people to be involved in the parish life. I was discouraged this past week by a couple things with the group – first, that Ginno told his fellow coordinator – and a main guitarist – on the night before we were to sing at mass that he wouldn´t be singing because he wasn´t leading well by example with the group. Partly true, I think, but could have been handled better. Anyway, he didn´t sing – and three other guys also boycotted in protest, leaving three of us who had rehearsed. We requested some emergency help, and it turned out a little off key, but acceptable. Then, this past weekend, a couple group members got on Ginno´s case for inviting others to sing with us who hadn´t rehearsed (a rule of the choir is that you have to rehearse to sing). Ginno got upset and there was an argument. I just left feeling – besides tired, at 11:00 pm – but discouraged that if even within parish groups we have trouble working with each other, how will we tackle the larger problems that face us all and face society?
BIBLE WORKSHOP
A very positive recent experience was a Bible workshop in the parish every evening during the week March 23-27. All parish groups and meetings were suspended (including our English classes) for a Lectio Divina workshop led by a team from the diocese of Chimbote. Primarily, following the first hour on Monday for introduction and orientation to they why of Bible study, we spent each evening in groups of 10-12 reading, discussing, and praying in response to a different short scripture passage each night. Each evening about 80 leaders and participants from the parish – primarily adults, but also some from our JUMIFRA youth leadership group – met to read, pray and share. Besides the benefits that it had in connecting members of the parish, I found it spiritually rewarding, something I´ve missed. I kept wanting to share all sorts of ideas and thoughts, and a couple themes kept jumping out at me. One, the missionary call of the church – to go out, no just wait for folks to come to us. As you know if you´ve read my blog for a while, I´ve had for some time a desire to initiate a more concerted effort to visit youth in their homes. The reality is that we communicate with a very small fraction of the young people that live within our parish region, the majority of whom are Catholic culturally or in name. Previously also, I´ve realized that the consistent time commitment required to plan and prepare for eight English classes per week indeed takes away energy and time that I could put at the disposal of other parish youth projects. In these weeks as we come to the end of a third English class cycle, I am discerning again my priorities in my final months – how do I best invest my limited time and energy in these five months that I have left here?
ENGLISH CLASSES
Even given the time commitment mentioned above, I do enjoy teaching English and the community that has developed within the group. We are just today getting back to our normal schedule after a two-week break – one for our retreat and the second for the parish Bible workshop. We tried to hold make-up classes on the Saturday afternoons before and after, but just a few students came. This actually is our final full week of classes – the second half of next week we will be suspending classes for our Holy Week celebrations. I took advantage of the class being cancelled last week to finish the project of an English Class IWM CD. Each of us four chose 9 of our favorite songs that we have access to here on CD and we compiled a two-disk set of music in English, accompanied by all the lyrics for students to practice – and for the fun of sharing our own musical culture with our students. Initial response has been positive, music being so popular here. We´ll finish this three-month cycle the Monday after Easter and are scheduled to start a new cycle the first week of May. Also at that time, I will again be assisting with the Confirmation program one or two nights per week and therefore am considering consolidating two of our four groups and not, this cycle, starting a new group from the very beginning.
UPCOMING VISIT OF MY FAMILY
My family is again coming to visit! A little more than a year after my mom and aunt Janie braved the summer heat of Chimbote last March, my brother Ryan and his wife Michelle, along with my sister Suzanne and her boyfriend Cory, will be arriving for a 2 ½ week sojourn in Peru. They arrive in Chimbote Saturday, April 11, and after four days here we will again travel south to explore Cuzco and the Inca trail. I feel blessed to be able (thanks to the generosity of my parents and aunt) to be able to visit for the third time sites that for many are once in a lifetime experiences. I also can´t avoid a little guilt knowing that my friends from Chimbote will likely never be able to visit Cuzco, although it lies within their own country. Still, I can´t help but be very excited for the upcoming visit – to see my brother and sister after 20 months, to share with my life and my temporary home country, to have them meet my friends. An ironic note is that thinking of the upcoming reunion I am missing home more – a feeling no doubt increased by the ill health of my dad and wanting to be able to help more.
ON THE HOME FRONT
One welcome development that came out of our retreat was the development of a more structured sharing of house responsibilities, important to me because at times I have felt recently that I was having to assume a larger than just share of taking care things around the house (cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc). With Julie and Courtney now each having two mornings free during each week, they have more time to cook, and actually wanted to take on more of this job. So, I now am responsible for preparing lunch on just two days – Friday and Saturday, and we have a rotating schedule of home cleaning responsibilities.
We still don´t have a new fridge, though our friend Alex did help us to sell the old one for parts. As a splurge, we used some of the 50 soles to go out for ceviche. We returned from our retreat to a burned out pump, once again leaving us without running water in the house. This time the bucket showers and filling buckets morning and afternoon lasted less than a week, our landlord Hector getting to repairing the pump fairly quickly. Lifting the faucet in the bathroom and having water come out is, hopefully, something I will not take for granted for a long time to come.
Last week we welcomed a two-day visit from Zach and Tad, two representatives of a US Christian organization called Harvest. The mission of Harvest is to train local missionaries in practical methods for transforming their local community socially, politically, and spiritually through concrete acts of love, of meeting peoples´ real needs. Zach´s job (he is a friend of Jane´s), as a journalist, as been to travel around three continents (Asia, Africa, South America) to record stories of the activities of local churches that have Harvest-trained missionaries. Peru is the midway point of his four month, eight country South American loop – the last of the three continents. I was intrigued to hear his stories of adventures while traveling and he was definitely interested in the activity of the local church here. It was interesting to hear that although Harvest trains missionaries from all sorts of denominations, he didn´t know of them working with any Catholic churches.
EVERYDAY IMAGES
With the months that I have left here sure to fly by, I am trying to remember more of the images of daily life here that I strike me as I walk through each day. 1) Every morning as I go running on Avenida Peru out into the fields of corn, rice, and cotton, I pass numerous two-wheeled donkey carts on the way from field to market and several groups of children I regularly see being driven to school using this means of transport. On one particular morning, I was struck by three very young school children, maybe 5 or 6 years old, perched high upon a mountain of cornstalks being carted into town. Another father can often be seen driving his two young daughters to school over the sandy dirt road – by bike – one perched on a back rack and the other between her father´s legs on the cross bar. Then there are the two sisters, maybe 12 and 8, who daily make the mile+ walk into school, almost invariably the older sister about 10 paces ahead of the younger. It strikes me that, pulled out of their radically different setting, these kids – in their well-kept uniforms of skirts and blouses – could just as well be piling out of an SUV at a Catholic school in the US. 2) I regularly see as well, walking about, people transporting large loads by their own power. The primary means for accomplishing the transport of whatever large item – a pile of furniture, scrap metal, bricks, sides of beef, crates of chickens in their last hours of life – is the ´triciclo´, or tricycle. Triciclos have one rear wheel, two wheels in front to support a large cargo box, and just one gear. For this reason, and because of the sheer weight of some of the loads, often the owner is seen pushing or pulling the card instead of actually riding, unless he is heading downhill. Apart from the triciclos, I saw a man this week carrying a metal tray – with an incredibly tall pile of cookies – on top of his head. How he managed to maintain the cookie mountain intact must me a feat of practice (and a strong neck) – anyway, the cookies must have been fresh baked, because they definitely smelled good as he walked past.
