28th September 2008
We have so much to share since the last time we wrote but we won't bore you with all the details, just the highlights (and the lowlights!) - although this email is still significantly longer than the others! We'll try to make the next one shorter to compensate!

Blessing Our Neighbours
Some of you may remember how Rachel blessed our neighbours with a marigold glove some months ago when it fell off our roof and went through theirs, well this time (no, the mattress didn't fall off the roof!) we lent our spare mattress to some people in the church who had people to stay. We loaded it onto the back of a vehicle during a powercut and sent them off on their merry way and the next day they came back to us very ashamed to admit that when they had arrived at the house (only 8 blocks away) with the mattress nowhere in sight! It had either fallen off and got taken away or was stolen off the back in the dark! We hope the recipient is feeling extremely blessed by it.

Housing Project
The latest on the housing project is that we are experiencing difficulties in communication with the architect who lives in the north of the country. Over the last few months he has managed to move the goal posts several times resulting in a project that has changed shape dramatically and has put us back progress-wise each time. This has happened yet again, much to our disappointment, and as we write this, we are on a 15 hour bus journey (on a comfortable coach with 'sofa beds'(!!) up to Chiclayo in the north of Peru to sit down face to face and see if we can salvage some of what the original project was supposed to look like. We have several large issues to thrash out (in the most loving way possible) over the course of a week before we can really get the project underway. Hopefully we will be able to bring you all up to date properly once we return. Please pray for safety in travelling to and from Chiclayo in the north and wisdom and guidance for the forthcoming discussions on the shape of the housing project. Meanwhile, we have managed to sort out the documents for two families and one of them has already received the go-ahead from the governmental scheme we will be working with!

Church Anniversary
We celebrated our 1st year church anniversary this last weekend. Rachel was responsible for making the cakes (for 150 people!) which you will be able to see at a later date when we update our photos. They were a big hit as, if there is one thing the English do well it is cake, and the Peruvians were quite amazed (which made Rachel feel quite pleased with herself!!) The church came into being following the earthquake as people searched for help, comfort, safety and the meaning to life. Although the church itself is still very immature spiritually, many lives have been changed for the better and we look forward to seeing what God has in store for us all during the 2nd year of "Morada de Dios" (Presence of God) Baptist Church .

Pastoral Team
Our Pastoral Team is experiencing lots of difficulties knowing how to function and work together. We are feeling extremely discouraged at the moment regarding this issue. It is very difficult for us to exercise patience and maintain a positive outlook in the face of such testing, so please pray for team building, grace, patience and mutual understanding as a pastoral team. The temptation here is to be very legalistic and dictatorial as a church which is hard on its members, especially in the face of extreme poverty and harsh living conditions. Life is hard here and everyone is tested beyond their capacity on a daily basis - including us! Needless to say this causes relationship problems and strong character clashes. As our colleague, Margaret, very wisely said to us just recently, "Chincha has problems and these will be reflected in the church". Part of our role here is to pray for the people here and guide and encourage them in their relationship with God so that these problems will become less and less. We look forward to the time when such transformations are also refected in the church!

Internet Strife
Alongside issues with our architect and with our co-pastors, we are also having issues with an internet company here. In order to stay in touch with you all more easily and to help us in our work, we made the decision at the start of September that we'd get an internet connection (these are more expensive and worse quality than in the UK ). After weighing up our options and going through a mountain of paperwork (usual Peruvian style), we took home a bright new shiny modem only to discover that it could achieve only about 1/3 of the advertised speed and completely useless for what we need. We tried to take it back and complain, but they won't accept it back unless we pay them a sizeable penalty (even though they sold us equipment that doesn't work as advertised). Fortunately and literally, we bumped into someone on the street who is the husband of someone in our church and is a lawyer. Lawyers are expensive here, but he's taken on our case free of charge, so we just hope for a just and imminent resolution to this problem and invite you to pray with us along the same lines.

