Internet problems

Sorry about the lack of updates. We are just having a lot of major internet issues that hopefully we can get resolved soon. While I have a little bit of connection I'll just give you some quick updates, and I'll post some pictures later.

My parents got here safe and sound last Sunday and we've been having a great time together. This is the last week of school for the kids, last day is tomorrow, so we have been trying to let them study for the tests as much as possible. My mom has been working a lot with the younger kids. Doing little puzzles and coloring and water painting with them. My dad knocked out about what I thought was going to be 3-4 days of fix up work in the kids houses in one day.

Other unrelated news, we got a ping pong table donated to us, which I think I love way more than the kids. But I'll be giving them lessons non-stop until they can catch up to me so I can have some one to hit around with. We should be getting a pool table donated to us very soon as well! I'm really stoked about that.

Sad story of the week. As my parents and I were walking back from dinner one night (about 8:00) we ran into 2 little girls one the street corner. One was about 4 years old and was holding what I presume to be her little sister of about 1 year old in her lap. They were both hysterically crying and all by themselves. So I knocked on the neighbors door whose house they were sitting in front of and asked them if they knew the girls. They said no but went out to talk to them. I also called Maribel (the orphanage director) to come and check out the situation. The neighbors figured out that the kids were from someone who lived in the next town over. They said "the mom always leaves these kids here by themselves, so that it was no big deal"...ya right. So Maribel said that we should take them down to the police station, but the neighbors would not let us. They told us that they would stay with the girls until the parents came to pick them up. So because we were out numbered and the neighbors were starting to get a little testy, I think because they didn't like seeing white people worried about some peruvian's kids, we decided to just let them stay there with the kids until the parents got back. But we decided that if we see those 2 girls at the corner like that again, we are just going to take them to the police station without knocking on the neighbors door. Because no little girls deserve to be left alone on an ally corner in the bad part of town at night.

I'm Back

Well I got back about a week ago, however I just now got internet access again so thats the reason for the delay in posting. I was incredibly happy to see all the kids again and they were all happy to see me again. I got there about 8:00 and a couple of them had started sleeping at around 7:00 for some reason but they woke up to come to talk to me. Yhonson and Tito were two of them that were asleep and so they were kind of sleepwalking and it was hillarious trying to talk to them. Tito was so out of it that he just stood there and started crying when I tried to talk to him. I got a good laugh out of that.

I went straight to work the next day and cut about 10 heads of hair with my brand new clippers that Laci Thurn gave to me. Thanks Laci! Then I broke out some baseball gloves and played catch for awhile with Gerson and Yhonson. The gloves were donated by Dana Rothaus. The kids are so good at catching yet but they have surprisingly good arms.

The next day we had a Cholotada. Which is a party with hot chocolate and cake, usually held during the holiday seasons. We had some people from the bank BCP come and donate all the stuff and throw the party for the kids. The people from the bank also donated 1 toy per kid and wrapped them all up and called them by name to come get it and everything. The kids all had a great time.

And today, I just got done meeting with David Meyers, the son of Joyce Meyers, who leads up all their international ministry and humanitarian work. Also along on the meeting was Rob Barringer who leads up a huge ministry in Peru. They came to meet with Avis to see what they can do to help. They are both really great guys and had a lot of wisdom that they shared with Avis.

I'm all caught up and I just finished getting my room in order. That's about everything for now.

Carving the first pumpkin

The only pumpkin I could find in Pacasmayo was this white one. It cost me 2 soles or $0.65. Anyway here is the pumpkin before they all went crazy.

Rolling up the sleves

Getting slimy

Pulling out the snot.

Jose has a handful

Carving the pumpkin was a lot of fun, I'll have to take some pictures of the final product when it's all lit up tonight. No one here ever carves pumpkins or does anything on Halloween because they all believe it is and evil day, and that if you have any fun you are pretty much worshiping demons or whatever. I'm trying to break that dogma.

happy halloween

Feast

Well it only took me 5 months, but I've figured out how I might be able to not loose so much weight down here.

I have finally found out how I can get about 2000 calories for $4. Here's the trick. I found a hamburger stand that cooks the patties in cooking oil. They make me the special which includes 2 meat patties (I'd like to say beef but....) that are about the size of Winstead's burgers and a fried egg in between, they top this with a bunch of mayonnaise and hot sauce. This is where it gets good though, after I buy that hamburger for 2 soles I start walking to the chicken place and eating the hamburger on the way. I finish it just in time as I'm walking into the resturant. I order a 1/4 chicken to go. With that 1/4 chicken to go comes a large order of fries, a salad and more mayonnaise. I can also get a coke there too. The chicken and coke costs 10 soles.

So thats a total of 12 soles or roughly $4. I guess if you include the moto rides its $5. And if I want to really pig out I can get a kabob of cooked chicken hearts for another 1 sol. Speaking of which I had my first chicken heart kabob a couple of days ago. It really wasn't that bad.

