29th June 2009
Here we are at the end of June, with roughly 4 weeks left in Chincha. 

Rachel has now finished most of her English teaching, she's just left with one student, Graciela, who she will continue to teach until the very end. These classes have enabled the beginning of a lovely friendship and also interesting conversations about our work here and a little about church life.  However, not having to plan so many lessons means more time to spend with people in a more social environment (not a very Peruvian concept, at least here in Chincha!) before leaving.

Paul has been researching potential projects for Chincha in the future.  These include: guinea pig rearing, poultry production, PEPE pre-school programmes (a special BMS programme), producing jam and other products from fruit and vegetables. It still remains to be seen if any of these will be suitable for Chincha, but the exciting news is that initial free tasting sessions of papaya and banana jam were a great success. With the help of Lidia, a lady from church, he's also dipped a toe into the market in Cañete, a town 40 minutes north of Chincha, and has already covered production costs with over half of the stock remaining to be sold. It clearly has some potential to become a successful micro-enterprise business and income-generator for local people, which makes it a shame that we are leaving Chincha soon.

Paul is trying to find a way to let this fledging project find its wings by the end of July, so he's been spending regular time with Fiorela, the girl who will be taking over from us regarding such projects, in order to train her up. As with us, her main focus will be the housing project, which still hasn't seen a spade in the ground, but we have been told that families now have their construction licences!!! At the risk of sounding repetitive, it shouldn't be long now! Unfortunately, it is now a certainty that we won't be around in Chincha to see any houses completed.

Chincha this winter is cold and damp. Much more so compared with last year when we arrived when we used suncream for many days.  The sun has shown its face just a few days in the last few weeks, the remainder of the time it is misty and overcast.  This means that clothes don't dry for days and don't continue to dry even inside since we have an open-to-the-roof house.  Sweeping up, the dust just cakes itself to the brush.  All our papery things are damp and floppy!  It turns out that, according to the thermometer, it ranges between 12 - 16 degrees in the house on cold days and 16-21 on warm days when the sun shines.

Monday 15 th we were flung out of bed by the strongest quake we've had since being here.  When the shaking first started at 8am we had just woken up with our alarm clock and didn't even bother moving as it wasn't stronger than anything we've experienced before... and then everything shifted quite violently and we both shot up almost involuntarily. Paul dressed like lightening and Rach ran for the door only realising a bit too late that she was shoeless and she couldn't see much as her glasses were still next to the bed!  Thankfully the shaking then stopped!

Many thanks once again for everyone's continued support, prayers, emails. etc.  We are hoping to be able to say very soon with our plans for the end of July. 

13th May 2009
We realise that we've been much more sporadic over recent weeks in communicating with you and this email will hopefully not only correct that trend, but also explain the reasons for the relative lack of contact. Don't worry - it hasn't been because we've been overrun by nasty parasites - we now seem to be free of those!

Over the past few weeks and months we found ourselves questioning the value of remaining in Chincha with increasingly frequency. We put off making any decision until the end of April when our the boss was due to pay his annual visit, which also gave us time to pray about where we were meant to be. It was a confusing time. We believe that Chincha was a God-given opportunity for us, so it felt strange to be thinking of leaving after only a year as local circumstances were suggesting that it was time to move on.

During this time, we didn't want to commit ourselves to much new work and couldn't, in fairness to others, publically share where we were at in our thinking, which is why it all went a bit quiet from Peru ! In the end, after discussing matters with our boss, we have decided that it is, indeed, time to move on and, having made the decision, we feel very peaceful about it, despite the series of 'what next' questions it immediately raises.

Essentially, the reasons for our departure are twofold. Firstly, since being here, we have continuously encountered opposition from local church leadership. Discussions over recent times have revealed that our social action role just does not square with their expectations of missionary work or, indeed, with the vision for the church. Integral mission, the type that looks to material and social as well as spiritual needs, is still very much in its infancy in the Evangelical Church of Latin America, so it was always going to be a risk to send us to Chincha with this mandate. We were aware of this from the beginning but, given the vast and widespread needs after the earthquake, we considered it was a risk worth taking.

Secondly, we are proud of what we have been able to achieve in helping set-up and shape the housing project and the real contacts we have developed with the families, but we have decided to hand over our responsibility to a local. With this having been the major focus of our time here and given the lack of local support and vision for other social projects, it seems best to think of moving on rather than forcing ourselves and our ideas upon others.

BMS World Mission do not currently have any further roles that would suit our interests and skills, so we will unfortunately terminate our time with them at the end of July, having decided to hang on in Chincha for a few months more in order to allow Rachel time to complete an English course she had recently started, for Paul to train up our successor in the housing project and for us to continue to work with one specific family who have had a series of problems. Leaving at this time also gives us an outside chance of seeing finished one of the houses we've laboured for for so long!

