Day One in Alto Cayma

Our first day in the community of Alto Cayma has been a mix of meetings and projects. The experience of being back in this community has been so exciting. It is amazing how many things have changed . . . and yet, how much has remained the same.

Our team has been split into a number of different groups. Some people are working on special projects like helping to build a sacristy for the Church. While others have been involved in the day-to-day routine of the community and the operations of the Mission.

These "day-to-day" operations include helping with the feeding program (on any given day about 800 people receive food from the Mission), working in the day care center (80 children are enrolled in a morning pre-school and an afternoon day care center; this allows very poor parents to leave their children in a safe and secure location while they seek work), accompanying the Mission's social worker on house visits to the community (every morning and every afternoon Maria, the Mission social worker, conducts visits to the poorest of the poor in this community of over 30,000 people), and working with the Peruvian healthcare team in the "brick-and-mortar" clinic.

This evening during the team meeting I asked a few people to share their first day experiences in Alto Cayma. One young man on the team told our group a very powerful story. He said that he had accompanied Maria to the home of a elderly woman. The "home" was really nothing more than a single brick wall with three thatched and woven mats. He said that the woman had recently undergone surgery for an undisclosed cancer. She lived alone, her husband had long since left her for another woman, and had little to no resources to attend to her basic needs.

He told the group how "painful" it was to listen to this woman tell her story - a story of life long suffering and continued struggle. He said that at one point the woman told him that the only thing she wanted in life was to be able to die in a "proper" home.

Listening to him tell the story, it was obvious how great the impact this home visit had been. Later in the evening I over heard our team member talking to other group members. He was telling them that he has, for most of his life, considered himself a "firm agnostic;" but the experience he had early in the day really pressed him. He said that at one point during the home visit he felt that there was nothing he could offer the woman. He felt that the plight of her life would not be dramatically changed by anything that he could do. He said that in this realization, a realization that the complexity of need in the world is almost beyond comprehension, he felt the only thing he could offer was prayer.

Our work in Peru is a slow and steady progression. I wish I could say that we were changing the lives of thousands of people - but I am not sure if there is any truth in that statement. I can, however, say that we are having a life altering effect on the people that join our teams. I can say that small, challenging experiences are making a huge difference in the lives of the Team Peru members.