July 16, 2003

As I type this C-File, I am in the Northern Hemisphere. You should never take something like this for granted, because just last month I was in a completely different hemisphere.* You can tell you change hemispheres when it's suddenly winter where it once was summer, and also you've just gotten off of a 6-hour plane ride involving far more vegetarian lasagna than you believe is moral to serve to death row inmates.

Now, you are probably asking yourself, “Why was Chris in the Southern Hemisphere?” That is pretty foolish, because you ought to be asking me. You see, the reason I was in the Southern Hemisphere is because I was in Peru. There. All cleared up.

Peru is a wonderful place to visit, and I highly recommend you buy a plane ticket to Lima right now and patronize all of its local restaurants. Why, you may ask? Because walking there might take a while. This is because Peru is located all the way on the other side of the Equator, which is the big dotted line that goes around the Earth (how it got there, I can't say, but the ancient denizens of Nazca might know why...). Peru is also famous for being convenient to the Pacific Ocean, which is made up of a whole lot of water. This is important, because about 68% of the water in the Pacific Ocean somehow winds up in the air in Lima, Peru, making the city the absolute most humid place that Chris Guin has ever been to, and Chris has spent his entire life in Alabama and Arkansas, so that's saying a lot. The city is, in fact, so humid that your towel is more likely to stay dry by being dipped repeatedly in the toilet then it is by being hung out over the balcony.

After having spent an entire month enjoying Peru, I am full of little tidbits of useful information such as this. It is a good thing, too, because I am not full of food, as, what with my digestive system not being too strong, everything I've eaten since I've returned from the country seeks immediate escape as soon as it is consumed.

But, despite appearances, I did not go to Peru simply to contract virulent forms of diarrhea. I actually went to share the Gospel with the people of Lima. The trip was, in fact, a mission-trip-slash-educational-program-for-credit provided by the Harding University Spanish Department, or, as it is more commonly referred to, Ava Conley. I did not take it for credit. I simply went to evangelize and also to work on my Spanish conversational skills. If you want to know the results of my attempts at Spanish improvement, let me just say that I'm glad I've now got some Peruvian pen pals to correct my usage of por and para.

I've figured out some important things about talking in a language you are not quite fluent in, like controlling the conversation tomake sure it's on a topic you know the words for ("my favorite color" is always a good one), and not being afraid to make mistakes because, let's face it, you're going to make a whole lot of them. Just be prepared to laugh at yourself, and you should get the hang of it someday. Maybe someday in 2054, but someday. (Also, you will find that people in Lima are more than willing to cut you some slack, as they may very well want to try out their English on you. Everybody's learning!)

But really, the purpose of the trip wasn't for me to learn Spanish, it was to share Jesus with people who needed him, as well as to encourage the local church in their efforts to reach out to the city. But I will not be talking about that so much, because it is all serious. Instead, I will be talking about all the things regarding Lima that struck me as outrageous or interesting, and if I can't remember anything outrageous or interesting, I will make stuff up.

1. The Digital Camera

I've never really been a big picture taker. I think it's mostly because I've never been a big picture looker-ater. Some people evidently enjoy flipping through photo albums of trips, weddings, ghastly surgeries, and reminiscing about things long past. I've never really liked doing that kind of thing. There are just things that always seem more pressing and interesting, such as watching The Simpsons.

So, I have not exactly been in the habit of taking pictures. There are certain moments that normal, well-adjusted camera-loving people see and realize, “Of course! This is a Kodak moment!” There are many signals that these normal people use to figure this out, such as, for example, everybody putting their camera into a large pile and then posing in front of something large and imposing. For non-camera people like me, these signals aren't so obvious. I'm just not used to thinking in camera terms.

So when I received my list of things to take to Peru, I promptly scratched off “camera,” knowing it wouldn't be of much use to me. My parents, however, would have none of it. “You are going to take a camera, Chris,” they demanded. “All right,” I said. “Not only that, you will take pictures with the camera!” “Darn!”

