Week of Firsts

This week we had a lot of first experiences here in our mission.

1.  Outgoing Missionary Seminar - Monday, July 28,  2014

We participated in our first Self-Reliance seminar with the outgoing missionaries.  Apparently, this was only the second tme for the seminar so it is a new practice here in this area.  We had 13 elders, no sisters who had completed their mission and were slated to leave the next day.  We had them for a one day training on self-reliance.  Carlos Hale presented first and did an excellent job discussing an overview of where should these young missionaries be headed now.  They have just completed two years of service where their entire focus has been on serving the Lord and preaching the gospel.  Often, they come home off their missions and are at a loss as to what to do with their lives and where to focus their time and attention.  It is an adjustment.  He did a great job explaining the what (education, work, family, service in the church) and the why.  I thought he painted a very good picture of how sacrifice now to make these things happen will allow them to harvest well in their later years.

We were asked to spend two hours reviewing the Career Workshop principles with the missionaries.  Normally the Career Workshop is an 8-12 hour affair.  We had to condense and present only the most important principles to these missionaries to pique their interest and encourage them to visit their centers in their home stakes to get more information.

Dave taught them a new tradition, one he had in his mission in the Gulf States back in the early 70´s.  He got them to take a group photo, with the soles of their shoes on display to prove that they had earned their walking papers to return home.  See photo below.

The elder on the left of the mission President, was our zone leader in the Cusco zone.  President Harbertson is on the far right in the front in case you couldn't distinguish him from the younger missionaries.

Side note:  July 28th is Peru´s Independence Day.  We didn´t see much celebrating.  We don´t know if it is because we were in meetings all day or what.  But no fireworks or parties in the evening.  It was a relatively quiet day.

2.  English classes -Tuesdays & Thursdays

We finally started our  Daily Dose English classes.  We are currently offering three different times, all on Tuesdays & Thursdays.  We are doing a morning class at 9 am before the Self-Reliance center opens and then two evening classes, one at 7 pm and then another class at 8:15 pm in another chapel within the Cusco stake.  Dave taught the 9 am and the 8:15 pm classes and I taught the 7 pm class as it is almost exclusively women and we felt they would be more comfortable with a female teacher.

Tuesday attendance was sparse, but we learned that both Monday and Tuesday were considered national holidays for the independence celebrations as well as the schools are in a vacation time as well.  Thursday, however, our attendance jumped.  We had 8 attend the morning class and 8 attend the 8:15 pm.  If we continue to have more people come, we will have to split the groups and both Dave & I teach every hour.

Daily Dose is an English conversation class geared to teach basic words and phrases required for daily living in an English speaking country.  The church is using it quite sucessfully for immigrants to the U.S.  We are not sure how well it will work here, where they do not hear a lot of English or required to use English but we feel it can be of benefit to them.  The course has 4 levels, with 12 lessons per level, each lesson takes one week to present.  Since it is a conversation class, the number of participants can not be large.  It is recommended 6-8 per group, 10 at the most.

The members here are anxious to learn.  We are learning as we go.  I´m confident my background teaching Spanish will help me.  Dave´s enthusiam and out-going personality will help him.

We also had a meeting with the stake president of the other stake in Cusco to get him on board with teaching these English classes to his stake members.  He was an easy sell.  They are currently announcing to their members this program and getting them to sign up and we will begin teaching classes to that stake on August 13th.  We will be doing those classes at similar times but on Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Our first week´s lesson was on Introducing Yourself and this next week is on Talking about Your Family.

3.  Home Improvement Project

Dave was a happy camper this week.  He was able to spend some time making something with his hands.  The church has a budget for apartment furnishings for us and they allocated some funds for a bookcase.  When we went shopping for furnishings, the bookcases were extremely flimsy and costly for the level of quality.  Dave told them he wanted to make the bookcase rather than buy one already made.  Well, he finally was able to make that happen and for half the cost he made us two large sturdy bookcases.  You can see Dave hard at work with his new drill below.

And this photo shows one of the finished products.  It sits at the end of our hallway.  The other one is identical and is in the bedroom that serves as our office.

All I can say is I noticed a definite lilt in his steps and a more happy tone to his voice the two days he spent an hour a day making those bookcases.  He bought himself a drill and I think he now feels complete, whereas without one I think he just wasn´t himself.

We also finally have all the furnishings for our apartment.  Friday, we did one last shopping trip with the brother assigned to take care of that and got an area rug and coffee table for the front room.  It really makes a difference.  See?

Dave relaxing in the front room.  I don't think we are going to be doing much of that from here on out.  We are getting busy!

Dave also took some time to mount some wire and we are using that to hang items on the wall.   We got this alpaca wool wall hanging when we were in Puno. 

With the additional area rugs we purchased, our apartment is finally feeling more like a home (look wise, not temperature wise).

4.  Sightseeing Adventure

I know a lot of you think we have already done a lot of sightseeing and playing around already.  What you have to understand is our chapel that we work out of is only like 4 blocks from the start of the historical district of Cusco so it is really easy to see a lot of this stuff just walking around town doing errands.  But this week we had our first planned excursion.  The families of the two sisters who help in the self-reliance center wanted to take us to see the Cristo Blanco that sits on one of the highest hills surrounding the city and do a hike/picnic.  We told them sure, so Saturday was the day. 

There are some ruins just outside of the city call Saqsaywaman, a quechua word.  We didn´t want to go into the archeological park yet, since we haven´t gotten our national ID cards yet and that gets us into these sites at a much cheaper cost, but they said if we hiked up to this Cristo Blanco statue we would be able to overlook some of the ruins. 

It turned out to be a very long, but fun and memorable day.  We had great weather and it was a lot of fun with these two families.

We met at the San Pedro market, named after the Catholic cathedral that is located there.

We were the first to arrive as the Hispanic culture does not put a lot of emphasis on punctuality.  While we were waiting, of course, the street vendors tried to get us to buy from them.  One lady was selling jewelry and knew a bit of English, so Dave tried to recruit her to come to our English classes.  Her two year old daughter that she had with her, climbed right up onto Dave's lap while they talked.  She also had an 8 year old daughter who hit me up to buy these little llama key rings.  You see vendors selling those all over the place.  When I found out her name was Jennifer and her little sister's name was Michelle (two names I used with two of my daughters) I decided I had to provide her with a sale.

Here I am with Jennifer, a young entrepreneur, and her little sister, Michelle.

Finally our two families arrived, we bought a few items to picnic on from the market and we took off.  We headed to the Plaza de Armas and took a group photo before starting the hike.

The next thing we knew we were taking a side street off the Plaza that took us up the hillside and out of the city.  This was not an easy stroll.  I took some photos to hopefully show how steep the stairs were that we climbed.  And the stairs went on and on.  We are definitely acclimatized to the elevation now or we would never have survived even this part of the hike, and it only gets more demanding from here.

This photo shows our fearless tour guide, Gladys.  She is the one in the sweatsuit, white hat and hands on her hips.  These stairs took us up to a plaza where we found yet another church and some food vendors.  Here is a photo of a display of all the Catholic saints that was sitting outside of the church.

Dave captured the wares of one of the food vendors.  Be sure to enlarge this photo so you can see really well what she is selling.

That is guinea pigs, head, feet and all. 

 

 

Here is the view from this point in our climb/hike.  But we still have a long ways to go.

 

 



This is where the hike got interesting.  Our guide, took us off the main roadway and said there was a path where we could hike up the mountainside to get to our goal. The next thing we knew, we were having to cross this gully with a small stream over a bridge made of four large tree trunks and then we headed off into the brush following a very small path.  Often it was overgrown with bushes that we had to push the branches out of our way or duck to make it through.  We climbed up a very steep incline for most of the way.

 You can see our log bridge at the bottom of the photo above.

Here is a view looking back during our hike up the mountainside.

This photo is from above looking back on our path.  Can you see it?  Didn't think so.  We were not on a well used path to say the least.  It was quite the adventure.  The kids had a blast.  Dave & I handled the climb pretty well, making us feel like we still haven't become old geezers even though we are serving a "senior" mission.

 

After about 45-60 minutes of climbing like mountain goats we were at the top and there was the Cristo Blanco.  You can see it from just about anywhere in the city.  It is huge.  Not as huge as the one in Rio de Janeiro, however, but similar.

 

And here are the views from the top.  We had a great day for the outing.  You could see really far.  It was impressive.

 The photo above is looking straight down on Cusco.  Below is looking off to the left.  If you look hard, or enlarge the photo, you can make out the airport.

 

Here is a photo of the view zoomed in.  I think it looks very picturesque.  What's your opinion, Emily?

 

 From the top of the mountain and the White Christ statute we could see the ruins of Saqsaywaman.  We only took photos from a distance.  The only close up photo we got was the sign at the entrance of the park.

 

 The pronunciation of this Quechua word sounds a lot like "sexy woman".  I think Dave is trying to point at me and say "Now, there is a sexy woman!".

 

We will post better pictures when we finally go into the park.

 

Speaking of Quechua, they say the pronunciation is closer to English than Spanish pronunciation.  A lot of the street names are in Quechua.  Try pronouncing this street name.

The apostrophe apparently means you are supposed to do this clicking sound in your throat.  I think Quechua is tough from what little exposure we have had so far to it.

 

Both Dave and I got to do some herding during this hike.  See below and you decide who is the better shepherd.

 

 

Dave brought some kites along hoping to be able to fly them.  We've heard that August is the season for wind here but we sure couldn't get enough wind to do much flying.  Later we heard that the wind really picks up from 3 pm on, and we were there before then.  Dave is determined to get back up there before August is over.

 

Some other activities we did while up on the mountain - a tree climbing contest which Dave won.  I think one of the boys would have gone higher, but his mom starting freaking out and forbade him to go higher.

 

We also visited what they called a laguna or lagoon, but I would call it a pond.  It was full of trout and there was a restaurant there that the whole menu was just trout prepared different ways.  We didn't eat there but reading the menu list sure made my mouth water.  The kids had fun trying to catch the trout barehanded and also messing around on a paddleboat.  Even the Guerra's family dog, who was along for the day fell into the pond trying to get a drink.  The dog was in over his head.  Dave put on his fireman hat and scooped him out before anything bad happened.  The family was very impressed with his quick response time.

It had been a really fun time, but it was mid-afternoon so we needed to head back.  We were not going to go straight back down the mountain they way we climbed up so our guide knew of another way to go.  We headed down the mountain on the roadway a bit and then headed down stairs built right into the side of the mountain.  We didn't count the stairs.  I wish I had.  We went down hundreds of steps, maybe between 300-500 stairs total?  It was a least a half a mile of stairs, I think.  Here is a couple of photos to give you an idea.

 

 

On the way down we passed some flowering shrubs that we were told by our guide was the native Cusco flower.  It blooms in a number of different colors and sizes.  If the shrub is small the flowers are small and as the bush gets bigger, so do the flowers.  Here is a photo.

 



It's the same flower we saw down in Lima that was white and we called it a trumpet tree.  It wasn't a bush in Lima, but a real tree, so apparently it can get quite large.  It will also form a fruit at the base of the flower when it dries up and we have tried eating it.  It looks like a small cherry tomato but yellow and the flavor is a bit tart and sweet at the same time.



 

When we got down into the city we ended up in the San Blas area of town.  They have a plaza there where on Saturdays a lot of artisans come to sell to the tourists.  We saw a lot of pretty things but we did not have a lot of money with us as we were not out to shop.

Dave was fascinated watching this lady at work weaving her handicraft.

 

There was a museum at the plaza of a famous artist, Hilario Mendivil.  This shows the entrance to the museum.  Entrance was free so we stepped inside to take a look.

 

This artist's work is apparently distinguished by the exaggerated neck lengths he uses in his work.  Here are some examples.



We decided we are not real fans of this technique or approach.  Here is something a bit more interesting to us that he did.

 

 

By now we are pretty beat.  We gathered for one last group photo before going our separate ways.  I love this photo.  It is in front of the fountain at San Blas plaza.  We had a blast today!

 



Left to right:  Henry Guerra, Gabriel Guerra, Mariana Guerra, Gaby Guerra, Renzo Machado, Gladys Machado, other son of Gladys.

 

Spiritual Thought:  2 Kings 4:1-7  We discovered this story in the Old Testament this week that really works well with Self-Reliance.  It tells of a widow who goes to Elisha asking for help as her husband had died and left her with debt that she could not pay unless she sold her sons into servitude/bondage and she didn't want to have to do that.. (She was not self-reliant.  She did not know how to solve this problem on her own)  Elisha asked her what she had in her house. (He made her look at what her resources were). She said only a little bit of oil in a small bottle.  Elisha told her to go borrow empty vessels from her neighbors and not a few, and pour her oil into those and  Her small bottle filled even the large vessels .  He then told her to go out and sell the oil to pay off the debt. (She had to do the work.  It wasn't just given to her).  She also had to exercise faith and do what the prophet told her to do even though it may not have seemed to make sense or seem logical, or may have been hard. (We as well need to exercise faith and follow the prophetic counsel of our church leaders to become self-reliant).  Interestingly, Elisha told her to use the extra to support herself and her sons.  (God will bless us with what we need and extra if we are humble and exercise faith to obey him and his servants).