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!