So I decided to make the best of it and get a digital camera with many buttons, because buttons are cool. I got the cheapest one I could find that had any sort of optical zoom at all, and decided I would take it to Peru without having tested or practiced with it. The results are somewhat less than spectacular.

You also have to consider that I had to train myself to think like a camera-using person. This meant, among other things, remembering to take the camera with me. You also have to remember to take pictures of things that strike you as photo-worthy. The trouble is, nothing ever struck me as photo worthy until at least fifteen minutes after it had passed. I was all the time remarking, “Wow, that was neat! I hope somebody took a picture of it.” “You have a camera, Chris. Why didn't you take a picture of it?” “Why must this always be about me?”

Here are some of my higher quality photos:

This, obviously, is the Lima/Callao airport as seen immediately after stepping off of the plane. There is evidently some kind of lightning storm or something going on. I don't know.	Here we see Ava and several of her students coming down the airport corridor that never ends. I don't know. I take a picture of them walking quickly, and they end up all blurry. Beats me.
Note to self: remember not to leave flash off when taking pictures in dark, cavern-like rooms.	Sometimes, it's okay to zoom.

The digital camera also proved an issue when I returned. It is now broken. Fortunately, I purchased a media reader to grab my photos, so you can witness the lovely fruits of my photographic labor. But the camera is shot, and the store won't replace it because of some silly two-week time limit, and the repair center is all the way in Pelham (motto: “Inconveniently Far Away from Tuscaloosa”), and the problem wasn't fixed by flipping the batteries around like usual. But, at least, the camera helped me to bring my wacky adventures to you here. I hope you like.

2. Getting Around Lima

Lima, Peru is a vast, sprawling city on the Pacific Coast. In this respect it is similar to New York City, except that it is cleaner, and the people are more likely to speak English correctly. The trouble with cities that are vast and sprawling is that walking from one place to another can sometimes take weeks at a time. This is why pedestrians need to use the efficient Lima Public Transportation System. Unfortunately, Lima does not have a Public Transportation System. Instead, it has taxis, which are even better.

There are taxis absolutely everywhere in Lima, including inside restaurants. I have seen personally more taxis on a single street waiting for me and my gringo buddies than there are in the entire Chicago metropolitan area, plus Demopolis, Alabama. And every one of the drivers was staring at me with visible dollar signs in his eyes. The taxis are understandably eager to have gringos ride in them, because gringos aren't aware of certain aspects of Peruvian such as the regular prices. This works out nicely, however, because nobody in Peru is aware of the regular prices. In Lima, prices are assigned randomly by a drunken monkey with a set of Yahtzee dice.

The taxis do not have meters. The price must be agreed on beforehand, a process that can and should take two hours or more, if you are the sort of person who is unwilling to ride in a taxi for anything remotely reasonable sounding. The fact is, with Peruvian taxis, there's always plenty of competition right around the corner, or gathering around you on the sidewalk cutting off all routes of escape. So feel free to volunteer a ludicrous price, such as “a broken digital camera,” and eventually somebody will take it.

Everything is cheap in Lima. Remember: a sol is, according to my Windows calculator, roughly the equivalent of $0.28985507246376811594202898550725, although if you have your money changed in the street, the exchange rate will be determined by the moneychanger's individual drunken Yahtzee monkey. It is good practice to force the moneychanger to remove his pocket calculator and show you how he is making his calculation (not that you actually understand the math, but the moneychanger may not know that...). Then, once you have a healthy wad of soles in your wallet, you can get around Lima much more easily, that is, followed by a wide assortment of money-grubbing children and shoe shiners.

Everywhere in Lima there are folks selling things – little bags of candy, such as chocolate, or alternately, Hall's cough drops. Trash bags at 10 for 1 sol, squeaking duck puppets, and cigarettes are peddled by merchants who wander through highways full of cars stopped at a traffic light. You can find just about anything you want on the street, provided what you want is a fake Inca jar, a small piece of candy, or marijuana, which is sold by this one very enthusiastic guy who knows maybe three words in English – “You buy weed?” which he practically yells at you even though you are all of five inches away from him.