Pics

I had a request for some more random pictures so here they are. Also I just bought some plane tickets to come home in November and stay until December. So if you would like to here stories in person all you need to do is take me to lunch some where.

Yum noodles

I PITTY THE FOOL

Playing with Blacky

Her face when I tell her to smile

The boyz table (Also with the cook Gladys posing)

Another Field Trip

Yesterday the kids were off school for some holiday that no one really seems to know anything about. They it's some kind of war date or something but don't know anything about it. So on this day off we took 14 kids to the agriculture company that has been giving us food for the last couple of months.

The company is located about 45 mins away to the North. The place is gigantic, 5000 hectares or 12,350 acres and 2500 employees. Also included is a 24 kilometer water canal and 3 big lakes they use for storing water. This is only their 3rd year in operation and Fred and I were amazed that they got all of that built in 3 years. At this place they grow corn, peppers, and beans. Their experimental crops right now are artichoke and asparagus. They ship their peppers all over the world, mostly to the United States though. So if you use paprika there's a good chance I saw where it came from. Since it never rains where they have their plantations they have drip systems running through all of their corn and artichoke. The peppers get by with the minimal rain and a little help from a canal. All their water running through the drip systems is fertilized so I'm pretty sure I saw the biggest corn in my life. Also they don't have a lot of insects there so instead of using pesticides they just put sugar water in buckets throughout their fields the sugar water attracts all the insects and then they drown.

Another cool thing is that the owners were really into horses. So as a side project they had a bunch of show horses which I guess it a pretty popular past-time in Peru. In their herd they had the horse that has won the most prizes of any horse in Peru. So we all got to take our picture with him.

They also fed us a good lunch while we were there and then let the kids play some games on their soccer field. So overall it was a great little field trip.

Kids with best horse in Peru

Close up of the best horse in Peru

Water reservoir

Man in the black shirt was teaching the kids all about the plants. How they grow, the parts and how to harvest them. It was very interesting. He is also the guy that's been responsible for giving the kids the food. He's a really great guy.

Learning about artichoke. Did you know that what we eat from artichoke is really the flower?

Huaranchal

I went to the mountain village of Huaranchal this weekend. We left at 5:00 am on Friday morning and I just got back Monday at 12:00. It took us over 18 hours to get there because we got a flat tire only 1 hour away from our destination. I can't say that I didn't expect that flat tire though, we had way to many people in a conversion van going off-roading up the side of a mountain. We waited for Auden to get to the destination and look for a tire. He called me about 3 hours later saying that there were no tires that size there so he was going to have to go all the way back to Trujillo, so we were gonna have to spend the night outside or inside the van. I wasn't to thrilled about that. But, he called us back around 10:30 and said that he talked with the Mayor of Huaranchal and that there was a dump truck on its way up. So the Mayor called the dump truck and told them to pick us up and bring us and our things to the city.

Here is a slideshow of some pictures, I'll continue my story later. You can click on it and view the full size pictures which I recommend doing.

When finally arrived at our destination at 12:00 AM. I felt officially initiated into the Peruvian culture after that dump truck ride up the side of a mountain. The hotel was MUCH nicer than I could have imagined. We hadn't seen any civilization within 2 hours of this place, but there we were, in this city that out in the middle of nowhere, had a 3 story hotel with hot showers. It was the best shower I've had since I've been in Peru.

For our first day there, we went around the town telling people that we were going to have a concert and a message that night in their coliseum. I quickly made friends with all the kids in the town since I was pretty much the first white person who spoke Spanish and English that they had ever met. I was surrounded much of the day answering questions about Micheal Jackson, and "how do you say my name in English." I've realized that it's a lot more fun to just make up names for them, rather than tell them that names usually just translate literally. Through talking with them I found out that this city only exists for mining, and that all of their dads worked in the mines, and so did the boys when they weren't in school and were over the age of 10.

In the afternoon Fred set up his projector in the Municipal building and showed a bunch of kids Christian movies. Only about 10 or 15 kids showed up for that. But then later that night after the concert we had, we put the projector on a wall outside and had a crowd of about 60-70 people watching.

The second day was Sunday. Every Sunday a bunch of soccer teams come from all around to play in Huaranchal. I spent the most of the day watching soccer with my gang that had formed yesterday. The other people in the group took a hike to the hot springs. I decided not to go to the hot springs because it was 85 and sunny out, and sitting in a hot-tub and getting a sunburn did not sound like fun at all to me, and that's exactly what happened to most of them. In the evening we had another concert and showed some more films afterwards. There were quite a few people to see the films again.