JUMIFRA
Our youth leadership council, JUMIFRA, has continued to be busy with a variety of projects, though it seems we are often a little behind in getting started. Projects accomplished recently include a first draft of a proposal for group statutes, or norms, in an effort to formalize membership a bit and emphasize the identity of JUMIFRA – a gathering of young leaders within the parish in order to serve their fellow youth and the parish at large. In fundraising efforts for a cross to use in our street Way of the Cross on Good Friday and for T-shirts that identify us as a group, we have held breakfast fundraisers on two consecutive Sundays after the 7:30 am mass. Instead of the pancakes and eggs that would be served in the US, we actually have it a bit easier – shredded chicken sandwiches (with lettuce, mayo, and thin-sliced fried potatoes on a French roll) and a hot drink, either ´quaker´ (oatmeal drink with cinnamon, cloves, and milk) or quinua, prepared with cloves, cinnamon, pineapple, and chuño (freeze dried potato flour).
Selling 120 sandwiches and 120 cups at 1.5 soles each (about 50 cents) yields us about 100 soles profit each time. Apart from visiting area schools to invite registrations for confirmation and first communion preparation, our major project of the moment is rehearsing for the acting of the Vía Crucis – Way of the Cross – that our young people (and me – I will be Simon of Cyrene this year) will perform on a route through a couple of our parish neighborhoods on Good Friday afternoon/evening, complete with crosses and a mock crucifixion.
Have a blessed Holy Week.
VISITS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
Elmer, an acquaintance from the parish who is finishing his studies to be an English teacher, asked me to accompany him on two visits to classes at a local public high school. As part of his student teaching, he has to do some communal work and asked me to present on the importance of learning English, the school system in the US, and bring a song in English to look at the lyrics. We visited a fifth grade class – students were about 16 years old, since high school here is five years – and a fourth grade class on two separate days (see photo of the fifth graders below). Impressions: a scarcity of resources and amenities within the rooms themselves, which were basically concrete with desks, a few tables and a whiteboard; students all wore uniforms; the first day we tried to have them do group work without much success; not a lot of respect for the authority of their teacher, though I know this depends a lot on the teacher´s work beforehand; all students in public schools wear uniforms; curiosity about school system in the US; they really liked hearing the U2 song, though didn´t understand much of it since their English is really basic, maybe similar to the Spanish of many US high school students. We arrived in the second week of classes for the year, and were told that some students had still not started attending for the year. While waiting for the watchman to let us out the second day, I had a group of 7-8 second grade youth gather around me with tons of questions about the US, why I was here, etc, realizing at that moment that in their enthusiasm youth in various parts of the world are not really that different.
ANNUAL IWM RETREAT
A couple days following the visits to República Peruana high school, we four joined Sister Leonila – a recently-arrived IW sister from Mexico – for the 45-minute ride to Casa Galilea, the retreat house owned by the Diocese of Chimbote on Tortugas Bay, where we held our yearly Incarnate Word Missionary Retreat. Though the rest of the IWM´s in Mexico, Guatemala, and Texas gathered together for a joint retreat in Mexico, travel distances oblige us to make our own retreat, united in spirit. Like last year´s retreat in Lima, this five-night experience was restful and fruitful spiritually and personally – but the site was definitely an improvement in my book. For one, we avoided the eight-hour trip to Lima and instead of being in a compound within the city, we were right on the water of the bay, the most consistently heard sound being that the small waves coming ashore down the stairs from the nice covered patio. We had a small, simple house with six bedrooms and a living room, pretty good food served three times a day (lots of rice and potatoes, not surprisingly), lukewarm showers if you waited until the afternoon, a swim most afternoons, and a refreshing ocean breeze. Tortugas itself is mostly vacation homes with a handful of hotels/hostals and a few restaurants. Though on the coast, there are few signs of greenery about – rocky shores and beach, mountains of sand and rock, dirt roads. It felt fairly abandoned with the summer over, schools back in session, and most of the families from Chimbote, Lima, or Trujillo gone for the year until next summer. There is no electricity anywhere except for 6:45-11:45 in the evening – weird to see all the lights in the homes across the bay come on at the same moment. Water is delivered by truck to private tanks which feed each individual home or complex, and a guy with a big basket strapped to the back of his small motorcycle makes bread deliveries each morning. Our schedule included prayer and scripture sharing at 9:00 at 4:00, one interview each day with Sister Leonila, guides for personal reflection, lots of personal time for journaling, reading, thinking, etc, and a time of sharing about the day with the group after dinner each night. I did some running around the bay or climbed the mountain behind the house each morning, and one afternoon we all four climbed up to watch the sunset. I went to bed early, took a short nap each afternoon, and generally caught up on a lot of needed rest (although three days back in Chimbote I felt very tired once again), and had plenty of time to play the guitar. Themes for my own reflection included my personal relationships, how I´ve grown in the past year (helped to read my journal from last year´s retreat), and priorities/hopes for the my final six months here in Chimbote. My list of last project ideas and goals from our 2008 retreat was, I now realize, quite naively over-ambitious – though I might very-well look back on my revised goals for this period as a bit far-reaching as well. I guess better this tendency than the opposite – see next headings for discussion of ministry goals.
CHOIR
I still much enjoy being a part of my choir, Trovadores del Evangelio (Troubadors of the Gospel), though we admittedly are suffering through a bit of a transition period as a group. Several veteran members have dropped out – at least temporarily – largely due to time restraints from studies and/or work commitments. As it happens, those 7-10 of us left are all guys, several being quite good musicians on guitar, percussion, and/or wind instruments. Ginno, our repeat coordinator, is deeply committed but at times lacks a little tact in managing the group and stimulates unnecessary tensions. I have taken on the role of typing up the lyrics every two weeks of the songs we will be singing at mass, and still have the goal of playing the guitar with the group, but would also like to help more. What we really need, maybe, is to invite new members for a new group make-up, though we need to work a little on creating a welcoming environment for new people. This may be an area of focus for my ministry – to help strengthen the choir an provide a place for new people to be involved in the parish life. I was discouraged this past week by a couple things with the group – first, that Ginno told his fellow coordinator – and a main guitarist – on the night before we were to sing at mass that he wouldn´t be singing because he wasn´t leading well by example with the group. Partly true, I think, but could have been handled better. Anyway, he didn´t sing – and three other guys also boycotted in protest, leaving three of us who had rehearsed. We requested some emergency help, and it turned out a little off key, but acceptable. Then, this past weekend, a couple group members got on Ginno´s case for inviting others to sing with us who hadn´t rehearsed (a rule of the choir is that you have to rehearse to sing). Ginno got upset and there was an argument. I just left feeling – besides tired, at 11:00 pm – but discouraged that if even within parish groups we have trouble working with each other, how will we tackle the larger problems that face us all and face society?