Some of the street people, unfortunately, don't sell you anything. They are children called pirañas, named after the piranha because, similarly to the fish, they have been known to skeletonize a cow in less than two minutes. They never smile. They never dance a happy jig or offer you a fake Inca jar. Instead, they just whine at you, as if whining at people is a service for which most Americans are very eager to pay. “Un sol, por favor!” whine the pirañas. “Tengo hambre!” Roughly translated, this means, “I'm starving. Please ignore the vanilla ice cream presently dripping out of my mouth.” Perhaps I am being too cynical in regards to the pirañas. But on the other hand, I didn't come up with that name for them. You be the judge.

It is also possible to travel by bus. However, the bus system is slightly different than it is in the United States, as the buses are all privately owned and operated, and there are millions of them, driving up and down key streets, or sometimes key sidewalks. Each bus comes equipped with its own guy-who-hangs-out-the-door-and-yells-at-passers-by-where-the-bus-is-going. This guy is very important to the bus's livelihood, because, while the destination of the bus is printed in gigantic letters all over the bus itself, it is more loud to have the guy yell at people, and being loud is the primary goal of just about everything that happens in Lima. If you accidentally make eye-contact with the door-hanging-guy, the entire bus will stop and he will yell at you to get on the bus, even though you have no express desire to travel to Chorillos, or wherever. The guy seems to believe very firmly that if he yells “Chorillos!” at you over and over, he will make you want to travel to Chorillos, and you will board his bus.

It is very important, therefore, that the traveler to Lima learn the Latin hand gesture for “No.” Simply hold up one finger (not that finger, the index finger), and wave it sharply from left to right once, while looking stern. They will get the idea.

Walking is the preferred way to get around Lima, as it is cheap, good exercise, and sometimes the only option.	Here we see Adam's shoes getting aggressively shined by a local shoe-shining person, who was kind enough to charge only mildly exorbitant prices for his unwanted services.
This is a shot of several taxis taken from the back of a taxi. In order to make taxi-riding cost effective, it is common practice in Lima to pile as many as eighty-five people into a single station wagon. It might be fun, if the taxis had any sort of shocks, and didn't each pump out as much toxic pollution as the bovine population of the Great Plains.	There is a guy dressed like a pig over there. This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought I would mention it.

To get around Lima appropriately, however, you must learn:

3. The Geography of Lima

Lima is huge, so, for our convenience, it is been divided up into districts, or, as they say in Spanish, distritos.

We spent most of our time in the district of Miraflores, the most touristy district of them all, as measured in fake-Gucci-peddling-carts-per-square-foot. Miraflores is Spanish for “Look! Flowers!” It might have been more appropriately named Miracarros, or “Look! Cars!” Miraflores is chock full of American establishments such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and Tony Roma's, as well as American-sounding establishments such as “Alabama Chicken Company,” “The Texas Station,” and “The Sex Shop.” The universal nature of many American values is obvious here.

Miraflores is on the coast, but not the beach, because the beach is something like eight miles down a precipitous cliff from the edge of Miraflores. To get to the beach, you must hike down a perilous set of narrow stairs. Then, if you do not have a guy with you, you must be robbed at knifepoint. Once you reach the beach, you must not get into the water because there appear to be live barrels of toxic waste bobbing in the waves, and the beach consists entirely of jagged gravel. (I have heard there are very nice beaches elsewhere in Lima, but unfortunately, we were never able to visit one.)

Miraflores is also home to a giant, exorbitantly priced shopping mall carved into the face of the cliff overlooking the beach. It is called “Larco Mar,” and it is only four blocks or so from our hotel. Mrs. Conley assured us, before the trip, that we would not need or want to be eating in the Larco Mar area, as it's all American food anyway, and why, while we were in Peru, would we want to eat American food? “Because we are Americans,” we answered hastily and promptly scarfed down several metric tons each of imported loaded potato skins.