Overall, I really loved that place. It is by far my favorite place I've been in Peru so far. It's probably the closest thing I've seen to a Utopian society. It's built around a huge soccer field and people just play games of soccer and volley ball all day on the weekends. Store shops never are locked, no one is ever worried someone is going to steal from them. We were able to leave our van abandon on the side of a road for an entire day and night and it was perfectly fine. All of our music and video equipment was never locked up, mainly because there wasn't really a good lock anywhere around, and nothing went missing. So pretty much a completely different attitude than people on the coast. And they are proud to say that too. However they aren't without their problems. They only have 1 doctor, no hospital, only 1 small school building for around 800 students, and surprisingly no police. They have 1 sheriff type guy who is somehow able to keep the peace between 7,000 people. Oh and all the guys were pretty much drunk every minute of the weekend. I'm guessing at some point during the week they have to sober up to work in the mines.

Circus

Along with our newest volunteer, Abby, the circus came to town this weekend. The circus was kind of weird, and I'm glad I went to go check it out before I brought any kids, because there were a lot of pretty inappropriate acts. Abby, Cherry, Gorge, and I went and even we were thinking that some stuff was just kind of awkward. They did have some cool stuff though, like an actual lion tamer with 5 huge lions. They dragged Abby into the lions cage and made her pet them. That was pretty intense. There was also the strong man, who just walked on his hands a lot. They also had a trapeze act which was kind of cool. Of course they also had clowns to. Here is a picture of one of the clowns. Although there were five clowns, this one was special. Someone please tell me what is so crazy about him.

Everything is going well, and this next weekend I plan on taking a trip into the jungle with Pastor Auden, Fred, Maribel and a couple of other people. Auden is going to be doing some mission work there and Maribel and I will be going farther into the jungle to go retrieve some birth certificates for the Rojas Reyes family.

Apendicitis

So yesterday I was woken up with a call from the school telling me that they thought Marinella had apendicitis. At the moment Maribel was taking care of it. She brought Marinella to the center of health here in Pacasmayo and they did some peliminary tests. They needed to have an ultrisound done but the doctor wasn't there who could do it. So I brought them to the hospital in Guadalupe which is about 25 minutes away. There she was attended by another doctor who did some more tests. A blood sample and a urine sample. After that they finally got around to the ultrisound. The blood test and the urine test came back negative, but the doctors were still a little worried because she had all the symptoms, and her pain was continually getting worse. A side note, all this was taking hours and hours. It was 4:00 in the afternoon before the doctors decided that she needed to have the surgery. And at that point, we found out that there was no anethesiologist in Guadalupe so she had to be transported to Trujillo. I said that I would take her but they assured me that it would be better to go in an ambulance. So we waited another 3 hours for the ambulance to arrive at the hospital.

I thought it was some kind of bad joke when the ambulance got there. All it was, was a pickup truck with a camper shell. They rigged it up with rolling cots and called it an ambulance. No medical equipment, nothing. Also the bed light of the truck was out so for light in the back compartment they brought them a flashlight, but the first flashlight they brought them didn't have enough batteries so they had to go get another one. Maribel and I were extremely upset that we waited for 3 hours for this, all the while Marinella was getting worse. Then they said they were out of gas so they had to go fill it up with gas. After all that, they were ready to go. Except for the fact that no doctor or nurses wanted to go to Trujillo. If people ride in an ambulance they have to be accompained by a doctor and a nurse. So finally someone who didn't suck finally showed up on the scene cussed out all the crappy doctors and nurses and hopped in the back of the ambulance and they took off at 7:30.

Maribel and the house mom Sindy went with her in the ambulance. I went ahead and drove myself back home in the van. I hadn't ate, drank or showered all day and I was about ready to pass out. I called Maribel at 10:00 and they were just getting into the hospital. At 11:00 they were starting the surgery. I called this morning at 10:00 and they said that everything was ok. The surgery went well and she should be ready to leave Monday.

This is not the actual ambulance because I didn't have my camera with me. However I found this image on the internet, and it is exactly what she rode in.

Long day.

First off, Sparky did in fact eat the kittens. I'd like to say they got lost but he actually did it infront of the girls so I can't really use that excuse. We are now down to 2 kittens last time I checked. I'll try and get some pictures of the girls with the kittens today before we lose the other ones.

Yesterday I went to Trujillo with 7 kids to bring them to a dermatologist. We were going to burn some more warts off, but the doctor decided to give them some topical medicine instead. I think I agree with the doctor. The visit only took about 20 mins, but we had to wait for 4 and a half hours. It was a private clinic and we didn't pay in advance so we had to wait for all the other people who paid to go first. So after that got over with we went and ate lunch, then the kids and I waited in the car for 4 hours while Maribel and Galdys bought some things in the market. Then I drove everyone home at 8:00. So ya, it was a pretty long day.

Utilities Blessings

Well just a couple days ago we found out that we did indeed get approved for having more electricity. The electric company has already started putting in another pole next to our compound so more electricity should be arriving shortly.