BIBLE WORKSHOP
A very positive recent experience was a Bible workshop in the parish every evening during the week March 23-27. All parish groups and meetings were suspended (including our English classes) for a Lectio Divina workshop led by a team from the diocese of Chimbote. Primarily, following the first hour on Monday for introduction and orientation to they why of Bible study, we spent each evening in groups of 10-12 reading, discussing, and praying in response to a different short scripture passage each night. Each evening about 80 leaders and participants from the parish – primarily adults, but also some from our JUMIFRA youth leadership group – met to read, pray and share. Besides the benefits that it had in connecting members of the parish, I found it spiritually rewarding, something I´ve missed. I kept wanting to share all sorts of ideas and thoughts, and a couple themes kept jumping out at me. One, the missionary call of the church – to go out, no just wait for folks to come to us. As you know if you´ve read my blog for a while, I´ve had for some time a desire to initiate a more concerted effort to visit youth in their homes. The reality is that we communicate with a very small fraction of the young people that live within our parish region, the majority of whom are Catholic culturally or in name. Previously also, I´ve realized that the consistent time commitment required to plan and prepare for eight English classes per week indeed takes away energy and time that I could put at the disposal of other parish youth projects. In these weeks as we come to the end of a third English class cycle, I am discerning again my priorities in my final months – how do I best invest my limited time and energy in these five months that I have left here?
ENGLISH CLASSES
Even given the time commitment mentioned above, I do enjoy teaching English and the community that has developed within the group. We are just today getting back to our normal schedule after a two-week break – one for our retreat and the second for the parish Bible workshop. We tried to hold make-up classes on the Saturday afternoons before and after, but just a few students came. This actually is our final full week of classes – the second half of next week we will be suspending classes for our Holy Week celebrations. I took advantage of the class being cancelled last week to finish the project of an English Class IWM CD. Each of us four chose 9 of our favorite songs that we have access to here on CD and we compiled a two-disk set of music in English, accompanied by all the lyrics for students to practice – and for the fun of sharing our own musical culture with our students. Initial response has been positive, music being so popular here. We´ll finish this three-month cycle the Monday after Easter and are scheduled to start a new cycle the first week of May. Also at that time, I will again be assisting with the Confirmation program one or two nights per week and therefore am considering consolidating two of our four groups and not, this cycle, starting a new group from the very beginning.
UPCOMING VISIT OF MY FAMILY
My family is again coming to visit! A little more than a year after my mom and aunt Janie braved the summer heat of Chimbote last March, my brother Ryan and his wife Michelle, along with my sister Suzanne and her boyfriend Cory, will be arriving for a 2 ½ week sojourn in Peru. They arrive in Chimbote Saturday, April 11, and after four days here we will again travel south to explore Cuzco and the Inca trail. I feel blessed to be able (thanks to the generosity of my parents and aunt) to be able to visit for the third time sites that for many are once in a lifetime experiences. I also can´t avoid a little guilt knowing that my friends from Chimbote will likely never be able to visit Cuzco, although it lies within their own country. Still, I can´t help but be very excited for the upcoming visit – to see my brother and sister after 20 months, to share with my life and my temporary home country, to have them meet my friends. An ironic note is that thinking of the upcoming reunion I am missing home more – a feeling no doubt increased by the ill health of my dad and wanting to be able to help more.
ON THE HOME FRONT
One welcome development that came out of our retreat was the development of a more structured sharing of house responsibilities, important to me because at times I have felt recently that I was having to assume a larger than just share of taking care things around the house (cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc). With Julie and Courtney now each having two mornings free during each week, they have more time to cook, and actually wanted to take on more of this job. So, I now am responsible for preparing lunch on just two days – Friday and Saturday, and we have a rotating schedule of home cleaning responsibilities.
We still don´t have a new fridge, though our friend Alex did help us to sell the old one for parts. As a splurge, we used some of the 50 soles to go out for ceviche. We returned from our retreat to a burned out pump, once again leaving us without running water in the house. This time the bucket showers and filling buckets morning and afternoon lasted less than a week, our landlord Hector getting to repairing the pump fairly quickly. Lifting the faucet in the bathroom and having water come out is, hopefully, something I will not take for granted for a long time to come.
Last week we welcomed a two-day visit from Zach and Tad, two representatives of a US Christian organization called Harvest. The mission of Harvest is to train local missionaries in practical methods for transforming their local community socially, politically, and spiritually through concrete acts of love, of meeting peoples´ real needs. Zach´s job (he is a friend of Jane´s), as a journalist, as been to travel around three continents (Asia, Africa, South America) to record stories of the activities of local churches that have Harvest-trained missionaries. Peru is the midway point of his four month, eight country South American loop – the last of the three continents. I was intrigued to hear his stories of adventures while traveling and he was definitely interested in the activity of the local church here. It was interesting to hear that although Harvest trains missionaries from all sorts of denominations, he didn´t know of them working with any Catholic churches.
EVERYDAY IMAGES
With the months that I have left here sure to fly by, I am trying to remember more of the images of daily life here that I strike me as I walk through each day. 1) Every morning as I go running on Avenida Peru out into the fields of corn, rice, and cotton, I pass numerous two-wheeled donkey carts on the way from field to market and several groups of children I regularly see being driven to school using this means of transport. On one particular morning, I was struck by three very young school children, maybe 5 or 6 years old, perched high upon a mountain of cornstalks being carted into town. Another father can often be seen driving his two young daughters to school over the sandy dirt road – by bike – one perched on a back rack and the other between her father´s legs on the cross bar. Then there are the two sisters, maybe 12 and 8, who daily make the mile+ walk into school, almost invariably the older sister about 10 paces ahead of the younger. It strikes me that, pulled out of their radically different setting, these kids – in their well-kept uniforms of skirts and blouses – could just as well be piling out of an SUV at a Catholic school in the US. 2) I regularly see as well, walking about, people transporting large loads by their own power. The primary means for accomplishing the transport of whatever large item – a pile of furniture, scrap metal, bricks, sides of beef, crates of chickens in their last hours of life – is the ´triciclo´, or tricycle. Triciclos have one rear wheel, two wheels in front to support a large cargo box, and just one gear. For this reason, and because of the sheer weight of some of the loads, often the owner is seen pushing or pulling the card instead of actually riding, unless he is heading downhill. Apart from the triciclos, I saw a man this week carrying a metal tray – with an incredibly tall pile of cookies – on top of his head. How he managed to maintain the cookie mountain intact must me a feat of practice (and a strong neck) – anyway, the cookies must have been fresh baked, because they definitely smelled good as he walked past.
