August 2014: "The Georges in Peru"

When we first started attending our church about 2 years ago, it didn't have steps to enter down into the property, you had to climb down a pile of rocks.  Following the good marketing principle of 'don't make it hard for people to enter your establishment', one of the first things we did was encourage them to build steps.  We thought a roof would be kind of swell, so with the help of a short-term construction team from CCC in Omaha, we put a roof over the church (took one morning of skilled labor to finish the job!) in July of 2013.  Now the church has finally saved up enough offering money to put in a floor!  In Peru, one doesn't hire someone to pour a floor when you can have a church work day (or several), so we've been working hard this week, getting all of the material into the church.  This means manually scooping/carrying/throwing six truckloads of sand, gravel and rocks into the church (ahem) atrium in preparation for pouring the floor in the next 2 weeks.  It's been a good time of getting the members of the church to work together, and we don't even need to bribe our kids with icecream to get them there,  it's such a satisfying job.

Here you can see us scooping gravel from the main road down to the sidewalk in front of our church.

Praise God that we will soon have a floor (and hopefully a more inviting place for new people to visit)!

From July 21st through August 1 we helped out with an eye campaign here in Arequipa.  I triaged patients while Sarah, Mia and Paul translated for the volunteers from Canada and the USA and Amy fit people with new glasses.  Sarah even got to spend time in the operating room with the ophthalmologists as they removed cataracts.  They need translators, since the patients are awake when they have cataracts removed!  She thought it was really cool, especially when they numb up the eyeball by putting a big needle behind the eye!  We're thankful that our kids were on vacation and could help with this event.  They made friends with the kids of an ophthalmologist couple that were here and continue conversing via Facebook.  I think all parents think their children's childhood is very different from their own, but at times I think my kids' experiences and my own couldn't be more different!