Trip with the Bishop

Well our trip to the mountains with the bishop of Chulucanas, turned out to be alot more than we expected! It was really great. We left Monday around 130pm and went straight east, right into the mountains. It was a pretty eventful ride up! We passed every kind of wild farm animal imaginable, and had to wait for them all to get out of the road! The mountains were gorgeous! The first hour and a half or so of the trip was on a paved road the last 4 hours were on an extremely windy dirt road. It was incredible! The windshields needed to be on because we were driving in the clouds! We drove forever in the clouds and then suddenly they disappeared! We had crossed the Continental Divide! It was so beautiful! We rose to about 10,500 feet, about 2 miles high. We didn't see any llamas but plenty of mountain goats, donkeys, wild horses, piglets!, cows, bulls, and plenty of mountain people! It was a really great ride, besides a little car sickness...

Once we were there we had a nice dinner at the parish house, which included wild chicken! It was amazing! Completely different from any other kind of chicken we've ever had. Then we were shown the house that we were to have all to ourselves! It was tiny and so cute! Kitchen, bathroom, dinning room, and 2 bedrooms that all fit into the size of a good sized master bed room back in the states! We loved it! Then we went out to the plaza (town central square) and watched some traditional Peruvian celebrations! They were celebrating 25 years of a specific Franciscan order of nuns' presence in the town.

The town was tiny! About 1400 people lived there! When we woke up the next morning and headed to the convent for breakfast people really started to stare. All of them had black hair and have dark skin and in such a small remote town, we stood out a lot. Literally people stopped what they were doing just to stare at us for as long as they could. After breakfast we walked around the town a little before the celebration Mass, and again we felt like celebrities because of the way people stared. When it was time for Mass and we entered the church, everyone sitting turned and stared at us. Then they would whisper and tell their friends to look! Besides the awkwardness, the Mass was very nice! And afterwards we went briefly to a celebration in the hall, before eating lunch and getting back on the road. We tried to sleep on the way back, to avoid getting sick and it worked!

But it was back to work the next morning! Thank you so much to all of you who contributed to our efforts here. We are now able to take out the money and can really get going on everything now! Keep us in your prayers.

-Andrea and Kelli