We just heard about your February gift of $500 to our ministry here in Peru. Thank you!
A friend is headed to the U.S. today and so we are jumping on the opportunity to send you mail. As you know, we work with teams. This year we will travel with nine of them and assist others such as the team Randy Ross will lead to Huanta in July. It was really good to see him here on his brief visit in March too! We are placing volunteers in several new locations this year. We'll be in the U.S. for five month this fall and winter. As you can tell, it will be a full year.
We thought life would be slower in the sunny summer months so I signed up for Quechua language classes. Many of our partner churches have members whose first (and only) language is this ancient Inkan dialect. It has been really interesting to see how language study has opened the culture to new understandings of these people who have been our partners for 6 years now.
Our dream of a long slow summer (January to March) with beach days never really came to fruition. We had a lot of visitors, and we finished many chores on the "to do" list. We also attended the General Assemblies of both of our partners denominations and caught up on all their news.
Now we are readying for eight teams in ten weeks. Six of them are new to Peru and several of the locations where there will work have never received teams. Everything is new! The logistics are a huge exciting challenge. But this is our work; to be a bridge between PC(USA) churches and their Peruvian partner churches. We help both sides to new understandings across the gaps caused by different business, church & work cultures. Add to that barriers caused by four languages and native cultures and it gives you some idea of why we love the challenges.
We enjoyed our last visit with the church. We'll be back in the U.S. on interpretation mid August. We plan to be on the east coast through the end of September. We'll be visiting Charlotte so let us know if there is a possibility of visiting you. We are just starting to plan our trip now.
Thank you all again for helping me in this challenging work. You make it possible for so many Christians to work in new and unexpected ways, establishing the kingdom of God.
Saludos Fraternales de Sara Armstrong y Rusty Edmondson
dos_zapatos@yahoo.com
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