JUMIFRA
Our youth leadership council, JUMIFRA, has continued to be busy with a variety of projects, though it seems we are often a little behind in getting started. Projects accomplished recently include a first draft of a proposal for group statutes, or norms, in an effort to formalize membership a bit and emphasize the identity of JUMIFRA – a gathering of young leaders within the parish in order to serve their fellow youth and the parish at large. In fundraising efforts for a cross to use in our street Way of the Cross on Good Friday and for T-shirts that identify us as a group, we have held breakfast fundraisers on two consecutive Sundays after the 7:30 am mass. Instead of the pancakes and eggs that would be served in the US, we actually have it a bit easier – shredded chicken sandwiches (with lettuce, mayo, and thin-sliced fried potatoes on a French roll) and a hot drink, either ´quaker´ (oatmeal drink with cinnamon, cloves, and milk) or quinua, prepared with cloves, cinnamon, pineapple, and chuño (freeze dried potato flour).
Selling 120 sandwiches and 120 cups at 1.5 soles each (about 50 cents) yields us about 100 soles profit each time. Apart from visiting area schools to invite registrations for confirmation and first communion preparation, our major project of the moment is rehearsing for the acting of the Vía Crucis – Way of the Cross – that our young people (and me – I will be Simon of Cyrene this year) will perform on a route through a couple of our parish neighborhoods on Good Friday afternoon/evening, complete with crosses and a mock crucifixion.
Have a blessed Holy Week.
Back to School (written March 8, 2009)
It´s still hot here, but summer has officially ended for students in primary and secondary schools, who went back to school this past Monday or will do so today, March 9. Apart from uniformed kids walking (or getting walked by their parents) to classes in the mornings as I go running or make the daily trip down the block to buy bread, other signs of the yearly ritual include busy tellers at most librerías (book stores) and workers giving a yearly coat of paint to the outer concrete walls of educational institutions. Students here are given a list of supplies that they need for the school year, as the schools themselves provide few resources – at some schools, at least, teachers even charge students for photocopies. Purchasing supplies such as notebooks, etc, follows the pattern of most stores here: the US norm of browsing through aisles to fill a cart or handbasket is rare except in a few supermarkets. Instead, one gives a list – written or oral – to a clerk or attendant (for larger stores downtown) or to the owner at smaller neighborhood shops, after which they look for and pull out items one by one. On the subject of schools, I hear from multiple sources that in Peru there exists a surplus of teachers and it is very difficult for a university graduate to find a job, especially on the coast. Apparently in the more remote Sierra, or mountainous region, teachers are still sought out, but such posts are not desireable for many due to the lack of services, infrastructure, and distance from family. Other oft-mentioned concerns over public education concern the quality of instruction methods (a lot of dictation, memorization) and systematic corruption and misuse of resources. A large number of private schools, both large and small, religious and not, also exist here and reputedly offer a higher level of education – at a price, of course. Monthly tuition at the small school down the street runs 70 soles ($20) per month, and other larger private schools, such as the Christian Brothers´ Mundo Mejor (Better World) must cost significantly more. It seems that the majority of primary school students attend school in the morning shift, 7:30-12:30, with high school students alternately drawing the morning (7:30-1:00) or afternoon (12:00 – 6:30). For this reason, all of our youth meetings at the parish begin at 7:00 or later to allow time for the afternoon students to arrive.
In other news…
At the house, Courtney´s sister Allison visited last week – they spent the first few days seeing Cuzco and Machu Picchu and then a couple nights here in Chimbote, where she met a ton of people in a short time, saw Courtney´s work sites (Hospice and two medical clinics), went to the beach, joined in on English conversation night, and of course tried ceviche. We four IWM´s met with Sr. Juanita on Saturday for a long overdue check-in on ministry, etc, and cleared up some miscommunciatons concerning our house budget – the way appears clear now for us to receive the money to buy a fridge soon. Another current project is the compilation of a two-CD mix of selected favorite songs, each one of us contributing nine songs that we have on CD here. Together with a booklet of the lyrics that I am putting together, I hope it will be a fun way for them to learn new vocabulary and practice their listening. In addition, it´s a fun way for us to share a little bit of our musical culture in a culture that is itself enamored of music. JUMIFRA commissions have started working on preparations for our Way of the Cross in the streets that will take place Good Friday – costumes, the crosses, fine-tuning the script, inviting parish youth, etc. I also met with a subcommittee on Sunday to develop a draft of statutes for the group – structure and expectations that we hope will help JUMIFRA be a successful, functioning group of youth and young adult leaders in the parish into the future. Articles treat areas such as the group mission, how new members join, member rights and responsibilities, roles of officers, etc. I think it is a positive step. Well, I´ll sign off for now – have a great couple weeks! Look for another entry after we return from our annual IWM retreat, this year five days in Tortugas, on the coast about 45 minutes south of Chimbote. God bless.
In other news…
At the house, Courtney´s sister Allison visited last week – they spent the first few days seeing Cuzco and Machu Picchu and then a couple nights here in Chimbote, where she met a ton of people in a short time, saw Courtney´s work sites (Hospice and two medical clinics), went to the beach, joined in on English conversation night, and of course tried ceviche. We four IWM´s met with Sr. Juanita on Saturday for a long overdue check-in on ministry, etc, and cleared up some miscommunciatons concerning our house budget – the way appears clear now for us to receive the money to buy a fridge soon. Another current project is the compilation of a two-CD mix of selected favorite songs, each one of us contributing nine songs that we have on CD here. Together with a booklet of the lyrics that I am putting together, I hope it will be a fun way for them to learn new vocabulary and practice their listening. In addition, it´s a fun way for us to share a little bit of our musical culture in a culture that is itself enamored of music. JUMIFRA commissions have started working on preparations for our Way of the Cross in the streets that will take place Good Friday – costumes, the crosses, fine-tuning the script, inviting parish youth, etc. I also met with a subcommittee on Sunday to develop a draft of statutes for the group – structure and expectations that we hope will help JUMIFRA be a successful, functioning group of youth and young adult leaders in the parish into the future. Articles treat areas such as the group mission, how new members join, member rights and responsibilities, roles of officers, etc. I think it is a positive step. Well, I´ll sign off for now – have a great couple weeks! Look for another entry after we return from our annual IWM retreat, this year five days in Tortugas, on the coast about 45 minutes south of Chimbote. God bless.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Enero/Febrero Update
In an attempt to bring this blog up to date so that I am not always writing about what happened a few weeks ago, I offer some notes on the last couple months here in Chimbote…
AT HOME
For the first two weeks of January, our house community dropped by half as Jane and Julie traveled to southern Peru – Cuzco, Puno, Machu Picchu – with friends and sister, respectively. January marks the start of the rainy season in the Andes, but the girls dodged most of it and had great trips. While they were gone, Courtney and I had an eventful time. First, we hosted a husband and wife from Israel, traveling cyclists who made a three-night stopover here after nearly a year after starting from the southwestern US and making their way through Central America. Gael and Raki were busy getting their bikes fixed, updating their blog, (http://ourbicycletrip.blogspot.com/)
, and washing clothes, tents, etc. Though busy ourselves at the time, we had some interesting conversations about their trip, Peru, etc. Their impressions of Peru had been relatively unfavorable as a whole, and they apologized later for doing some venting upon their arrival. While they were here, we experienced several days in a row with at least some rain – on night in particular we were dumped on more severely than any other time during our stay. The results in a town that in no way expects rain were predictable: flooded, muddy streets and lots of water in houses. Many people here have bamboo sheet/tarp roofs, which do little to hold out moisture. Our laminate roofing did better, but the dining room in particular experienced several leaks and water just came in through the walls in general. Folks here were excited/scared by the novelty of the storm, alternately playing in the downpour or hunkering down at home – mostly the latter. While Jane and Julie were away Courtney and I, both wanting to work harder on our Spanish, made the decision to speak only Spanish in the house – I really liked it. It helped me to think more in Spanish and pushed me to seek and learn a lot of new vocabulary. Jane and Julie weren´t as excited about the idea, and as a whole we have unfortunately gradually let the habit die.