The center of Miraflores is a park called “Parque de Kennedy,” or “Kennedy Park.” Kennedy Park is home to hundreds of merchants with tables who would like to sell you authentic handmade Inca jewelry from a local manufacturing plant. You can also buy Peruvian paintings, or Peruvian turkey sandwiches (which are actually really good). Larco Mar and Kennedy Park were both popular locations to be dropped off at by taxis who couldn't understand our attempts at Spanish.

However, there is a lot more to Lima than Miraflores. Most importantly, there's the Centro, or downtown Lima. This is where the government of Peru is centered, as well as the black market, which is immediately next door. If you want something and you want it ridiculously cheap, and you don't mind being robbed too terribly much, the Centro is where you want to do your shopping. You can find anything in the markets downtown, including human feces along the wall where Peruvians who couldn't be bothered to find a restroom did their “business.” (I am not kidding.) I have no idea where any of the merchandise comes from, except that it was almost certainly stolen (but from where?). A lot of it is actually good quality, and the drunken Yahtzee monkeys often give you excellent prices. However, these prices are not without a cost. If you take girls along with you to the Centro, particularly to the “Land of Shoes,” you will likely never return. They have entire acres of stores dedicated to selling burned DVD's alone. Toss in some shopping-loving females and you will create a volatile reaction spewing out hours and hours of boredom for guys like me.

The Centro is also home to fun historical-type places – museums, cathedrals, dried skulls, etc. Unlike the United States, Peru has some serious history behind it. In the museums of Lima, you can see the artifacts of long-forgotten Peruvian Indian cultures, most of them involving exaggerated genitals. While taking dutifully copious notes for your Spanish class, you can witness the flow of time as each Indian civilization, one after another, is massacred to pave the way for the following civilization. Then there was a big gift shop, selling postcards of many beautiful places not actually located in Lima, as well as jars in the shape of natives in naughty positions. Evidently, the culmination of history.

An extremely interesting and beautiful place to visit is the Convento de San Francisco. Underneath the church you can find a sprawling system of catacombs, filled with, believe it or not, human bones. It is very dry in the catacombs, but if you are tempted to bring your towel to hang here, it is strongly suggested that you do not.

One district you will probably not be wanting to visit is Surquillo, just northeast of Miraflores. Surquillo has somewhat of a bad reputation. To give you an inkling of the reputation of Surquillo, if you tell a taxi driver who is stalking you that you want to go to Surquillo, he will peel away at 80 mph without so much as a word. If you ever want to go to Surquillo, you must never specify the district. The taxi driver must not realize until it is too late.

You see, the site of our week long Bible Conference (with the excellent Bob Brown serving as preacher) was “La Casa de Juventud” in Surquillo. The Youth House, as it might be translated in English, was kept under guard 24 hours by security guards in Kevlar. One of the more popular events hosted at the Youth House is a regular course in self-defense. It should be obvious, therefore, that while spreading the word about our conference, we kept quiet about the district in which it was located. When confronted, we simply replied, “It's almost in Miraflores.” The truth, certainly.

San Juan de Miraflores is nothing like Miraflores. It's a lot more like Honduras, according to Whit, one of our campaigners who has been to Honduras. While distributing flyers in the relatively nice residential district of Surco, our group saw San Juan de Miraflores in the distance – a treeless mountain of shacks and hovels, rising over the streets of Surco. Naturally, the girls in our group wanted to visit. I'm not really sure why. We didn't give out our fliers there. In fact, we mostly just looked around awkwardly at the Peruvians who stared at us like we were aliens while the girls... well, why don't you guess what the girls did? That's right. They shopped. For wooden eating utensils. And you know how I feel about shopping.

