Peru, Revisited

My parents are returning to Peru this week. Dad left this morning, and Mom is leaving tomorrow morning. They are part of a team that will run a mobile medical clinic, along with vacation Bible school, to assist Wycliffe missionary and Bible translator, Jim Wroughton, who has translated the Bible into the indigenous language of the Quechua people. To help you understand how incredible this is, let me also tell you this: before Jim came along, this people group did not have a written form of their language. At all. He wrote the alphabet, then began to translate the Bible into their native, spoken language.

Here are some images from past trips. This first one was taken in 2006, as my parents were setting up the triage station for our clinic:

Here I am getting ready for clinic one morning. Every morning we would go to a different village, find a place to set up our clinic, and then have some down time as we waited for the first wave of villagers to arrive. Once they arrived, they would first hear the Word, as preached by Jim, receive their Bibles, then go through triage. This gave me and other health care professionals a chance to set up our stations, clean our equipment, and for me, pray. I always prayed that God would guide my hands and give me wisdom and recall.

Here is one of our clinics. This is one of my favorite places in the world. Seriously. There are no roads to this village, which is usually the case wherever the team goes. There are roads that go close, and then we usually have a few Peruvian guys go with us to move boulders out of the way so that we can reach these villages.

This is one of the roads that goes close to a village we visited. We loved seeing traffic like this because this is supposed to be a 2-lane road and we typically saw on-coming buses, 18-wheelers, or other vehicles driven by people who for some reason thought that taking oversized trucks on roads like this was a good idea. When that happened, someone had to back off, back up, and let the other pass. The only problem is, there is no shoulder. One side of the road is a rocky mountain. The other side drops off about 1,000 feet (no lie, no exaggeration).

Peru is beautiful. The people are beautiful and precious and warm. They are some of the hardest working people in the world. I'm not sure if that's a cultural thing, the fact that life is so incredibly difficult where they live, or a combination of both. For instance, we had patients who were injured because they fell off their field while farming. Yes, fell off. As in, their fields either went straight to a cliff, or were at such an angle that tripping could cause you to actually fall off.

I'm going to post more later this week about Peru. It's going to be on my heart and mind for the next 12 days.