The water situation also seems to be solved. We have been getting much more water lately. When we talked with the company they said it was because that the dam had closed its gates and that one of their wells were broken. So I guess they finally fixed their well and the dam has opened its gates.

We also got a new boy last week. His name is Tito and he is 9 years old. At this point we aren't sure how long he is going to stay. He supposedly has 7 brothers and sisters and was working in a circus. The police picked him up in Guadalupe off the streets. He is very talkative and doesn't really seemed to be phased by coming here at all. At first we had some issues with him hitting Maribel and some of the other kids, but I think that he now understands how to behave here.

Two nights ago some girls found some kittens outside and are now taking care of them. There were 4, but as of this morning there are only 3. I'm pretty sure that Sparky ate one of them. I specifically told the girls to make sure that Sparky is in his pen when they opened up the laundry room door where the kittens are staying. I think they learned that lesson the hard way. I'll take some pictures of the girls with thier kittens later today and post some pictures.

Yogurt Factory

On Friday we visited a yogurt factory that is about a 10 minute ride away from the orphanage. All the kids ages 6 and up got to go see how yogurt is made. It was actually a very interesting tour and the guide did a great job. He showed us the holding tanks for the milk, the boiling room the mixing room and the bottling room. Then he took us all into the walk in refrigerator where they store all of thier product. It was the biggest refrigerator I've ever been in. However, we didn't get to see the 1600 cows they have for milk and he wouldn't let me take any pictures of the bottling room or the refrigerator, so I was a little disappointed in that. After the tour he gave all of us free yogurt samples, and let me tell ya, fresh yogurt is extremely good. Probably one of my favorite things I've had down here. I also learned that you can buy yogurt straight from the factory, so thats what I did. I bought 2 liters of it and it is delicious. I found out that since all the stores I buy the yogurt from around here don't have refrigerators it turns the yogurt sour after only 3 days...so thats why all the yogurt I have been eating previously is a little acidic.

Pre-School March

Here are a couple pictures of a parade that our preschoolers when to on Friday morning. Danilo also went to the same parade with his own school. The parade was for all the preschools and special needs schools in Pacasmayo. After walking 10 blocks with 10; 3,4, and 5 year olds went went to the beach for a little bit. We actually shortened our part of the parade by intentionally turning right while the rest of the parade turned left at the end of the main street.

The weekend

The kids have school on saturdays right now now to make up for lost time for the swine flew outbreak. So saturday I kind of just chilled until they got back at 1:00. I Ate some lunch with them then cut Gerson's hair. After that we played some video games. In the evening I went to dinner with 8 kids and Maribel. It was the 8 kids that recently got declared abandoned. Gerson, Yhonson, Joel, Sibila, Betsy, Nelson, Lurdes, Marcielo. After that I came back and had some kids over to watch a movie, but the movie didn't work so we played more video games instead.

Sunday was church and visitation day. We had a lot of visitors, and once again I got filled up with snacks that the parents brought and the kids wanted to share with me. Nothing out of the ordinary for Sunday.

I just got back from the Market, I went to buy some movies, and Cellphone minutes. While I was there I ate some papa rellenas (fried mashed potatoes rolled in balls stuffed with meat and hot sauce on top...SO GOOD) and some Cake from some of the stands there in the market... you can tell I'm starting to get brave when I'm eating food from stands. Later today I'm going to take Yhonson to go get a haircut. Maribel talked with me the other day and suggested that I spend more one on one time with Yhonson because he is not doing so well right now.

I also have a prayer request. I ask everyone who reads this to pray for Avis. She is very sick right now. The doctors say it is anemia and she is on some iron supplements right now. She returns to the states September 4th and I think she is planning on visiting another doctor there. She hasn't been able to do much of anything this last week, so please pray that she recovers.

Happy Birthday Joel

Yesterday was Joels birthday, and for a special celebration I took him to the emergency room to get stiched up. He was running around the house and slipped, fell, and hit his head on the corner of a wall. So Maribel comes knocking on my door at 5:30 in the afternoon and said "I don't mean to bother you...but can you take Joel to the hospital, he cut his head open." So I just grabbed the keys and we loaded up and I drove them down the hill to the Center of Health.

We got there and the doctor laid Joel down on the table cleaned him up, and said that'll be 20 soles. We also had to provide the supplies from their in house pharmacy. So we went bought the stiches the gloves and the needles brought them to the doctor and he stitched him right up. The entire emergency room visit took 20 minutes and cost us $12. Joel did great, he was a little nervous and wanted to see what the doctor was going to stick in his head, but we kept him from moving so he couldn't see the needles.

More good news, is that on Wednesday we finally got the official legal document declaring the Rojas Reyes abandoned. So if there's anyone out there that might want to adopt 5 kids aged 13, 11, 10, 8 and 6 let us know.

Utilities Crisis of 09.

