A House in San Blas!

If you've read our latest (August) newsletter, you will know something about the San Blas house we have been hoping to acquire, with our friends, Jed and Jaime. If not, here's a summary of what this is all about!

Part of what we do here in Cusco is to host visitors in our house, and part of our vision is that people who stay with us, and also volunteers who work with us at the mountain project, may return home transformed in some way as a result of their experience in Cusco, with a better understanding of the lives of the poor and the Christian faith in action. We also like to host other missionaries who need a break! Many guests give donations for staying with us and this year these are already helping to pay for the completion of our clubroom at the mountain project and the building of toilets alongside.

Our friends Jed and Jaime, with whom we have been meeting up each Friday evening, have a vision to start a café that can serve as a place for meeting foreigners, for live music (Jed is a musician) and for discussions and Bible studies (maybe like an Alpha course, for those of you who have experience of this). Their vision is also to host short-term teams and encourage people into mission, and with any café profits, to support a project which benefits the poor.

Recently we were discussing how we might work together and support each other. We were considering obtaining a building we could share, where they or we could live and have guests, as we do now, and start the café as more of a breakfast room and coffee shop initially. The idea would be that we would oversee the guest room part, where short-term teams and volunteers, as well as mission visitors, could be accommodated, and they would concentrate on the café part.

Amazingly, a few days after coming up with this plan, through a friend I heard of a property that sounded very interesting. The property is a beautiful old colonial style house around a small covered courtyard just behind a shop on San Blas Plaza, exactly the area of town where Jed and Jaime have been looking for so long and where we had been house-hunting last year. It’s just 5 minutes walk from our current house.

Well, after working through all the details of the contract and discussing for hours amongst ourselves how to make the property work as both home, guest rooms and cafe, we have the house! We have agreed to rent it for 2 and a half years initially, but obviously hope the landlord will agree to another contract after this time.

Jed and Jaime have moved in initially, although we may swap over next year. They are sorting out some re-wiring that needs doing in order for them to have a kitchen suitable for a cafe, and together we will be repainting most of the interior. Unfortunately you can't get landlords to do much here with rented properties, but on the other hand at least labour and materials are quite cheap.

So what is the house like? We think it's really beautiful, and once it is done up as we want it, it will be fantastic. It is a colonial style house with 2 storeys built round a patio. There is a wide entrance 'tunnel' off San Blas Plaza leading into the patio. The ground floor consists of the patio (this is covered with a glass roof up above and will be the main cafe area), kitchen, a bedroom and three toilets (2 with showers).

Upstairs are 6 bedrooms (2 for the family living there and 1 for a private lounge/office/play room, leaving three double/triple rooms for guests) and a wide balcony overlooking the patio where there is space for a lounge furniture. There are also a couple more showers and another toilet.

The aim is that as families we will both raise some additional financial support to pay the rent. This will ease financial pressure on the cafe as it gets going and will enable us to use all donations given by guests for our projects with the needy here. The cafe will also be donating to projects once it begins to make a profit. The most impressive project with kids I have seen recently is one where a Dutch lady has started a hotel (in fact three hotels now!) and uses the profits to pay for a lunch programme for 500 children! The hotels are simple but attractive and each one has a similarly simple but attractive children's cafe attached. Malnutrition is a huge problem in and around Cusco so she and her staff are doing a fantastic job. If you're interested, have a look at her website: www.ninoshotel.com/

Anyway, this, among other things, has really inspired us. We believe that a relatively small investment into the cafe/guest room project will be multiplied through cafe profits and guest donations and enable us to have an ongoing source of funding for work with the needy.


A goal for next year is to fund a lunch programme to complement the homework/activity/English club we have started at the mountain. We do not anticipate a shortage of guests as we already overflow in our current house. And the cafe should do well as although there are stacks of places to eat here, there are very few that really know what the foreign tourists are looking for (it's almost impossible to persuade them that you really do want milk in your tea!!) and there are very few that have such a great location.

This venture is quite a step of faith for both families, but one that we are sure God has led us to take and that will expand our work here in many ways.

If anyone would like to help with set up costs or rent, come and volunteer, come and stay as a guest, send us a short term team, help with the outreach and Bible study aspect of the cafe, etc. please let us know!

Holiday in Huaraz

We have just come back from a weeks holiday, two days spent in Lima with friends, and then four days in Huaraz, a town 8 hours on the bus north of Lima. It is quite a journey to get there, with the flight to Lima and then the bus journey, but the boys are used to travelling! They slept a good part of the way there, with the journey being afternoon and evening, and then we got a night bus back.

Our main reason for going to Huaraz was to visit several Latin Link friends there who are all part of a project centred on a children's home. They also work with street boys, have set up workshops to provide work opportunities (Roland went last year to help with the business side of these), and run a lunch club and after school club - this was something I was keen to see in order to help with our mountain project.

So we spent some of the time with our friends, both socially and looking at various aspects of the project, and some time exploring the local area - amazing scenery as Huaraz is near the foot of Peru's highest mountain.

We found a lovely hostel to stay in with a breakfast room with the most amazing view and a big fireplace for the evenings. Being up in the mountains the town has a similar climate to Cusco with hot days and cold nights at this time of year. The boys sleep in the room with us when we go to hostels which doesn't always give us all a good night's sleep, and they can get rather over-excited and over-tired on a holiday like this, but overall we had a good time.

One of the highlights was playing with the children in the home. At one point I was reading stories in English with Sammy translating into Spanish! We also went on a fun day trip with them and several of the older girls were so good looking after our boys.

For photos of our trip click here.