We've hit the hump!

Holy cow!  Monday, March 9th, was hump day for us.  9 months as missionaries.  Most of the times it feels like time is flying by.  Every once and awhile, I get homesick and can hardly wait to be back in the states and enjoying family and friends.

Monday was as close to a P-day as we've had in a long time.  We unpacked from our trip to Puerto Maldonado, did some shopping, did laundry and planned for the week.

We did filler classes with our English classes as we had our Level 2 Celebration on Thursday during the hours we would have held class and we knew we would not be able to teach a complete lesson.  We devised a tic-tac-toe game where they had to answer a question in English to claim that square.  It worked out so well that we decided to adjust it for our missionary review class as well.

For our celebration we followed the same format we used for Level 1.  We played games, had them sing songs, presented certificates and then had some refreshments, American style, of course.  This time we didn't go all out with the refreshments like last time.  But we did do banana splits.  Oh my, were they good!

 We had everyone playing BINGO.  They can never have too much practice with numbers.  It is something we take for granted but it takes time to master as a foreign language.

 We even had some sister missionaries that were in from Juliaca for a leadership meeting taking part and the Johnsons stopped in and we got them to play a bit as well.

 In the photo above you can see all the daily dose posters up for the lessons we've covered.  We have taught a lot of material!

We put the sister missionaries to work.  Above they are calling out the BINGO numbers.  Below they helped prepare the banana splits.

And the photo above shows a classic reaction to the refreshments.  They were a hit, just like last time.  It sure was one of the best tasting banana splits I've ever had.  I think the fact that it has been months since having something like that made a difference.

We had an interesting experience this week that was out of the norm.  Wednesday while we were doing our classes at the Inti Raymi chapel, a man from Sweden came in looking for the missionaries.  Dave ended up talking to him for some time and suggested that he come back in the evening.  Apparently he was having financial difficulties and was hoping for a handout from the church.  That happens from time to time here.

Well, Wednesday evening he showed up to the mission office drunk.  The elders came and got Elder Rhoades as they didn't know how to handle him and couldn't get him to leave the premises.  Elder Rhoades, having had experience with drunks as a fireman, went back and dealt with the situation.  It ended up taking two hours for him to deal with it, however.

In the meantime, Elder Rhoades felt impressed to tell him to come back tomorrow and he would help him out, it he showed up sober, as that is what he was repeating over and over again - Ayudame,  ayudame.  He spoke English and Spanish.  The next morning he showed up sober so Elder Rhoades and the office missionaries gave him a discussion.  Dave says he was asking some really good questions.  This made Dave hopeful.  The man's name is Magnus and he is 39 years old and has spent the last two years living in Cusco.  However, he has been an alcoholic for many, many years and has also done drugs and apparently some pretty bad stuff in the past.

Dave kept him by his side the whole day to help keep him sober.  He even came to our English celebration. You can see him in the photo below.  He is the one with the baseball cap on.

Without the alcohol in him, he was going through pretty bad withdrawals and I think being sober was making him face the reality of his life and choices and it wasn't pretty.  In fact it was pretty painful for him.  We encouraged him to hang in there, everyone at the celebration was being friendly and supportive to him.  We paid to put him up for the night in a very cheap hostel (15 soles a night, that is only about $5) and told him to meet us the next day, Friday.

He was waiting for us Friday morning and still seemed to be sober.  But he did not want Dave to babysit him the whole day, so Dave came back to the self-reliance center and told him that he would hook up with him again in the afternoon at 5 pm.  While when we met with him that afternoon, we talked with him a bit and tried to encourage him to stick it out and things would get better.  However, I thought I smelled just a bit of alcohol, but it was so slight I wasn't sure.

Sure enough, when Magnus went outside to take a smoke, Dave looked around and this is what he found.

A bottle of  alcohol with a 40% alcoholic content!  Dave confiscated it and didn't let on that he knew.  We put him up for another night in the hostel and set an appointment up for Saturday morning so he could talk with the stake president.  Because in the meantime, we had consulted with him Friday evening and his advice was to turn him in to the immigration authorities as he is in Peru illegally.  They would then take him to the closest Swedish embassy and the Swedish embassy would then arrange for him to get back to Sweden.