Our home continues to serve well as a gathering place for friends and the occasional youth ministry event. Most recently we hosted friends from the parish for Valentine´s Day. The youth council, JUMIFRA (Franciscan Missionary Youth), held a party/meeting at the parish until 10:30 with games, songs, food, and reflection/sharing that actually went pretty well – and an hour when our high school aged youth could attend. After, some of the group came over to continue the party. Unfortunately, we hadn´t coordinated well the music situation and were without a stereo that played CD´s – but ours still has functioning radio, so we made due. We saw the return of running water inside the house in late December (our pump´s wiring had fried and the whole thing had to be replaced), but mid December also witnessed the demise of our recalcitrant refrigerator. We expect to receive money to buy a new one by the end of this month, but we have adapted to life without refrigeration – only buying meat/fish and vegetables on the morning it is to be cooked, keeping leftovers from the noon meal just into the evening, switching to powdered milk, going to the market every couple days to buy vegetables, etc. Maybe the hardest part is not having anything cold to eat or drink in the house during these hot summer months. One thing for sure – when we are served a cold beverage (sometimes in restaurants or homes people give in to the heat and risk the sickness-inducing cold drinks) we definitely appreciate it. It may or may not be a coincidence that in this new year the girls have suffered stomach discomfort/malfunctioning more often than before – maybe I have been here long enough develop resistant to some of the food-borne ailments.
Since my schedule this new year has become busier, I have cut back to just a couple times a week on sweeping, picking up trash, and watering the dust in front of the house – the neighbors haven´t complained yet, but I sometimes wonder if they mutter under their breath (helps, maybe, that our immediate neighbor family has never kept that neat of a front sidewalk). Summer is harvest time, and our back yard is yielding its share – tomatoes (amazingly sprouted from compost trash, we assume), guanábanas (white, slimy, sweet fruit that hangs high and is hard to pick before it ripens, falling with a splat to the pavement), and figs (the neighbor boys do a good job of harvesting the high-up figs from the top of the wall in between our houses). I´ll wrap up the house news on a negative note – I again had articles of clothing stolen from my room during the night while I was sleeping. We have had bars installed, so the thieves were not able to enter – but satisfied themselves with pulling a few nearby items to window (open due the above mentioned heat) with a stick, it guess. I was frustrated to have gotten lax enough to leave the window open and have things close to the window after being careful for so long.
¡QUE CALOR!
Did I mention that it is hot here? Not sure of the temperature, as no one has thermometers up and I have seen a weather program since being here (if they if fact exist), but some days the sun in the street 12-5 pm beats down mercilessly. I have become accustomed more or less to usually being hot and sweaty – I seek the shady side of the street when possible and just sweat if out when I´m indoors. Inside temperatures in the evenings (for example in the rooms were we hold English classes) usually stay higher than those outside, where generally a relatively cooler breeze of some form offers relief. As a household, we have adopted the Peruvian practice of trying to cook the food a little ahead of time in order to let it cool down before we eat. I never realized before that eating hot food on a hot day – lacking everywhere the luxury of air conditioning – produces quite a bit of perspiration. One positive aspect: the cold showers are now quite refreshing, leading me often to shower twice daily. Other ways to deal with the heat include going to the beach – once more, with JUMIFRA, since the new years trip – or to a local swimming pool. In early February I made my inaugural visit to the pool at the Vivero Forestal (local public park) with a group of the recently-confirmed youth from the parish. The pool is actually quite big – Olympic sized – but the vast crowd of people that shows up to seek relief from the heat has to squeeze into roped-off sections at either end, about 30% maybe the pool´s area. The middle section, as it were, is deep – about three meters – and since most people here have never learned to swim, this section is closed to all but a privileged few who pass some sort of swimming test (or, as for Julie, who is a swim team and water polo veteran, just be a gringa and ask the group of guy lifeguards who were more than happy to let her swim anywhere she wanted – and even invited her back after hours to teach them how to play water polo).
One coping mechanism that children and youth employ to beat the heat is called carnivales – related to the festive celebrations leading up to Ash Wednesday and Lent. Somehow, carnivales here has evolved into primarily a tradition of having water fights in the street with buckets, water balloons, squirt guns, whatever. And sometimes it’s a very one-sided fight, one participation not knowing at all that they were even playing – for example, the bucket of cold water dumped on my head from a rooftop by a couple kids as I walked down the street one hot late-afternoon. I was surprised, but actually didn´t mind the refreshing dousing. Supposedly the game is on only on Sundays, when even public transit vehicles such as the minivan-like combis and taxis are fair game – but often hot and over-zealous kids on summer vacation conveniently forget this limiting convention.
CURSO DE INGLÉS
After a three-week break we began a new three-month cycle of English classes in the parish on January 13 – increasing by one the number of groups to four: Beginner, Basic 1 & 2, and Intermediate. The three higher groups are continuing on from where we left off in December, and the new group is starting from scratch. Because of increased word of mouth and it being summer vacation here, we had a large group of students enroll this term – the highest yet at over 50 registrations. A significant number of people start the course and later find it too much time to continue, but we still have over 30 attending on a regular basis. Two groups meet each night Monday-Thursday, with all invited to a conversation practice at our house on Friday evenings. Jane, Julie and Courtney all have one designated group/night that they help out with classes during the week, and they rotate on the fourth night every three weeks. In addition, they also all make an effort to be there for the conversation time, which helps a lot because with the higher turnout we are dividing the group into two parts so that each person has more chance to talk. Below is a photo of the group that came to our house one Friday evening, 7-9 pm.
I am excited by the growth of the program and that we are able to help with this need that people feel, but I have felt the impact of the increased time commitment. Every night I plan and prepare for two classes, many nights needing to make a copy run as well. Combined with choir rehearsal on Friday and Saturday nights and mass/choir/JUMIFRA meetings on Sunday evenings, I effectively have obligations every evening. I have recently felt the fact that the English class commitment diminishes my flexibility in coordinating other parish youth activities with JUMIFRA, a truth I will have to reflect on how best to handle as I look to plans for our next (and my last) English-class cycle of May-August. For one, the Confirmation program starts up again in April, and I want to be a part of that group. I will somehow need to combined English groups and /or lessen the offerings, I believe. Also looking ahead to my departure, I have requested that our IWM directors seek new volunteers to continue on the work with both the English students and parish youth. They are taking the wise, I believe, approach of looking for separate people to coordinate the two aspects of my ministry that are each growing in scale and potential.