Up In The Mountains
Paul had a rather surprising experience recently. He accompanied one of the other pastors and a group of youth up into the mountains to visit a church for its anniversary. It turns out that he was the first ever gringo (white foreigner) to visit the community and being about 2 feet taller than anyone there made his stand out even more. He enjoyed(?) local celebrity status for 3 days as they ministered in the church and amongst the community. He was even obliged to deliver his first sermon in Spanish in the middle of the market square and to sing 2 songs in English without accompaniment at an evening service (apparently they liked the sound of English, though Paul did warn them that they might have changed their mind after they had heard him sing!!!)

While all of that was a surprise, the most startling aspect of the trip was he was approached by a pastor from a tiny church further up in the mountains. His church had been built with money from Europe and three months ago he was praying and God told him that someone from Europe would come (bearing in mind Paul was the first ever gringo to visit) and that that person would have a significant ministry across the world. As a church they had committed themselves to saving money to help support this European's ministry whenever he arrived. So, just before leaving the mountains, Paul was presented with 600 soles! This is a little over £100, but that fact that it came from a tiny mountain community who live on what they grow in their fields and know no luxuries makes this gift a staggering amount . Both of us are blown away by the generosity and want to make sure that the money goes into something very worthwhile in recognition of the sacrifice it must have been to give it, but as yet we are unsure about how to use the money. Please pray that God would show us how to use this incredible gift.

4th September 2008
Firstly thankyou to all those of you who responded to our last email. It was great to read your words of encouragement and support - we really appreciated it. Forgive us for not having replied to all of you, we have been really busy and haven't managed to get to the internet much at all.

Since the last email, although we are still struggling with lots of aspects of life here, we have had a few encouraging, exciting and also amusing moments:

15th August 2008
It feels like some time ago we last sent news from Chincha. There has been a strike today as it is the one year anniversary of the earthquake and a strike was organised to protest the fact that aid money has been swallowed up by the goverment and hasn't reached the people. One year on and so many are still living under plastic and aid tents.

Housing Project
We have continued to be frustrated and challenged, mainly due to the fact that our advancing with the housing project has been brought to an almost standstill as we waited for documents from the government and also various changes in the requirements for starting the project. The good news is that the documents we were waiting for came through last week. The frustrating part is that we need to have 5 families (we only have 2 at the moment) that fit the bill in order to start designing and building. This is to keep material and labour costs lower. To make things more frustrating we have been waiting on two important meetings, one with the President of the Baptist Convention and one with our Architect before we can move forward. Both meetings have been rescheduled 3 or more times... and we wait on!
Although we have felt extremely discouraged we do feel at the same time that God has the timing planned and we wait for that perfect time to start!

Search for Land...
The search for land continues for the new site for the growing church. The three sites we mentioned in the previous email now look unlikely due to cost or lack of documents to prove ownership. We have, however, just today identified at least one other option that we still need to look into. We won't give up yet!

Eating and cooking cheaply...
We hosted our first workshop on basic nutrition and making solar cookers on Monday. Twenty women came, about 4 weren't from the church, so that was encouraging. We learned about the basic food groups, how to cook economically and also how to make solar cookers from a cardboard box and foil. Our next workshop will hopefully be making more solar cookers so those who attend can take one away with them and in the future we might try to run workshops to practice cooking with them!

Time Out!
We enjoyed a couple of days away last weekend 2 hours south of where we live at a place called Huacachina, an oasis in the the desert near Ica. The oasis is surrounded by enormous sand dunes where we learned how to sandboard. We also enjoyed the views of sand, sand and more sand from the tops of the dunes and watched others dune buggying.

A final note...
With just over two months living in Chincha we don't mind admitting that we are struggling with many things here. Life isn't easy and the culture isn't easy either. We made very quick progress in the first 6-8 weeks and we enjoyed reporting such progress and excitement. However, as the newness of everything becomes less new and the reality of living in this place sinks in further and further we are feeling lonely and disheartened. We know this is a phase we have to work through and we are trusting in God to provide what we need, but we'd appreciate all your support as we live in this place where everything takes so much time, energy and patience. We haven't as yet made good friends we can trust and talk to and this makes it all the harder. Please keep us in your prayers and encourage us.

That's all from us for now.

God Bless
Rach and Paul
xx

25th July 2008
It´s time for some more news from a slightly chillier Chincha. The last few weeks have passed with unseasonably warm temperatures for winter, where we have needed suncream and sunhats once again. However the last 2 days have been chillier with not much sunshine.This means that our washing (handwashed) takes a matter of days to dry on the line rather than hours. The warmer weather is very much appreciated by those who still live under plastic and bamboo sheets.

Housing Project
More in depth details of how we are going about our housing project will be given in our next official BMS newsletter which we will endeavour to get out within the month. However the basic information is as follows:
We are able to access a government scheme to build people houses out of local materials in such a way that will withstand strong earthquakes. The scheme allows us to build free houses as they give us back our money once the house has been checked and approved. This is the governments way of ensuring that quality housing is built for those who have little resources to do it themselves.
The preparation for this project has required a lot of research on our part and lots of complicated discussions with the town council, the governmental offices and building schemes.
The good news is that our first two or three families are nearly ready with all that they need ready to access the building scheme and we are hoping to apply to the scheme as soon as possible. We are very excited about this. We won't be able to start building until the families have been approved by the scheme and we have received a construction licence for each. However, once we have started, these two house should serve as our two models to show the community and hopefully the project should snowball (in a manageable way) from this point!

Search for Land...
The search for land, particularly for a new church building is still on. We have looked at 3 potential sites which look promising but we are awaiting on prices in order to find out if these could be viable sites. The long term plan is to build a larger church building that can be used for a development centre in the community.

Eating and cooking cheaply...
On 11 August we will be holding a day workshop for the community to teach them (with the help of some wise women in Lima) how to cook cheaply and still retain as many nutrients as possible and also how to make a very simple solar cooker.

General Stuff
We have had frustrating times as we come up against the trials and tribulations of working in cross-cultural teams, trying to understand how each of us works (or doesn´t!) and endeavouring to be gracious when, for us, we feel very held back by inefficiency, disorder, unprofessionalism and sometimes sheer laziness on the part of our Peruvian friends. However we understand that they often feel very pressured by our organisation, our high expectations, our respect for time and our desire to get as much done in a given time. We´ve had to wrestle with our attitudes and our disappointments, because at the end of the day we are all working for a common cause and we are all 'brothers' as they say here in Peru when you are in a church community.

Strikes and Crime
At the beginning of this week all of Chincha went on strike with the aim of overthrowing the police force here who apparently have done nothing in response to many murders in the area, including the kidnapping and killing of local children. This type of crime has been particularly problematic since the earthquake - people being kidnapped and killed for their organs to raise money in a time of dire need. The strike happened because the body of a girl who had been missing for the last month was found last week. During this strike a local bus agency was targeted and bus set on fire - the same agency that Paul and I had used to go away to get some time out over night in the nearby town of Pisco. As a result we found it difficult to get back to Chincha as their buses weren´t running. It didn´t help that the night before another bus had been assaulted in the south of the country by three men with guns! Fortunately we found another bus company who were still running.

Baptisms
This Sunday just passed we were very excited to have a Baptismal service at a local beach to baptise 5 people in the church. It was lovely seeing baptisms outside in the river that runs into the sea - it felt very much like the way it would have been in Jesus´ time.

Piles and Piles of Potatoes!
To finish with, a mixture sadness and amusement.
One of the ladies in our church who got baptised was unfortunately attacked by a neighbour just a few days before. Lidia runs a ´comedor´ which is a communal cooking area where large groups of neighbours share rations to make a meal between them - a cheaper way of sustaining their families. One morning last week Lidia was attacked by her neighbour and she called us for assistance. Paul and our two Pastors went off to the rescue and a bit later Rachel and others were called to go also. Whilst the neighbours attended to Lidia and some of our group tried to get the police to react (very difficult), a group of us put to continuing with the food in the comedor so that everyone would get fed. This meant peeling hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cooked potatoes by our fingers... then mashing every single one of them with either a fork or just crushing them with our hands. We were literally up to our elbows in potatoes for a long time! The more amusing part was that we had been disturbed from a seminar we were running on social action in the community and, did Paul and Rachel really devise such a plan for them to put social action into practice so quickly???!!!

Thanks to everyone who has emailed, send letters and cards and parcels. We get very excited every time we receive something - it truly makes our day!

We will be updating our website soon, but due to our workload we have got a little behind in this, so sorry about that. We´ll have more photos and videos in the near future.

Lots of love

Rach and Paul
xxx

11th July 2008
We had intended to send this out a bit sooner but Rachel has been stuck in the house with Peru belly yet again and Paul has been in Lima for various Dentist appointments. In between times we've had electricity cuts…!

Bed
We were very pleased to receive all the parts to our bed soon after our last email and also to see that it fit together – albeit very badly! Unfortunately our long-awaited mattresses turned out to be rock hard and we are now sporting sore hips as a result!

Dare to go the Dentist?
Just over two weeks ago Paul managed to break a tooth (eating avocado!) and so we arranged a visit to the dentist. On our first visit we were vaguely amused to find his consulting room in the middle of a photocopying shop, a 2.5m x 2.5m put-you-up office which didn't quite reach the high standards of hygiene we were hoping for. Still his tools came out of a sterilising unit so that brought some comfort! He sent us off to another dentist to get a photo taken of the damaged tooth before deciding on any treatment and once we had this we decided to make an appointment two days later to be the first patient and therefore make sure everything was as sterile as possible. However, when we turned up for the second appointment there wasn't any electricity so we rearranged for four days later when we were all free... by which time Paul's tooth was badly infected! So he was prescribed some antibiotics and anti-inflammatory tablets with instructions to come back in 5 days.
Just over two weeks since breaking his tooth, Paul to Lima to pick up his brother Simon and also sought help from another dentist! It turns out that he will have to return to Lima another twice for a further three appointments!

Mouse Mayhem
After waging war with a number of mice who loved our poisoned pellets (that we hid away from sight of baby downstairs that isn't ours!!), we finally managed to get the family downstairs to block the gap that is under their door at the bottom of our stairs and we are VERY happy to say we are now mice-free! Although, Rachel has a mice-ometer to keep an eye on the situation: a piece of cheese in the corner of the kitchen.

Housing Project
We are feeling excited as our housing project has now stepped up a gear. We have three potential families who, once they have the relevant documents to show they own their land, will fully qualify for the scheme under which we are intending to build houses. Please pray for the documents to come through ASAP as we can't start the project without them. In the meantime, we hope to decide by the end of this week where we shall be building our new house and get this under way so that we will have a model house to show people.
We spent a couple of days with architect, Lanty and his assistant (and girlfriend) Janina who came down from the north of the country to visit us and the church to bring everyone up to speed with how the project would work once we actually start.
Together we have also put together a survey that we will use to go from house to house introducing ourselves and asking people questions in order to find out what kind of housing situations there are in the immediate area of the church and also what other what other problems exist in the community. This information should help us in finding those families who may be eligible for our project and also help us in deciding future projects.

Rachel's Run Away Washing Up Glove
Finally, to bring amusement to your day once again, we finish with the account of Rachel's runaway glove. She was on the roof merrily making her way through a couple of loads of laundry. Half way through the process she notices that one of her gloves has gone missing and had ended up falling off the wall down onto next doors 'roof'(if you can call it that!). Going downstairs to ask for advice as to how to retrieve this valuable glove, Luz, the 15 year old, came up to put a plan into action. Taking a LONG bendy, metal road Luz attempts to reach the glove and knock it off the roof to the floor where we could reach it. Rachel garden the other end of the rod to protect the clothes she had just hung out. Bit by bit and with a lot of patience the glove was pushed across the roof towards the edge, when suddenly Luz shouts out "Oh no! It's gone through the neighbour's roof!" And sure enough we had blessed the next door neighbours with a left-handed yellow marigold!

Please see BMS website for our first official newsletter

Lots of love from us both

Rach and Paul
XXX