This is Larco Mar, the gringo mall carved into the cliff face over the ocean. Its atmosphere is very theme-park in nature. So are its prices.	This is the beach. Notice how low down it is. To get down to it, you have to scramble down some very treacherous staircases, but not come back up, because you will die from exhaustion, so you just take a taxi.
The large rock in the background is an Inca temple mound called Juaca Pucllana. The church we were helping is right across the street. Nobody is allowed to climb on top of Juaca Pucllana. Therefore, people climbed on it basically all day long.	These security guards are having a lot of fun guarding the only nice-looking building in all of Surquillo, la Casa de Juventud, the site of our conference. Surquillo is one of those districts you wouldn't want to send your women into. Or your men.
The hill in the background is San Juan de Miraflores . Right behind the highway are little shops that sell wooden things. Gringos don't usually go there. So, naturally, we went there.	This is Miraflores as seen from the top of our hotel. Most people don't get to see Miraflores quite like this, so it probably doesn't matter.
Here, Toni and Lindsey chase pigeons from the square in front of El Convento de San Francisco downtown. You can't tell they're chasing pigeons, because the pigeons have already flown out of frame when the camera snapped. But they look like they're having fun, don't they?	This is a well full of skulls. This sort thing is common in the catacombs beneath El Convento de San Francisco. If you look carefully, you will notice a wadded up Dr. Pepper can among the remnants of the dead.
This is the front of the Convent of San Francisco. It is very old. That's why you have to pay admission to get in.	This is the fountain in the middle of the Plaza de Armas, one of the important tourist squares downtown. There's no water in the fountain presently because all the water in the city is busy keeping my towel from getting dry.
These are the cliffs that separate Lima from the ocean, as seen from the back of a taxi. It is not a hike for the feint of heart, or the sane.	This is us standing in front of a fountain outside one of the museums downtown. We are smiling, but we are faking it, because we are tired.
Here is a painting of Jesus watering a garden with streams of his blood, as if he were a literal fountain. I probably shouldn't find this funny, but I do.	Unfortunately, this shrunken head is only a model.
Here we have some skulls of ancient Indian coneheads.	This is a jar in the shape of a monkey.

4. Our Hotel

We stayed at a hotel in Miraflores called El Señorial, which is Spanish for “the Señorial.” The hotel is a white, rectangular affair situated on Jose Gonzalez, a little ways from Cuadra 10 de Avenida Jose Larco. I remember the address very well because without it, you can't communicate to the taxi driver where it is you want to go. Sometimes, you can't communicate with the address either, so the taxi driver just takes you to some tourist, gringo-filled location and hopes it works out for you. Surprisingly enough, it usually does.

The hotel served as our home away from home for an entire month. Coincidentally, it served as the home for many other tourists from countries the world over, such as Germany, France, and even Argentina. Here is an easy tip for recognizing the difference between a North American tourist and a European/Argentine (they're the same thing) tourist. If they look like they're enjoying themselves, they're North American. If they look both very well-dressed and very unhappy, odds are they're European. If you don't believe me, try walking past a moneychanger while laughing and having fun. He will ask you if you want to change dollars first. Then try walking past with a general attitude of disdain. He will ask you if you want to change Euros.

Not that American tourists aren't substantially more annoying. The Argentine tourists gave one member of our group a giant tub of “tres leches,” an extremely rich creamy caramel-like dessert substance. I think she ate it entirely in, like, an hour. The American tourists, however, didn't give anybody a tub of tres leches. Instead, they occupied the computer room all day long, and took every cubic centimeter of hot water – all twenty of them, before six in the morning. Then they would loudly complain outside our window that there was no more hot water. I have never been more tempted to scream “THEN STOP USING IT” in my life.

Not that it was tough to wake up at 6:30, as we awoke our first morning at the crack of dawn to discover that, in place of wake-up calls, the hotel owner had placed the hotel immediately next to a giant construction site, specializing in jackhammering and whistling at American girls. I'm not sure what exactly they were jackhammering, because they never stopped. I think they just liked making noise.

Speaking of making noise for no apparent reason, everybody who drives in Lima honks their horn every time they sense an electron moving somewhere in their body. Honking in the streets has, in fact, evolved into a kind of language of its own, which I have studied and developed a rudimentary dictionary for, as follows:

Our hotel was, despite the construction and hot-water stealing tourists, an extraordinarily nice place to stay. We got breakfast every morning in the patio by the courtyard. This was not just a continental breakfast. This was a continental breakfast with scrambled eggs. They had croissants and oddly shaped buns that we termed “butt-bread.” They had little dishes of butter and strawberry jelly on each table. We were very thankful to have breakfast, as we sometimes didn't get other meals, such as supper.