JUMIFRA (Juventud Misionera Frannciscana – Franciscan Missionary Youth)
I have already mentioned JUMIFRA (which celebrated its one-year anniversary in mid-February) a few times, but here I give a brief summary of our projects that we have undertaken during January and February. These months are summer vacation for students – primary and high school return to class on March 2 and most university students have freedom until early April. We first offered a four-week summer program for grade school children, three mornings a week with a mix of courses, each taught by a different professor – some from our own group members a few invitees: theater, modern dance, folkloric dance, English (I and two intermediate students taught), math, and chess. We hit a few small snags and could use a bit more organization, but still the results were positive for the 35 students ages 4-14 that participated.
Second, we just finished a week-long offering of ministry-training workshops for teenage youth (we invited several of the surrounding parishes as well as our own youth) to the 3:00-7:00 pm Monday to Friday courses, February 23-27. The project of organizing and offering youth workshops arose out of our trip with 14 youth/young adults (many of whom are now in JUMIFRA) to Lima for two weeks of youth ministry training. For various reasons, including my own decreased flexibility to miss English classes, we decided to try to share what we had learned last year in Lima right here in Chimbote – inter-parish cooperation and relationship building a definitely part of the objectives as well. Although turnout was less than we originally anticipated and we ended up keeping the 10 participants together for the week instead of dividing into the five distinct workshops of Youth in Christ, Motivation and Theater, Mission of Youth in Society, Leadership, and Singing to the Lord, those that attended and the JUMIFRA team/presenters took away a very positive experience of fellowship, reflection, learning and fun. The project team from JUMIFRA additionally had a positive experience in planning and orchestrating a large event that reached outside our parish walls – we learned some lessons for next time and, I believe, planted a seed that might grow into a periodic event that helps build leadership capacity in individual parishes and fellowship collaboration on an inter-parish basis. I must say, though, that the schedule of the week exhausted me – with English classes immediately following the workshops each day, I planned classes in the mornings and found zero down time. Still, the testimonies of participants during the closing ritual made the full schedule definitely worth it.
The third major project we chose for the summer – a concerted effort to visit homes of youth to survey and give invitations to parish programs – has not yet gotten off the ground. Though the project commission planned training for parish youth in hopes of gathering a team to go out en masse, the session never drew enough participants. I hope to continue in March a scaled back effort with JUMIFRA members, adding to a couple cycles of previous visits/surveys in February and September of 2008. I just believe that a personal invitation is far and away the most effective way to show that we care about the youth of our community, and after overcoming the initial fear I have had only positive experiences during our visits to youth in their homes to hear their concerns, gather contact information, and seek suggestions of what more we can offer in service of the our young people. As we have now entered the liturgical season of Lent and the start of the school year, the attention of JUMIFRA will turn now to preparing the Stations of the Cross street drama for Holy Week and recruiting/ planning for the start of the Confirmation program in early April.
PERSONAL AND MISCELANEOUS
A few personal notes to close out this long blog entry, after which I hope to most shorter, more frequent updates in order not to let small, day-to-day details fall through the cracks. After 15 years of mostly daily running, I have recently cut back to 4 days a week in response to sore knees. It requires discipline not to run on the off-days, though an hour-long morning walk downtown is a passable substitute. I am very much looking forward to the visit of more family in mid April, over a year since my mom and aunt Janie boarded the northbound plane and 20 months since I have visited in person with my brother Ryan, his wife Michele, and my sister Suzanne. I have not yet met Cory, Suzanne´s boyfriend since last year who is also joining the expedition. The five of us will spend Easter and a few days here in Chimbote before traveling south to visit Cuzco, Machu Picchu the Sacred Valley of the Incas.
I feel like I am gradually making progress in both guitar playing and singing – in the former learning to strum some local rhythms such as Cumbia, Saya and Huayno in edition to increased dexterity in picking. In singing, I definitely sing with more strength than when I began, though still find it much easier to follow another than to hit the right notes all on my own. I did, however, succeed in singing a solo verse during a wedding mass at which our choir was contracted to sing. I recorded several of the songs from that night which I will soon be posting on our music site for a sample of our choir´s sound. We have recently had our several female members take a break from the choir, so we are in a stage of recruiting new members and the group is excited for the new ponchos that we are having made using money from contracts (funeral and wedding masses) from 2008. When they´re done, I´ll post a photo. A second upcoming trip will be our yearly IWM retreat, this year at Tortugas Bay, about 45 minutes south of Chimbote, at a retreat house that the diocese owns. From March 15-20 Julie, Jane, Courtney and I will have time to step back from the busyness of life here to look back, forward, around, and inside – guided by Sister Leonila, a member of the IW sisters Mexican province who arrived just after new years to live and serve in Chimbote. We four are definitely looking forward to the opportunity.
OTHER PROJECT IDEAS
i am considering the feasability of a youth center here in the parish neighborhood as a gathering/educational center for meetings, workshops, skill training, and social gatherings. If anyone has recommendations for grants that I could look into that might fit such a project, or expertise/time to offer in helping to prepare such a grant, please let me know. The idea could be to buy/rent a house or property close to the parish, fix it up, etc. Though I (and Sister Juanita) have had this idea since my first weeks here, I had reservations about separating youth work from identification with the parish community. Recently, though, I have found that the sometimes limited access (hours, keys) to parish facilities, the increased potential for training in a space that we could modify for our purposes, and the simple shortage of rooms on busy nights could make a separate, close-by space a welcome addition. Secondly, something a lot smaller – a stereo. For both parties that JUMIFRA has hosted at our house and youth events at the parish, we have repeatedly scrambled to put together a sound system by borrowing. My idea is to seek donations for a moderate, portable stereo that would be officially property of the IW missionary house but be designated for parish youth events. I have not yet researched exact prices, but I believe that somewhere around $100-$150 would be sufficient. I have lent out my small ´CD-cube´ -- which I use in English classes -- a number of times, but the sound output is significantly lacking for a group or room of any size. Third, our choir has the tentative idea of recording a few songs with my digital recorder in order to put together a small CD that we could sell in order to raise money for new instruments. In the next few months we might have the CD´s available to be purchased for a small donation – just a head´s up.
Thanks for hanging with me through the whole blog (or maybe you skipped to the end). God bless!
AT HOME
For the first two weeks of January, our house community dropped by half as Jane and Julie traveled to southern Peru – Cuzco, Puno, Machu Picchu – with friends and sister, respectively. January marks the start of the rainy season in the Andes, but the girls dodged most of it and had great trips. While they were gone, Courtney and I had an eventful time. First, we hosted a husband and wife from Israel, traveling cyclists who made a three-night stopover here after nearly a year after starting from the southwestern US and making their way through Central America. Gael and Raki were busy getting their bikes fixed, updating their blog, (http://ourbicycletrip.blogspot.com/)
, and washing clothes, tents, etc. Though busy ourselves at the time, we had some interesting conversations about their trip, Peru, etc. Their impressions of Peru had been relatively unfavorable as a whole, and they apologized later for doing some venting upon their arrival. While they were here, we experienced several days in a row with at least some rain – on night in particular we were dumped on more severely than any other time during our stay. The results in a town that in no way expects rain were predictable: flooded, muddy streets and lots of water in houses. Many people here have bamboo sheet/tarp roofs, which do little to hold out moisture. Our laminate roofing did better, but the dining room in particular experienced several leaks and water just came in through the walls in general. Folks here were excited/scared by the novelty of the storm, alternately playing in the downpour or hunkering down at home – mostly the latter. While Jane and Julie were away Courtney and I, both wanting to work harder on our Spanish, made the decision to speak only Spanish in the house – I really liked it. It helped me to think more in Spanish and pushed me to seek and learn a lot of new vocabulary. Jane and Julie weren´t as excited about the idea, and as a whole we have unfortunately gradually let the habit die.
Our home continues to serve well as a gathering place for friends and the occasional youth ministry event. Most recently we hosted friends from the parish for Valentine´s Day. The youth council, JUMIFRA (Franciscan Missionary Youth), held a party/meeting at the parish until 10:30 with games, songs, food, and reflection/sharing that actually went pretty well – and an hour when our high school aged youth could attend. After, some of the group came over to continue the party. Unfortunately, we hadn´t coordinated well the music situation and were without a stereo that played CD´s – but ours still has functioning radio, so we made due. We saw the return of running water inside the house in late December (our pump´s wiring had fried and the whole thing had to be replaced), but mid December also witnessed the demise of our recalcitrant refrigerator. We expect to receive money to buy a new one by the end of this month, but we have adapted to life without refrigeration – only buying meat/fish and vegetables on the morning it is to be cooked, keeping leftovers from the noon meal just into the evening, switching to powdered milk, going to the market every couple days to buy vegetables, etc. Maybe the hardest part is not having anything cold to eat or drink in the house during these hot summer months. One thing for sure – when we are served a cold beverage (sometimes in restaurants or homes people give in to the heat and risk the sickness-inducing cold drinks) we definitely appreciate it. It may or may not be a coincidence that in this new year the girls have suffered stomach discomfort/malfunctioning more often than before – maybe I have been here long enough develop resistant to some of the food-borne ailments.
Since my schedule this new year has become busier, I have cut back to just a couple times a week on sweeping, picking up trash, and watering the dust in front of the house – the neighbors haven´t complained yet, but I sometimes wonder if they mutter under their breath (helps, maybe, that our immediate neighbor family has never kept that neat of a front sidewalk). Summer is harvest time, and our back yard is yielding its share – tomatoes (amazingly sprouted from compost trash, we assume), guanábanas (white, slimy, sweet fruit that hangs high and is hard to pick before it ripens, falling with a splat to the pavement), and figs (the neighbor boys do a good job of harvesting the high-up figs from the top of the wall in between our houses). I´ll wrap up the house news on a negative note – I again had articles of clothing stolen from my room during the night while I was sleeping. We have had bars installed, so the thieves were not able to enter – but satisfied themselves with pulling a few nearby items to window (open due the above mentioned heat) with a stick, it guess. I was frustrated to have gotten lax enough to leave the window open and have things close to the window after being careful for so long.
¡QUE CALOR!
Did I mention that it is hot here? Not sure of the temperature, as no one has thermometers up and I have seen a weather program since being here (if they if fact exist), but some days the sun in the street 12-5 pm beats down mercilessly. I have become accustomed more or less to usually being hot and sweaty – I seek the shady side of the street when possible and just sweat if out when I´m indoors. Inside temperatures in the evenings (for example in the rooms were we hold English classes) usually stay higher than those outside, where generally a relatively cooler breeze of some form offers relief. As a household, we have adopted the Peruvian practice of trying to cook the food a little ahead of time in order to let it cool down before we eat. I never realized before that eating hot food on a hot day – lacking everywhere the luxury of air conditioning – produces quite a bit of perspiration. One positive aspect: the cold showers are now quite refreshing, leading me often to shower twice daily. Other ways to deal with the heat include going to the beach – once more, with JUMIFRA, since the new years trip – or to a local swimming pool. In early February I made my inaugural visit to the pool at the Vivero Forestal (local public park) with a group of the recently-confirmed youth from the parish. The pool is actually quite big – Olympic sized – but the vast crowd of people that shows up to seek relief from the heat has to squeeze into roped-off sections at either end, about 30% maybe the pool´s area. The middle section, as it were, is deep – about three meters – and since most people here have never learned to swim, this section is closed to all but a privileged few who pass some sort of swimming test (or, as for Julie, who is a swim team and water polo veteran, just be a gringa and ask the group of guy lifeguards who were more than happy to let her swim anywhere she wanted – and even invited her back after hours to teach them how to play water polo).
One coping mechanism that children and youth employ to beat the heat is called carnivales – related to the festive celebrations leading up to Ash Wednesday and Lent. Somehow, carnivales here has evolved into primarily a tradition of having water fights in the street with buckets, water balloons, squirt guns, whatever. And sometimes it’s a very one-sided fight, one participation not knowing at all that they were even playing – for example, the bucket of cold water dumped on my head from a rooftop by a couple kids as I walked down the street one hot late-afternoon. I was surprised, but actually didn´t mind the refreshing dousing. Supposedly the game is on only on Sundays, when even public transit vehicles such as the minivan-like combis and taxis are fair game – but often hot and over-zealous kids on summer vacation conveniently forget this limiting convention.
CURSO DE INGLÉS
After a three-week break we began a new three-month cycle of English classes in the parish on January 13 – increasing by one the number of groups to four: Beginner, Basic 1 & 2, and Intermediate. The three higher groups are continuing on from where we left off in December, and the new group is starting from scratch. Because of increased word of mouth and it being summer vacation here, we had a large group of students enroll this term – the highest yet at over 50 registrations. A significant number of people start the course and later find it too much time to continue, but we still have over 30 attending on a regular basis. Two groups meet each night Monday-Thursday, with all invited to a conversation practice at our house on Friday evenings. Jane, Julie and Courtney all have one designated group/night that they help out with classes during the week, and they rotate on the fourth night every three weeks. In addition, they also all make an effort to be there for the conversation time, which helps a lot because with the higher turnout we are dividing the group into two parts so that each person has more chance to talk. Below is a photo of the group that came to our house one Friday evening, 7-9 pm.