Well, Saturday morning he was a no show and later in the day we got a call from the elders saying he had shown up stone drunk.  Dave advised them to not let him on the church grounds.  We had been storing his luggage and bags in the church kitchen up until then and so Dave had the missionaries tell him to look for his things at the hostel and he returned them to the hostel later that day.

It was a long shot that we would be able to help him, but Dave felt obligated to make an effort.  We feel bad for Magnus and hope that we will have been able to plant some seeds that will help him in the future.  It certainly made me reflect on the journey we took 5 1/2 years ago with my daughter, Jenni.  I have always been proud of her ability to put that path behind her and extremely grateful that she dodged a fateful end that so many experience on the addiction path.  It also made me reflect on the great blessing Christ's atonement can be in our life, allowing us to change and overcome and more importantly be forgiven!

Saturday started off with an early morning practice with the youth.  I've been asked to play the piano for a special musical number for a youth program scheduled for April.  They will be singing "Choose Ye This Day" and they pretty much learned it in less than an hour.  I suggested they learn another song, and told them about the EFY Sisters in Zion/Army of Helaman song.  The music director knew of the song and it's Spanish version.  She was all for it, if we could find the music.

Saturday morning, our friend, Betsy Moore, flew into Cusco.  She had been serving a PEF/Self-Reliance mission in Trujillo and had completed her time earlier in the month.  She is doing some traveling around Peru before heading home.  She spent Saturday in Cusco before she headed out to Puno and then to the Camino Inka and MachuPicchu.  We will put her up upon her return next Saturday and she will spend Sunday in Cusco again before heading out to see Arequipa and the Nazca lines.  She will have seen a lot of Peru before she heads back to her home in Arizona.

I let Dave hold down the fort with our work and I took the day off to take Betsy to see Sacsayhuaman, the ruins just outside of the city.  We haven't even visited them yet and we have 9 months so it was fun for me to go.  And it was impressive.  Not like Machu Picchu, but the size of the rocks used were huge!

 The bus let us off up the road from the ruins, but we found these on our walk down the mountain.

The first section of the ruins we visited were these caves that showed carved spaces in them.  It worked out well because it started to rain about then and we just stayed in there until it mostly let up.

 We didn't pay for a tour guide, so I don't know for sure, but my guess is that this area was used for burial purposes.

Sacsayhuaman, was an Inca fortress before the Spaniards conquered the Inca empire.  The Spaniards then used the already cut stones in the construction of their homes and buildings in Cusco so that not much is left at the site except for the stones too large to move.  Apparently, these ruins boost some of the largest, if not largest, sized rocks in all the Inca ruins.  Pictures of those to come.

Next we visited the area where you could see where rock had been hewn out.

This area was located on a higher part of the ruins.  From there we had a great view of the impressive walls that still stand with the large rocks.

The following 3 photos are looking from right to left.  You can see the city of Cusco in the background on each side.

 Betsy taking in the panoramic scene.  It really is quite beautiful and impressive.  Not on the Machu Picchu scale, but still impressive and to think it is a 20 minute bus ride from Cusco!

We then walked down this flight of stairs to the center open space 

and you would not believe how close we could get to the llamas that were grazing there.  This photo was not taken with a zoom lens.

 Then we got up close to the massive stones left on the walls.

 This one above is the largest we found in our exploring.  It was impressive to see the rounded walls as well.

To get a good idea of the height of the stones, I had Betsy, who is over 6 feet tall stand in front of one of the large rocks.  Here is what it looked like.

We actually found a way to walk down from the ruins into Cusco.  Going down the mountain wasn't bad.  Walking up to the ruins would have been extremely strenuous.

We visited San Pedro market and she loved that place.  I bought some fresh figs and oh, they were good.

We headed out to one of our workshops to make sure it got started.  I left Dave there so I could get Betsy Moore to the bus terminal in time to head out to Puno, Lake Titicaca and the floating islands.  She is on a whirlwind tour.  Hopefully, she has the energy and stamina to handle everything.  She didn't seem to have any problems with the altitude Saturday while she was here.  She is amazing!

Spiritual Thought for the Week:  With seeing all these massive rocks that have withstood the test of time it seems appropriate to post the following scripture as our spiritual thought for the week.  Helaman 5:12 -  "And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall."