Family News - November

Benjamin continues to speak and sign more and more. He now joins in with his ‘Sing and Sign’ video and has a sweet way of saying ‘dee-dee-dee’ whenever he sees Bob the Builder – from the rhythm he uses he’s obviously trying to say ‘Yes we can!’.His favourite word at the moment seems to be ‘wack-wack’ which means ‘quack-quack’ – every bird he sees is a duck at present! He continues to be fascinated by books but unfortunately tends to only concentrate on each one for about 2 minutes and then leaves it wherever he has been looking at it, so we constantly have books strewn all over the house. He is still quite a mischief and his latest trick is pouring his juice on the table and smearing it into his hair. Benjamin was very excited recently Dina brought her tiny kitten to play for the morning!

Sammy learnt about plants at pre-school last month and is now learning about animals. He has learnt a little song in Spanish about a seed growing (there’s a video of a performance on ‘facebook’ if you can access that).

Recently he dressed up as a cow for the animal fancy dress day and then did his little presentation all about cows last week. He is definitely speaking more sentences now in Spanish – it’s hard for us to tell how much he really knows but when we see him with his friends we are often surprised! He still gets very tired after school and will sleep for over 2 hours many afternoons, if we let him! The trouble is, in the mornings, he then often wakes up at 5.30am! We have just had another of our parcels of books arrive from the UK so Sammy has been very excited to see stories that he has not read for 8 months. A highlight for him recently has been seeing the train coming into Cusco – it only comes in once a day from Puno, and on the other line late in the evening from Machu Picchu, so we hadn’t seen it before.

Jenny – I’ve been struggling with the 5.30am wake-ups from Sammy, a sore throat that lasted over a month, and then a cold! However, there have been some good things recently too! PE at school has been going OK, although I do find them a bit young. I haven’t had much chance to get to know the staff yet, but I have spoken to one of the English-speaking teachers and she is from Brighton! I’m starting to have some discussions with Mary, our pastor’s wife, about the format of Sunday mornings and how we do the children’s and youth work and we have some exciting possibilities for change I think.
The other week I went to a lunch and Bible study with some American missionary ladies. I was interested to meet two women I had heard about – one, Regina, is helping her husband with a little Christian school in a poor area on the edge of Cusco. The other, Laura, has nine children of her own and also cares for 20 abandoned or orphaned Peruvian children! She does have help, but still, 29 children! We visited Regina at the school last week and hope to visit Laura soon too. While I could easily fill my time twice over with helping at Sammy’s school or church, I want to be careful that I have time to do what I really came here for, which is working with the very poorest children. In Cusco itself we don’t see these children much as they tend to live in the communities outside town. Yesterday we visited the community in the hills above ‘the mountain’ (see previous blog entry – July, 2nd entry) and I feel very positive about that as the place I would like to spend a good deal of time.

Roland - I went to Huaraz in October. It was a bit of a flying visit and I didn’t get to see much of the town. I spent one day meeting the staff involved in the children’s home and the training projects they run. The second day I went with all the staff for the start of their retreat. I did some presentations (mostly in Spanish, apart from some bits I wasn’t able to prepare beforehand) on the sort of things they need to think about as they look to develop some small businesses as well as train others not only in a practical skill but also in how to use it in a business context. It was certainly a good experience for me, both for my Spanish and to see some of the challenges they are facing. I hope it was useful for them too!
I have recently started a course on micro-finance developed by the UN. The material is on-line and then there is a separate discussion forum that Peerservants (the US organisation who had the conference here in August) have set up to discuss some of the issues from a Christian perspective, with people from the projects they are linked with around the world contributing. I am also trying to get to grips with a computer programme which helps with financial projections for Micro-finance institutions. It is nice to be looking at some numbers after so long learning words!! We have a few more weeks of intensive language study and then we hope to be able to pass the Latin Link language test which means we can hopefully cut down significantly in the New Year.