So this last week we've been fighting some battles with our utilities. I found out that we haven't been getting our fresh water from the city about 4 days ago. We usually get a little bit of fresh water everyday at 4:00. We use this water for the kids to drink and cook with. The rest of our water we get from our well which is a little bit salty. So Fred and I carried some buckets of water in the old van over for them on Sunday. We had a meeting today with the water company and they told us that they put another line in that is lower than ours that goes to another part of the city, hence there is not enough pressure to make it to us. So we have another meeting later today with the boss of the water company to see what we can do about it.

At the same time we are trying to get more electricity in to the orphanage because we don't really have enough right now as it is, and we are wanting to build more volunteer houses and more houses for kids in the future so will we need more. The process was going well until a couple of days ago. Then we got a call saying that the company thinks we have enough electricity so they are not willing to put another line going into the orphanage. So we are in the process of waiting for the answer to come from our appeal.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon on top of the church installing an new antenna for our wireless internet because our signal has been very weak lately. Right now it seems to be much better so hopefully at least that problem was solved.

Tomorrow one of our kids is leaving. Maria who as been here since February is going to go live with her Aunt and Uncle in Chimbote. When she came to us she was on drugs and very unstable. She was living a very hard life. She is returning to a different place so hopefully her old habits will not pick back up again. She has made so much progress since she arrived. Right now I think that she is very sad and a little nervous to go. Please be praying for her.

Maria

Pictures

Flying a kite

Washing the van

House Mom Gina helping Fatima practice walking

The picture that will go in the twins adoption file; Jonel on the left, Lenny on the right.

Great News

So we went to Trujillo, again, and we talked with the judge one more time about sending kids away. This time our social worker went too. We also had our all of our complaints written on a document in a formal way. Maribel was just going to go give the document to the judges secretary and leave but the judge was there in his office and stopped her to see what was up. So she just handed him the document and let him check it out. He was a little angry at first and told her that "She was beating him with a stick on this one" our equivalent to raking someone over the coals I guess. So after much discusion he finally decided that our kids didn't have to go. None of them.

We were all pretty happy with this news, and my way of celebrating was to go to the Papa John's there in Trujillo and stuff myself full of pizza. They had a buy one medium, get one free deal going so I ate one medium and there's half of another one in my fridge right now. The other half went to Maribel and Mari Ester.

Then we came back and I took a quick nap. I have caught this little cold these past couple days and it's wearing me down. Then I went and helped with some homework, brought a couple kids over to my place to play some video games, then went to the other house and played some cards. So I felt like I got to spend some good quality time with the kids today too.

These next couple days I'll do some photo only blog posts.

This has been another pretty full week. Karen and Aimee left earlier this week. I felt terrible for Aimee because she was so sick that day, but I've talked to her since and she's feeling much better now. It's always hard to say goodbye to volunteers, and even harder for the volunteers to say goodbye to the kids.

I went to Chenpen on Wednesday to talk with the judge about moving those three kids, however I think right now it is looking like we aren't going to have to say goodbye to them anytime soon. We also went and took a tour of the orphanage where they would be going if they left. The orphanage had a great building however it was kind of a cold feeling. It reminded me very much of the government run orphanages that I've been to.

On Thursday morning I woke up at 4:25 and drove to Trujillo to pick up Terry Hunka from the airport. He came to visit me and see the ministry that's going on here in Pacasmayo. We first stopped by Hogar de Esperanza and had a great meeting with their administrator after taking a tour. Then we drove to Pacasmayo and I showed him around and gave him the tour of the orphanage and the school. We talked a lot with Avis and I think we might be trying to plan a couple trips next summer. Then last night I brought him back to the airport so he can catch up with his team that was flying in. Terry will be going to some meetings to check on the status of his adoption so please be praying that those meetings go well.

Today I took a couple of the boys to Pastor Auden's house to do a little yard work and hang out. At 12:00 we had a meeting with our lawyer. The rest of the day today I have been resting and talking to my sisters on skype. I'm getting ready to head over to one of the kids house and eat dinner. Hopefully tonight they won't be having Sangracita, which was something they made earlier this week and I ate for the first time. I found out that what Sangracita is, is just cooked blood. They put a whole bunch of chicken blood into a frying pan and cook it until it globs up, then they serve it over rice. The taste wasn't that bad, but it was just the mental part of it which made it so I couldn't eat it. I tried two bites then I had to give up.

I know I've been saying this a lot lately, but I'll try and post more on my blog.

The system

So I went and had a couple chats with the Judges on Thursday. First we spoke with the head president judge over the matter of them wanting to move some of the kids here at Casa de Paz to another orphanage in Chenpen. He was less than helpful. He said he had nothing to do with it, and was actually pretty pissed that we knew anything about the ordeal. So we left his office and went upstairs to talk to the family judge.

