Well we are back in Iquitos and it feels like a week or two, not two months, since we were here. The last two months have been nothing like I expected and my world has definitely been rocked! My perspective and views on many things have been stretched and challenged. In this blog, though, I am only going to talk about our trip and in a later blog I will review my personal and spiritual experiences.
Over the course of the last two months our team traveled to 9 or 10 different villages along the Amazon and Ucayali (spelling?) river. In each village we partnered with some local churches and did children´s and youth ministries, prison ministries, preached and gave testimonies at services, and led worship. We also did some door-to-door outreach and physical labor such as cutting acres of grass with machettes and putting a new roof on a church. We played soccer with the villagers and communicated as best as we could with our spanglish.
We traveled everywhere by boat (a barge which tripled it max capacity and a large motorized canoe which took on water) and slept in hammocks or on the ground in schools and locals´ houses. Being in Iquitos feels so different from the jungle villages simply because I have a bed to sleep in and a motocar (basically a taxi-motorcycle) to ride around in. We took bucket showers or bathed in the river every few days and we all got really good at wearing clothes multiple times before being washed. As for food, we had rice 2 or 3 meals a day along with chicken and bread. Potatoes and beans were a luxury and it was always a great day when we were served these. Needless to say, my jar of peanut butter and granola bars that I brought lasted only about a week.
We were able to see lots of wildlife including caiman, various jungle rodents, many kinds of snakes, a sloth, birds, pink dolphins, sting rays, many kinds of beetles and insects, and the list goes on. The bugs here were definitely not as bad as I expected, but the insects in the amazon are America´s insect on steroids. The last two months were filled with adventures, spiritual highs and lows, and fellowship with locals. I definitely feel as if I have assimilated to Peruvian culture and way of life and the transition back to the states is going to be tough. I have gone through and experienced so much in this country and it is going to be hard to leave. I hope sometime in the future I will be able to revisit this place.