(Random information: Did you know that in Latin countries, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are Pedro and Pablo? And Sabrina the Teenage Witch still isn't funny?)

Each hotel room comes equipped with its very own Creepy Jesus™, as pictured above.	The white building is part of the hotel. Behind it is the construction site that was kind enough to awaken us at 6:00 every morning with excessive jackhammering.
This is the first group photo we took. This in the hotel lobby, where we often spent hours at a time waiting for various Peruvians to show up.	This is the “solarium,” or the roof, complete with jacuzzi and gym (defined as one weight bench). It was a nice place to read or baptize people, depending on your mood.
This is the exterior of the hotel, around dusk time. A car was pulling out of the garage at the time. The garage is, of course, the same thing as the front yard.	Here we see April, Nate, Whit, and Lindsey in the “party room” playing spades. In case you were wondering, Nate and Lindsey are losing.

5. The Food

Now, for the part we've all been waiting for. Peruvian food is excellent, especially for a meat-lover such as me. Everything is meat, potatoes, and rice, unless it's mayonnaise, which it usually is. To give you the gist, I now present to you some parody lyrics I composed on the subject, to the tune of The Little Mermaid 's “Part of That World”:

Look at this food, all of it meat!
Why is it so hard to find something sweet?
Anything healthy to eat? Salad greens? Anything?
Look at this drink! Where is the ice?
Why must it always be served over rice?
A little less mayonnaise'd be nice! Sure... it's on everything!
I've got fine Inca Kola a-plenty.
I've got chicken on white rice galore.
You want supper? Not till ten twenty!
But I'm big! I must eat! I need... more!

I want to eat what the Peruvians eat
I want to eat, want to eat the lettuce!
Drinking the water right out from out of the tap!
I don't want sandwiches off the street.
I want real food, but our teacher won't let us!
So we eat Chinese and now I am feeling like crap!

All that I've tried,
Milanesa-fried!
All of it tearing me up inside!
Peruvian world... much better world... before I hurled!

Yes, a bunch of us got sick after eating Chinese food one night. We spent an entire day bowing before the porcelain throne, as they say. Our teacher, as well as many of our campaigners, didn't want us to take the anti-diarrhea/anti-vomit medicine too early, as the disease must “run its course” and we must “get it out of our system.” I'm not sure what exactly the disease was trying to get out of my system, because I was basically dry-heaving out one end and expelling water that I hadn't even been drinking out the other. Not that I'm bitter or anything. I actually got the medicine before anyone else did, so I really can't complain, except that we had to watch Peruvian TV the whole time. Latin animation is just weird, especially when you're throwing up.

However, I have to say that I really liked the Peruvian food nonetheless. Not everyone agreed with me on this, but I loved it. Aji de gallina is a creamy chicken dish mixed with chili peppers and served over potatoes. Lomo saltado is spicy beef strips. Pollo a la braza is rotisserie chicken. Cabrito is roasted goat. Ceviche is probably the most controversial item, as well as the most distinctly Peruvian. It is basically a big pile of raw seafood and onion that's been soaked in lime sauce so that, essentially, the seafood is cooked – just not the traditional way. It's extremely tasty, and the lime sauce is widely believed to be an aphrodisiac (it's called leche de tigre, or tiger milk, for a reason, you know).

Everything in Lima is lime. They serve limes on little plates with your most of your meals. Pisco sour, the traditional alcoholic beverage, is composed of a lot of lime juice. Ceviche uses lime sauce. I suppose you would think it natural, considering the name of the city is “ Lima ,” except that in Spanish, lima is the word for “lemon.” The word for “lime” is limón. How strange is that? (Answer: somewhat strange)

The Peruvian beverage of choice is a bubble-gum flavored cream soda called “Inca Kola.” It's oddly yellow-colored, so the natives sometimes refer to it as “La Orina de las Incas,” or “Inca Pee.” It's all right, but it takes some getting used to. Another beverage of choice is chicha, or sweet purple corn juice. I'm sorry, but chicha grossed me out. It tastes like a combination between some generic fruit juice and lawn clippings. Chicha was only good at one restaurant we went to, where it was more fruity and less grassy. Beware the chicha. Sometimes it's the only thing they have available to drink.

