Ayacucho Approach And Landing

Never Completely Home...

Dear 2014 Perú Mission Trip Team:

Last Friday, July 25, 2014, I was on a flight from Minneapolis to Charlotte, my thirteenth (13th) airplane ride since June 29, 2014! During the flight, I had an opportunity to catch up on some of the mail that had found its way to my home during our time together in Perú.

One of the letters I received was from Nancy Dimmock, a Presbyterian Church (USA) mission worker who has recently returned with her family from the mission field after many, many years of dedicated and faithful service on the African continent. The Dimmock family is the most inspiring family I have ever met.

In her letter, Nancy shared her thoughts about the most recent (albeit short) chapter in her life in Zambia and saying “farewell to deep friendships, a continent, a way of life, home.” Nancy also shared the following quote that someone had sent her. The quote is attributed to Miriam Adeney.

“You will never be completely home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

I couldn't help but think about not being completely home from Perú. We shared some very special moments during our time there: the love, fellowship and food shared in the kitchen and around the table of the Bellido family; the warm and enthusiastic welcome we received from the congregations of the churches we visited; and the food, friendship and music shared in the home of the Montes family.

Ms. Adeney’s quote rings so true for me.

Thank you for your participation in and contributions to the trip and the personal sacrifices that you and your families made to enable you to love and know people in Perú. I hope the trip was both meaningful and inspiring. Please know that each of you is loved by so many of the people we encountered there.

I quote MJ Shetron’s recent and insightful statement, “God was showing off when he created Perú.”

Indeed He was.

Randy

Peruvian City Of Ayacucho Remains A Museum Of Memory And Sorrow

An Andean Woman Looks For The Coffin Of A Relative

Resource:  The Star

By Oakland Ross

Published 2/10/13

A colonial gem, Ayacucho remembers its long years of suffering, when the terrorist insurgents of Shining Path haunted the Andean region.

They say the past is a distant land and people are different there.

But Adelina Garcia Mendoza recalls the events of Dec. 1, 1983, as if they were part of a film that’s unreeling still, as if she were the same woman she was then — a young wife and mother, just as helpless, just as afraid.

“I remember it all as if it were a moment ago,” she says.

Those were terrible times, the long, dark years of the 1980s and early ’90s, when this handsome colonial town high in the central Andes of Peru was haunted by two murderous forces — an eerie Maoist insurgency known as Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, pitted against the Peruvian police and military.

Now a woman of 50, with her long black hair streaked with filaments of grey and pulled back from her bronze, oval face, Garcia huddles at a small wooden table on the second floor of a building that houses the aptly named Museum of Memory. The structure stands on a street called Liberty in the western reaches of Ayacucho, the city where the Shining Path was born, where it thrived for more than a decade, and where it finally collapsed amid a poisoned legacy of murder, grief and enduring loss.

Just now, Garcia is recalling the night three decades ago when Peruvian soldiers in balaclavas burst into the home she shared with her husband and their two infant daughters at 282 Avenida Arenales.

It was after midnight, a curfew was in force, and Garcia and her family were asleep in their beds.

The soldiers seized her spouse of four years, a self-employed welder, aged 27. His name is Jose Zosimo Prado, or at least it was. They muscled him out of the house.

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