The family judge then gave us all his reasons and excuses why he wanted to move the kids. Mainly it came down to this other orphanage didn't have any kids and so he wanted to give them some of ours and some kids from 2 or 3 other orphanages. We explained to him again why it was tramatic for kids to just be moved all over the place from one location to the next. So he finally said fine, I won't move these kids. However, we still have to move 3 kids from our orphanage over to the other one. There are three kids in our orphanage that have all their paperwork in the Chenpen court system, and also have family in Chenpen, so they are the ones that have to go.

Other than all that crappy news, I had a relativiely good weekend. The sams from Blue Springs came and I had a lot of fun with them. Matt brought be some guitar hero games that I'm teaching the kids right now. They treated me to all my favorite restuarants here in Pacasmayo, and then in Lima they treated me to the best food I've eaten in Peru. I also got to take a great shower in their hotel room, so it was a nice little get a way for me.

While I was there I also got my residency card. So I now have some more rights here in Peru. I can buy property, a car, and open a bank account, and stay here for up to 5 years without getting my visa renewed as long as I pay my fees. I also get to take the local buses in tourist locations saving me hundreds of dollars. I'll try and post some more pictures later.

Baptism day!

Sorry for not posting every day. The daily things that happen to me seem less extrodinary now so I sometimes have a hard time being motivated to post them for you all to read. However there were some exciting highlights this last week that I will share with you.

Last Thursday Fred took me and some of the boys out for a worker appreciation day. All the boys that have been working and Carlos and Aurelio got to go to a resturant where there is a lot of pretty greenery and trees and flowers. The resturant also had a pool and a playground. When we got there and were excited to check out the pool we were a very disapointed to find that it was empty. We decided to stay and eat anyway because we knew the food was very good. All the plates were huge and Jose ended up getting a plate of Ceviche which was bigger than him. So after lunch we went on a search for some water to swim in. Thats when the Peruvian adventure came about.

Jose with his huge plate of Ceviche

The gang at the resturant

We were taking the ancient van, and I say ancient because old just doesn't do it justice. After about 100 meters out of the resturant the van starting smoking. We got out and took a look and discovered that there was a cut in our radiator hose. So me and the kids got some ice cream while we waited for Carlos to go buy some tape from the nearest store. After we patched it up we filled the radiator back up with water and were on our way. We had to stop every mile though to fill it back up with water because it was still leaking pretty badly. So after about 6 stops we finally made it back to the house.

Sunday:

We had our annual baptismal this past Sunday. We all got to church around 9:00 AM and had a short service that lasted until about 10:00. After that we all piled into the van and headed out someone's house that had an irragation creek behind it. We got there around 11:00, and had a little free time and ate lunch while the kids all jumped in and had a lot of fun swimming. At 12:30 we started the baptism. We had 10 people get baptized that day. Four of them were older girls from the orphanage. After the baptism we all just sat around in the shade and played games and talked until about 2:30 then headed home.

Kids swimming in the place where we baptized

Pastor Auden baptizing Milagros with the help of Fred

Current:

Right now the Sams family from Blue Springs is here visiting. I've been having a good time so far showing them around the city and just hanging out with some local Blue Springsians.

Tomorrow unfortunately I have to go to Trujillo at 5:30 in the morning to talk with a judge. They had this idea to take five kids from our orphanage and five kids from a couple other orphanages and combine them into another orphanage that doesn't have very many kids. So we are going to explain to the judge how terrible this is for the kids. To have to be moved to a new orphanage after they've been living here for so long and have finally gotten comfortable with it.

Some Updates

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, let me catch you all up to date.

First of all the most important news is that thankfully the tumor that was removed from Lourdes did not have any cancer, praise God!

I forgot to mention a couple weeks ago that all the schools in the Libertad Province were shut down to prevent a swine flu outbreak. They shut them down for two weeks, plus the one week vacation. Currently I'm on day 11 of no school. It's been both fun and crazy with the kids not having school to occupy the greater portion of their day. The volunteers, Aimee, Rita, and Karen have been working on delousing like crazy, I've been working on some more financial spreadsheets when I'm not having fun with the kids. I've also helped out with the delousing by spraying and carrying some mattresses.

The first part of this week has been kind of a blur, so I can't really remember exactly what I did on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sorry about that. Today there sleepover for the older girls, the house moms, Maribel and the Psycologist. What that means is that me and the Girl volunteers are watching the other kids for the night. I took the house with less kids and the girls took the other house. I kind of got lucky because one of the moms didn't want to stay up late so she came back around 10:00, so that's how I'm writing this right now. I had all the kids nice and calm and watching some looney toon cartoons that I bought earlier today, then walked in Danilo (who is the mentally handicapped crazy child) and everything just went nuts. I only had to deal with him for about 2o minutes because then the house mother came in and took over, but 20 minutes was enough for me to never want to do it again.