On a side note, bewaremayonnaise after 2:00 pm. It has sometimes been sitting out all day long, which isn't something that we weak-stomached gringos can handle. Other than that, and anything involving local water, you can eat anything. And I suggest you do, because it's excellent.

This is my airline dinner, before I had eaten the good stuff. No, wait. This is after I had eaten the good stuff.	Here, we see Scott, Whit, Dala, Ava, and Linnea thrusting bottles of Inca Kola into each other's faces prior to our first Peruvian meal – ají de gallina and, of course, rice.
This is us doing what we took about 40% of each day to do – arguing over where to eat.	This is ceviche mixto, in all its raw splendor.
This is Toni pretending to like ceviche.	This is us wearing our Inca Kola t-shirts. We may not be stylin', but we are yellow.

6. Other Places in Peru

I hear they're quite nice.

7. The Mission

Our task was simple: spread the Gospel in Lima, help the local Church of Christ at Miraflores. However, it turned out to be a little different than we expected.

You see, the campaign was supposed to go to Venezuela. Venezuela is a country famous the world over for not being Peru, so needless to say we were a little surprised to find ourselves in Lima for the month of June. The change in plans is a direct result of Venezuela's resident insane dictator – Chavez, who is officially a malevolent nutcase.

So, at the last minute, to avoid Chavez's insanity and because the United States State Department wouldn't let us (a minor technicality), we wound up in Lima. The trouble with winding up in Lima at the last minute is that we hadn't much time to prepare Lima for the big campaign. Usually, with Venezuela, Ava comes down with other students many weeks in advance – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break – promoting the big summer campaign and helping the church prepare. None of that got to happen. So the advertising for the conference had to be done the week immediately prior – by us.

Thus, week one of the campaign was spent distributing volantes, or flyers. We had one week to make sure every single home in Miraflores had one of these flyers under its door, in the hands of its maid, or in the jaws of its Rottweiler. Distributing volantes is one of those tiring, thankless jobs that never seems to end. But many people did actually respond, and we have, at the time of this writing, at least one person baptized as a result of our distribution efforts, so our work has most started to pay off. Yay for that.

Anyway, a typical day of distribution went something like this. Kevin and Paul would show up each morning at the hotel around 9:30, after we had eaten breakfast but before any of the girls had taken showers or gotten dressed. You see, Kevin and Paul (and Paul's wife Amy) are missionaries who had already been in Lima two or three months and are planning on staying for several years if they can get a resident visa, or perhaps if they can't get a resident visa. They helped in every way they could, including bringing to the hotel, each morning, enough stacks of freshly copied volantes to rival Aconcagua for biggest pile in South America. We divided up into groups, boy-girl usually, and then, after waiting four hours for Marco, one of the local church boys, to show up, we set off to distribute.

We would gather around a map of Miraflores (kindly provided by one of the local tourist restaurants), and Paul and Kevin would divide up the turf. Then, with our assignments in hand and our backs under severe stress from backpacks full of volantes, all fourteen of us loaded into a single taxi and we set off for wherever it was we were going (we sure didn't know).

Now, at first, we didn't simply leave the volante under the door and move on, a strategy referred to as “stop-and-drop.” We rang doorbells. Ringing doorbells to deliver a flyer is not my favorite thing in the world to do. That would be eating Oreos. Doorbell ringing ranks significantly lower.

The average home in Miraflores comes equipped with an enormous steel fence around it, topped with barbed wire, sometimes electrified. So it was usually impossible simply to walk up to the front door of a place and ring the doorbell. You had to ring the doorbell that was conveniently located on the giant, imposing steel fence. You also had to hope the doorbell didn't become stuck and not stop ringing, because that's just embarrassing.