I am excited by the growth of the program and that we are able to help with this need that people feel, but I have felt the impact of the increased time commitment. Every night I plan and prepare for two classes, many nights needing to make a copy run as well. Combined with choir rehearsal on Friday and Saturday nights and mass/choir/JUMIFRA meetings on Sunday evenings, I effectively have obligations every evening. I have recently felt the fact that the English class commitment diminishes my flexibility in coordinating other parish youth activities with JUMIFRA, a truth I will have to reflect on how best to handle as I look to plans for our next (and my last) English-class cycle of May-August. For one, the Confirmation program starts up again in April, and I want to be a part of that group. I will somehow need to combined English groups and /or lessen the offerings, I believe. Also looking ahead to my departure, I have requested that our IWM directors seek new volunteers to continue on the work with both the English students and parish youth. They are taking the wise, I believe, approach of looking for separate people to coordinate the two aspects of my ministry that are each growing in scale and potential.
JUMIFRA (Juventud Misionera Frannciscana – Franciscan Missionary Youth)
I have already mentioned JUMIFRA (which celebrated its one-year anniversary in mid-February) a few times, but here I give a brief summary of our projects that we have undertaken during January and February. These months are summer vacation for students – primary and high school return to class on March 2 and most university students have freedom until early April. We first offered a four-week summer program for grade school children, three mornings a week with a mix of courses, each taught by a different professor – some from our own group members a few invitees: theater, modern dance, folkloric dance, English (I and two intermediate students taught), math, and chess. We hit a few small snags and could use a bit more organization, but still the results were positive for the 35 students ages 4-14 that participated.
Second, we just finished a week-long offering of ministry-training workshops for teenage youth (we invited several of the surrounding parishes as well as our own youth) to the 3:00-7:00 pm Monday to Friday courses, February 23-27. The project of organizing and offering youth workshops arose out of our trip with 14 youth/young adults (many of whom are now in JUMIFRA) to Lima for two weeks of youth ministry training. For various reasons, including my own decreased flexibility to miss English classes, we decided to try to share what we had learned last year in Lima right here in Chimbote – inter-parish cooperation and relationship building a definitely part of the objectives as well. Although turnout was less than we originally anticipated and we ended up keeping the 10 participants together for the week instead of dividing into the five distinct workshops of Youth in Christ, Motivation and Theater, Mission of Youth in Society, Leadership, and Singing to the Lord, those that attended and the JUMIFRA team/presenters took away a very positive experience of fellowship, reflection, learning and fun. The project team from JUMIFRA additionally had a positive experience in planning and orchestrating a large event that reached outside our parish walls – we learned some lessons for next time and, I believe, planted a seed that might grow into a periodic event that helps build leadership capacity in individual parishes and fellowship collaboration on an inter-parish basis. I must say, though, that the schedule of the week exhausted me – with English classes immediately following the workshops each day, I planned classes in the mornings and found zero down time. Still, the testimonies of participants during the closing ritual made the full schedule definitely worth it.
The third major project we chose for the summer – a concerted effort to visit homes of youth to survey and give invitations to parish programs – has not yet gotten off the ground. Though the project commission planned training for parish youth in hopes of gathering a team to go out en masse, the session never drew enough participants. I hope to continue in March a scaled back effort with JUMIFRA members, adding to a couple cycles of previous visits/surveys in February and September of 2008. I just believe that a personal invitation is far and away the most effective way to show that we care about the youth of our community, and after overcoming the initial fear I have had only positive experiences during our visits to youth in their homes to hear their concerns, gather contact information, and seek suggestions of what more we can offer in service of the our young people. As we have now entered the liturgical season of Lent and the start of the school year, the attention of JUMIFRA will turn now to preparing the Stations of the Cross street drama for Holy Week and recruiting/ planning for the start of the Confirmation program in early April.
PERSONAL AND MISCELANEOUS
A few personal notes to close out this long blog entry, after which I hope to most shorter, more frequent updates in order not to let small, day-to-day details fall through the cracks. After 15 years of mostly daily running, I have recently cut back to 4 days a week in response to sore knees. It requires discipline not to run on the off-days, though an hour-long morning walk downtown is a passable substitute. I am very much looking forward to the visit of more family in mid April, over a year since my mom and aunt Janie boarded the northbound plane and 20 months since I have visited in person with my brother Ryan, his wife Michele, and my sister Suzanne. I have not yet met Cory, Suzanne´s boyfriend since last year who is also joining the expedition. The five of us will spend Easter and a few days here in Chimbote before traveling south to visit Cuzco, Machu Picchu the Sacred Valley of the Incas.
I feel like I am gradually making progress in both guitar playing and singing – in the former learning to strum some local rhythms such as Cumbia, Saya and Huayno in edition to increased dexterity in picking. In singing, I definitely sing with more strength than when I began, though still find it much easier to follow another than to hit the right notes all on my own. I did, however, succeed in singing a solo verse during a wedding mass at which our choir was contracted to sing. I recorded several of the songs from that night which I will soon be posting on our music site for a sample of our choir´s sound. We have recently had our several female members take a break from the choir, so we are in a stage of recruiting new members and the group is excited for the new ponchos that we are having made using money from contracts (funeral and wedding masses) from 2008. When they´re done, I´ll post a photo. A second upcoming trip will be our yearly IWM retreat, this year at Tortugas Bay, about 45 minutes south of Chimbote, at a retreat house that the diocese owns. From March 15-20 Julie, Jane, Courtney and I will have time to step back from the busyness of life here to look back, forward, around, and inside – guided by Sister Leonila, a member of the IW sisters Mexican province who arrived just after new years to live and serve in Chimbote. We four are definitely looking forward to the opportunity.
OTHER PROJECT IDEAS
i am considering the feasability of a youth center here in the parish neighborhood as a gathering/educational center for meetings, workshops, skill training, and social gatherings. If anyone has recommendations for grants that I could look into that might fit such a project, or expertise/time to offer in helping to prepare such a grant, please let me know. The idea could be to buy/rent a house or property close to the parish, fix it up, etc. Though I (and Sister Juanita) have had this idea since my first weeks here, I had reservations about separating youth work from identification with the parish community. Recently, though, I have found that the sometimes limited access (hours, keys) to parish facilities, the increased potential for training in a space that we could modify for our purposes, and the simple shortage of rooms on busy nights could make a separate, close-by space a welcome addition. Secondly, something a lot smaller – a stereo. For both parties that JUMIFRA has hosted at our house and youth events at the parish, we have repeatedly scrambled to put together a sound system by borrowing. My idea is to seek donations for a moderate, portable stereo that would be officially property of the IW missionary house but be designated for parish youth events. I have not yet researched exact prices, but I believe that somewhere around $100-$150 would be sufficient. I have lent out my small ´CD-cube´ -- which I use in English classes -- a number of times, but the sound output is significantly lacking for a group or room of any size. Third, our choir has the tentative idea of recording a few songs with my digital recorder in order to put together a small CD that we could sell in order to raise money for new instruments. In the next few months we might have the CD´s available to be purchased for a small donation – just a head´s up.
Thanks for hanging with me through the whole blog (or maybe you skipped to the end). God bless!
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