Now I'm getting ready to go to bed after stuffing my face with a bunch of oatmeal butterscotch cookies that Wendy (The pastors wife) made for me.

Feliz Cumpleanous

Yesterday we had a huge birthday part for all the kids who had birthdays in July. Pastor Audens brother is in town and some people from his work gave him $100 bucks to do something for the kids. So he decided to sponsor the birthday party. There were 2 big cakes, a pinata, gifts, and prizes. We played a couple different games. One was wrap the other person in toilet paper to make a mummy out of them, another was the cram your mouth full of food and see who can finish their plate first game. We also did a race where they had to balance an egg on a spoon, and all sorts of other little party games like that.

Here is a picture with all 40 kids

Here is the eating game. The twins Lenny and Jonell are feeding Yhonson and Gerson

Above is a quick video I threw together of the mummy game.

These next couple days we all kind of have our own missions. The girl volunteers, Rita, Aimee and Karen are out to rid the orphanage of lice, we've had bigger out break and it was starting to get out of control. I will be assisting them. However, my main mission today and these next couple days is to take care of our (my) dog Sparky. He must have a bad infection of worms because he has gotten really skinny and does not have much of an appetite. Also he is itching really bad all over. So I went and picked up some parasite medicine for him today and gave it to him, I also gave him a flee bath and a topical treatment for flees and bugs. Cherry also called her son who is a veternarian. He said because he has a lot of open sores an thinning skin that he has a bacterial infection from being in the dirt so often also the fact that he had worms and is loosing weight isn't helping his body fight off the infection. So tomorrow or later tonight I'm going to go pick up some antibiotics that he recommended. In the mean time we aren't suppose to chain him up in the dirt during the day. So he's living in my house at the moment.

The operation

Lourdes, Maribel, Gladys, and I left Monday afternoon for Trujillo. When we arrived in Trujillo we put our bags at Gladys's mothers house. Then we headed for one of the plaza's nearby. We went and ate dinner and saw a movie. It was the first time that Lourdes had ever seen a movie in a real cinema. The movie we saw was "Knowing". We went back to Gladys's mother's house and spent the night there.

We woke up at 4:00 am and headed off to the clinic at 4:30. The surgery was scheduled at 6:00 and she had to be there an hour before for prep. The surgery amazingly took place on time. It lasted about 40 minutes. Everything went well. The entire tumor was removed and put in little black baggy and set on her night stand next to her hospital bed. We are taking the tumor to a lab to have it analyzied to see if it was cancerous. She was not allowed to talk or lift her head for an entire day. I let her listen to my Ipod for awhile and Maribel also read some books to her.

Avis and Peggy arrived at the hospital around 7:30 to see her. At 8:00 Avis, Peggy and I went to go eat some breakfast and then we went to the courthouse to visit with a judge in the supreme court. It turned out to be a great visit and he wants to come see Casa de Paz next week.

After the meeting with the Judge I went back to the clinic and stayed there with Lourdes until about 1:30 and then I got a bus home. If everything goes well Maribel, Gladys, Avis and Peggy are bringing her back in the van today around noon.

The weekend

I had a great birthday on Friday, I opened about 10 cards out of the 27 that I recieved. Thank you all so much for thinking about me. To celebrate my Fred took me out to the Estacion resturant, and all the kids sang me happy birthday when I came back.

Saturday in the morning is when Aimee, Karen, and Cherry got in to Pacasmayo. I went down and picked them up nice and early at 7. I helped them get comfortable and we spent some time with the kids. I then had a meeting that lasted too long with the lawyer, Avis, Fred, and Pastor Auden. We then went to church to hear the guest pastor from Lima preach. After that Aimee, Karen, Rita and I went out to eat at the only and very good Pizza place here in Pacasmayo. Rita paid for my part of the pizza for my birthday present. It was very delicious.

Today is another visitation day, I printed off some photos for the lady that comes and visits the twins. I need to go give them to her right now.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Trujillo and spending the night there. Lourdes has her operation tuesday at 6:00 AM. So I will wake up and go straight to the hospital. Then we have a meeting with some of the Judges at 9:00 am. After that I'm planning on returning to the hospital, and then most likely returning to Pacasmayo later in the afternoon.

So please be praying that the operation will go well. I will keep you posted and let everyone know how it went as soon as I can.

Pray for Lourdes

Lourdes is a 12 year old girl here in the orphanage. A couple of months ago we discovered that she had a tumor on her abdomen. After a couple of tests the doctors said that it wasn't dangerous and that they were going to have it removed in August when an operating bed opened up. However after the last couple of check-ups and some more lab tests and results, the doctors now believe there is a chance that it could be cancerous. So this Monday they are going to do the operation to remove it. She will stay overnight in the hospital Sunday and have it removed in the morning on Monday.

Please be praying that the operation will go smoothly. And that when they remove the actual tumor and do more tests on it that it will prove to be non cancerous.