We currently do not know what comes next. Paul is busy looking for employment, but the financial crisis has hit the development/charity sector harder than most. In the event that paid work is not forthcoming, we have in mind to stay in South America until at least November, since family had already booked to visit us in October. Financially and in terms of gathering further experience and language skills it makes more sense to stay here in the meantime. Paul already knows that he is able to volunteer with a Peruvian NGO in Pisco (30 minutes south of Chincha) until then, but for the moment we are keeping our options open and waiting to see what other opportunities present themselves before making a decision.

Even though our placement has turned out as it did, we still feel no regrets about taking this risk - it had the potential to be of huge benefit - and are grateful to BMS World Mission for presenting us with the opportunity. Regrettably, we need to move on, but we shall do so in the knowledge that we have made a significant difference in the lives of a number of families and individuals. For this reason, despite the problems we've experienced, it will still be very hard to leave.

We'd like to finish by saying a huge thank you to you all for your support and prayers throughout the time we've had here in Chincha. We've felt that you've been walking with us and we've been greatly encouraged throughout the darker days by the packages and letters in the post and the emails in our inbox. We're also aware that many of you have been faithfully praying for us and our situation and this has been vital to our time here and what we've been able to do. Our time has not yet finished, so we hope to be able to count on your continued support in what promises to be an emotionally difficult and unsettling remaining couple of months.

10th April 2009
Yesterday is our 1st year anniversary of being in Peru! And we are still here!

I recently came across the greek word verb spangchnizomai which is used in the context of Jesus 'being moved to compassion' in the gospels. Apparently, and I quote:

"The splangchna are the entrails of the body, or as we might say today, the guts. They are the place where our most intimate and intense emotions are located. They are the centre from which both passionate love and passionate hate grow. When the gospels speak about Jesus' compassion as his being moved in the entrails they are expressing something very deep and mysterious..."

I mention this for two main reasons:
Firstly, as I read this I thought I had finally discovered the reason for our weekly illness that we were both experiencing. We were obviously being moved to compassion on a highly regular basis!! Further investigations, however, disproved this theory when we found out that parasites were the true cause! We have now finished a course of treatment and are now living in hope that our cyclical misery has ended. Please pray for our health to recover.
Secondly, it is impossible to live in a place like Chincha, work with the local/national people and do what we are doing without being profoundly affected by it. Our experiences here have caused intense emotions, the kind that aren't easy to cope with. What is harder still is seeing the way you do respond to it all and realising that you don't like that part of your character very much and 'where did that come from?'

Our first year here has presented us with very difficult situations and challenging people and, if we are very honest, we haven't always wanted to stay. In fact the last couple of months have been the hardest yet and for this reason we haven't been communicating as readily as before.

There has been little change in our work as a whole. The housing project is moving forwards very slowly and painfully. We still wrestle with money issues for families and communication issues with our technical team. But we have managed to get two new families into the project, increasing our number from 7 to 9 families. Last we heard, an engineer should be arriving in Chincha this coming Monday to set up office and make way for the building stage, but this will depend a lot on each family's circumstances as to whether they themselves are ready to build.

Rachel is still enjoying teaching 2 girls individually, both now on a weekly basis. She will be starting a 9 week evening course next week with another group of new people, partly with a view to making some friends in the area. Please pray that this will be the case.

We have had more time recently to get alongside families, one in particular. Pressures of struggling to make ends meet to maintain a family of 8 during a time of economic crisis and living all together in what is effectively an overgrown garden shed have taken their toll and led to a breakdown in communication between some members. We've been meeting up with them to bring about understanding and reconciliation and, it seems, have been helpful in achieving this. We're also helping them find ways to make sure that they make a point of working at being family together in between all the other busyness. Please pray for them and us as we try to assist as best we can.

Outside of project work, we have really been struggling with church life to the extent that we recently had to have a frank discussion with our bosses and with the pastor of our church about it. In became clear throughout the course of these discussions that the local leadership have been disappointed in us (because we are not the do-everything-in-the-church-and-pay-for-it type of missionaries than they are accustomed to receiving). Expectations have now been reset and our frustrations at a lack of local support heard, so we are hopeful that we have turned a corner in this respect. Paul has had one Pastoral Team meeting since and, if this is anything to go by, there is much greater co-operation and willingness to move forward together. There is always the possibility that this will prove to be a false dawn, but we are praying that the shift is permanent and just the beginning.

Finally we are very much looking forward to the weather changing (last year it was mid-April) when the temperatures begin to fall to much more acceptable levels! We've seen hints of the change to come and are wondering what tremors this might bring as changes in temperature tend to affect the earth movements too! Please continue to pray for our safety regarding tremors and quakes, but also general life which has it's close shaves!!

Thank you to those of you who have specifically been praying with us since our last email in Feb. The decisions that we were praying about are not fully resolved yet but we feel we have made progress. Please keep praying!

With much love to you all this Easter