Sometimes they would answer over the intercom. I didn't like this, because I could never understand what they were saying, as the intercom was usually kind of tinny and staticy, and also they were speaking in Spanish, which isn't my first language. Sometimes they would yell out of a window at you. This would obligate you to yell back at them. You see, we had our lines that we memorized in Spanish to say to everybody as he rang their bells. We were fine reciting these lines in a friendly voice while smiling. But we never could figure out what it was exactly they were saying back to us. So sometimes we would just smile, bid them a buen día, drop the volante in the busón, and go on talking Spanglish because the language centers in our brains were about to fry.

Sometimes the maid would come to the door. The maid was never too happy to see us, even if we made it clear that she was invited to the conference as well. It was better when they came to the door themselves. Sometimes we could get lucky and be invited into the house to sit and chat. Sometimes we could get lucky and get invited to regular dinners every week! So it just depended. You have to suck it up and keep moving.

Week two of the trip was the conference itself. Bob Brown came to preach the conference (he preaches these things all over South America, and, as I understand it, Russia and Ukraine as well). Not that we stopped distributing flyers while the conference was going on. We kept distributing in Surco, even when there was only one day left. You never know, after all.

Weeks three and four were dedicated to having Bible studies cancelled on us. Actually, I am only kidding. Occasionally a Bible study actually happened, and that was great and wonderful. It just got frustrating after so many people ended up not home, or sick, or whatever. There's nothing quite as maddening as being on a campaign trip to Peru and spending entire afternoons sitting on your butt in the hotel, watching DragonBall in Spanish, because they cancelled on you at the last minute. The down time depressed me sometimes, but looking back on it, I think it was all worth it just for the times the Bible studies actually happened. Many people were eager to have a chance to study Scripture with somebody. A lot of people in Peru believe in God and Jesus and the Bible on a certain level, they just don't really know anything about them. The chance to study the Bible person-to-person with some young gringos felt like a much needed answer to prayer for some people.

At this writing, eight people have been baptized on the campaign, and all eight of them need prayers, as well as the campaigners still down there, and the church, for continued growth and maturity. As I understand it, they're still looking for a new building to handle the new, increased membership. Please keep the church in your prayers, as well as some of the students who are still studying and struggling. Pray that the missionaries will have stamina and wisdom to continue, and that the hearts of the students will be open and receptive.

In the meantime, don't think that because you aren't in a foreign country you can't be an evangelist. There are receptive and waiting people who just haven't had an opportunity to study even in the States. At Harding, there is an organization called Messengers of Christ (of which I am a member) that goes out into local Searcy neighborhoods to offer yard-work, house-cleaning (or whatever else people need), prayers, and Bible studies. Get involved. If you live in Searcy, it's not like you don't have free weekends. Do something worthwhile, that will last.

And that's all I've got to say about that.

This is Dala and Whit, distributing volantes to a home in Miraflores, or, in this case, posing outside someone's house while pretending to distribute volantes.	Jenn distributes a flyer to a home in Miraflores that in no way resembles a prison yard.
This is us standing around the lobby of La Casa de Juventud in Surquillo, prior to the first night of the Bible conference.	Lindsey hands out a flyer to one of Lima's fuzzier citizens.
Whit prepares the “baptistry” with cold water. We had to set up several fireman's brigades to get the thing filled before 2005.	Phillip performs a baptism. The man on the left is Bob Brown himself.
Here we are on the roof of the hotel after a baptism one glorious Sunday afternoon.	One of the possible locations for the new church building was a former casino/bar complex. Now that would've been interesting...

8. Random Other Pictures

This was my point of view that one Thursday after Chinese.	A popular brand of shirts in Peru is named “Kids Made Here.” I'll bet they are.
“Ooh, Chris, take a picture of us and see if you can see the mountains in the background!”	April watches as a brown bear digs an escape route from the zoo in San Miguel. Little does she realize she is about to be crushed by a giant finger.
Guillermo, the alpaca teddy bear, is executed for the crime of smelling like butt.	And the sun sets over Miraflores. Have a good summer, everybody!

*The Southern Hemisphere