Weekend marathon and Monday

Another great weekend!

Saturday we had the visit from the Judge and his crew to come inspect the orphanage. The judge came with three pyscologists and a state social worker. They checked out all of our rooms to make sure they were a safe place for kids to live. The psycologists interviewed three kids a piece asking them questions like, "do you have enough food to eat?", "do you think that you are safe here?", "do you have any chores?" etc... The judge acted like he loved the place, he had not seen it since the switch in February. Also while they were here inspecting Ronal Enrique from the chicken delivery business came and dropped off another couple boxes worth or rice, noodles and milk. They are continuing to bless us. This morning they also dropped off another 5 live chickens. I didn't here about that until later in the afternoon so I guess it wasn't at 2:00 in the morning again.

The Judge with a couple of kids

Sunday was the marathon. I woke up around 6:30 and went to my spot. My group was incharge of shutting down a portion of the highway so that the runners could run on it. The police and fire fighters came to help us (about 2 hours to late). I got to watch Yhonson, Pastor Auden and Fred run by for the 5k. Yhonson ran it in under 30 minutes with only practicing two times, so not too bad. I volunteered until 2:30 pm. Then came back and got out of the sun and rested until about 5:30, then I went to the after party for all the volunteers. The party was mostly Peace Corp volunteers. I also met some people that were doing research in Lima for the graduate school program. They were doing a project on eco-friendly fish farms that people in developing countries and start and make money off of while providing sustainable nutrition for their towns. It sounded really cool.

Yhonson in the 5k race

My group responsible for shutting down the highway

Today (Monday) all the kids had the day off from school, so that meant that I took the day off too. I slept in until about 9:00 for the first time since I've been down here. Then had a relaxing day of playing volleyball, watching some videos, then playing some video games all with the kids.

Learning how to play

Ok I almost forgot to add another thing that I did today. At first I wasn't going to post it because it was so gross, but then I realized it was just too gross not to post. So there's your warning if you don't want to get grossed out you should probably stop reading now. I'll even leave a couple blank lines to make it easier on you.

So the twins who are actually in that photo playing video games have their new grown up teeth coming in. This is causing some problems for them. When their teeth are coming in they like to pick at their gums and this has caused some infection. I guess a couple months ago one of the infections in their gums got bad enough that they had to take him to a doctor and put him on anti-biotics. Ok so now for the gross part, still reading? I discovered today that Lenin had another infection. He had a cankor sore on his top gum that had swollen up to the size of a pencil eraser. Not wanting it to get any worse I showed it to Maribel and his house mom Sindy. Then I decided to take some action. So I took him into the bathroom and had him lean his head over the sink. Then I popped the fluid filled sack. There was a lot of pus and blood in my sink after that. I got some gauze and soaked it in listerine and had him hold it on his sore. The other twin Jonel had the same thing but in the back of his mouth, so we repeated the process with him. They are rinsing with hot water then puting listerine soaked gauze on their sores and they are already getting smaller. Hopefully doing this will keep the infection from getting as serious as it did last time. They told me last time they had those they didn't do anything to them and they eventually got so painful they had to go to the doctor.

Friday

Friday was a great day! It was teacher appreciation day so the kids at school had a party for all the teachers. They gave them all gifts, I got a pair of socks and a matching handkerchief haha. They then sang us a couple songs and performed some skits they had been secretly working on. After that they just played a bunch of games for the rest of the school day.

Fred and I decided a couple days ago that we are going to have the boys start doing more "man" work around the orphanage. So Friday was the first day. When I told the boys that we would be doing this some of them were excited (Cristopher, the twins, and Jose) while others were mad and pouted (Gerson, Yhonson, Joel). However, they were all going to do it just the same. So yesterday after they ate lunch we brought them outside and explained to them exactly what we were going to do. They were going to learn how to take care of the yard, paint, and do stucco. So here are a few pictures from the first yardwork day.

Remember you can click on the pictures to see much bigger versions.

Lenin (Pronounced Lenny)

Jonell (Pronounced Yo-nell)

Fred, Jose, and JoelJonell and Cristopher picking up grass clippings

After the yardwork, Ronal from the Pacasmayo company stopped by to give us a donation of food. Praise God! He drove in with a truckload of food. Two 100 kilo bags of rice, and a whole bunch of vegetable oil, sugar, pasta and canned milk. All this food is from his employees. At the end of every month they get paid a bonus in food. So all the food you see on the table in this picture plus 2 bags of rice was given up by families for the kids in the orphanage. Avis was so happy that she started to cry. This was the first time that anyone from the comunity had really contributed to the orphanage. If I added it all up it is around $600 worth of food. All that oil will last us hopefully an entire month and the rice is enough for 2 full weeks.

Here is the food (you can't see the rice) with me accepting the inventory sheet listing all the stuff the workers gave from Rosa (the woman who got us an in with the boss).