Well, maybe we can’t completely say goodbye to our suitcases, but we did decide on an apartment today! Actually, we decided on two. I mentioned last post about an apartment I liked that won’t be ready for another month. We decided to go for it, but we need a place to stay until then, so we are moving in a furnished apartment tomorrow until our new one is ready. Both apartments are very nice and we feel extremely blessed and grateful to have found them! We had a full but good day again today with more apartment shopping, contract signings for our teammates, negotiating, and even some furniture and home decor shopping. Peruvians like to take long lunches (with a nice siesta at the end!) so today in the midst of all our errands we stopped at a great Brazilian-style rodizio restaurant. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of restaurant, they give you a little block of wood or card at the beginning of the meal that is green on one side and red on the other. They come around with different kinds of meat on swords and they slice you off pieces of it until you switch to the red side. Also with the meal came a good salad bar, cheesey bread and other appetizers, and ice cream for dessert. All for around $10 a plate-and that’s expensive compared to most meals here!
We may be without internet for a few days until we get set up in our new place, so I thought I’d go ahead and do a quick post with some pictures until then. By the way, our apartment looks over a field with sheep and chickens-Cole was loving them earlier today when we went by for negotiations!
We have been so blessed by all the help we have received in the settlement process. Ron and Georgia Freitas, from Continent of Great Cities, are here with us for a total of 3 weeks to help with a myriad of things, including documentation, apartment searching, furniture and appliance purchases, car shopping, etc. In addition to their help, several church members here have given us a lot of their time and energy. One of them I mentioned in an earlier post, Maria Ysabel, has been a real blessing. She has been with us all day everyday since we arrived searching diligently for apartments, helping us find a good cell phone plan, setting up a post office box, and many other things, including making us a wonderful Peruvian lunch yesterday. The main dish was causa. The filling was similar to chicken salad with some potatoes (kind of like mashed potatoes) surrounding it casserole-style. It was garnished with Peruvian olives and it was delicious. She also made some great soup and then for dessert we had mangos and vanilla yogurt. I am a very picky eater so God was really looking out for me when he sent me to Peru! The food here is so yummy. It was a nice break to go to her home for a meal because all of our other meals have been in restaurants, which is nice, but a little tough with an 8-month old! So far Cole has knocked over everything from bread bowls to soup bowls (luckily he didn’t spill any soup on himself-just on his parents)! We’ll be glad to get back to eating at home with Cole in his highchair. All the kids on the team have been real troopers so far with the settlement process, especially considering that they have to ride on a van for the majority of the day! Logan has kept us entertained with his singing on the van. I think we’ve heard the theme song from “Speed Racer” about 500 times!
We have been really blessed in our apartment search so far. Matt and Charla and Gary and Jenn will soon be closing on their apartments, and we are fairly certain that we found our apartment today. I never thought it would go so quickly! We’re going out once more in the morning to be sure we don’t see a better apartment, but I feel really good about the one we saw today. I’ll be sure to post pictures when we decide for sure. The one downfall to the one we like is that it is very new and it won’t be finished for about a month. But, we may try to find a furnished apartment in the meantime (we’ve seen several) and rent it short-term until ours is finished. We also got a post office box and cell phones today. While we were shopping for cell phones, a parade of school children crossed down the street in their colorful costumes. Cusco is very big on parades-I think we’ve already seen about 3 in the short time we’ve been here! Tomorrow is another very full day, but hopefully we’ll get a lot accomplished. From what I hear, it’s very unusual to make progress as fast as we’ve been able to make it in South America. I know a lot of folks back home must really be praying for us.
The pictures below are from the past few days. Sunday we worshipped with the local congregation here, and they hung up the signs they brought with them to the airport. We have already made some great friends here!
Just as many of you back home celebrated Halloween, we were able to do the same here in Peru! There are a few differences, but Peruvians celebrate in a very similar manner to Americans, with trick or treating and costumes and candy. Cole has a cute little dinosaur sleeper/costume so he wore it Saturday and he was a huge hit! The Peruvian children were so excited to see a little gringo baby dressed up and they were all talking to him and giving him candy (although he’s too young to eat it-but I didn’t want to burst their bubbles so I took it anyway)! They do a lot of candy exchange amongst each other so I was able to give Cole’s candy away to some cute kids in the big plaza downtown. We went down to the plaza after supper for some coffee and dessert and we knew it would probably be a big celebration, but it was even bigger than I had imagined. There were literally thousands of people crowded around and a marching band went through playing music. It was really fun. And everyone wanted to get their picture made with Cole! It was so funny!
Our search for apartments is going well. We saw several promising ones earlier today and we may make an offer soon. We’ll go out again tomorrow so we’ll probably wait a little longer to make a decision, but the good apartments get snatched up really fast so we are trying not to wait too long. The problem is that we all like the same apartments so it is going to be hard to decide who gets which one! Hopefully soon each of us will find our ideal place and it won’t be the same as the ideal place for our teammates. Otherwise we’re going to have to draw straws! The process for finding apartments is a little different because they don’t use real estate agents here. You just go directly through the owner. Luckily one of the ladies from the church has been helping us and taking us around to all the different places. Another of our friends at the church has offered to help with negotiations and closing and also to check the quality of the apartments to be sure we’re getting a good place. It’s such a blessing to come here with so many friends willing to help!
We had a wonderful welcome at the airport today in Cusco! We were so excited to finally arrive (again, with all of our luggage!) and soon after exiting the plane, we saw the familiar face of Juan Carlos, a friend from the church here in Cusco, in a window along the walkway. He pointed to the right of him and we saw a large group of church members holding signs up and cheering for our arrival! It was a very heartwarming moment. We proceeded to baggage claim, and after getting our luggage outside, we talked for a few minutes with all those who came to greet us. Just before we left on the bus to our hotel, a lady came by with Peruvian hats (chullos) for each of us-even Logan, Brody, and Cole! They said we needed chullos since we were now true Cusqueños! Another example of the warm Peruvian hospitality we have found here. This whole process of moving internationally has been challenging and frustrating at times, but moments like this make it all worthwhile. The church members here are so happy to have fellow workers come and join them and they are already showing us a huge outpouring of love. Tomorrow morning one of the church members, Maria Ysabel, will take us out for our first look at housing for a few hours.
Below are a few more pictures from our travels today. I never want to go through an airport with this much luggage again (and I wasn’t even the one who had to carry it all)!
We’ve had a great week in Lima. It’s been such a huge blessing to have a team here who has already gone through the settlement process in Peru and who can help us navigate through everything much quicker and easier than we would have ever been able to do on our own. It’s also nice to meet the team and make friends and missionary contacts in another part of Peru. We finished everything up a little earlier than we had planned, so after a meeting with a shipping company here who will help us get our container through customs, we were able to do a little sightseeing. We ate lunch at a neat little pizzeria and afterwards we all took a tour of Lima on a double-decker bus. We saw an archeological site, several parks with some beautiful landscaping, and even some hangliders floating off skyscrapers near the coast and down to the beach. After that we had some coffee (or hot chocolate for the non-coffee drinkers) and desserts at a cafe and then came back to the hotel for a bit before going out to eat tonight with the Lima team. We met them at Chile’s (yes, the same Chile’s that we have in the states) and got to spend a lot of time getting to know them. We’ve enjoyed our time here but we’re very excited to be moving on to Cusco tomorrow to begin the fun part of the settlement process-picking out our new homes! All of us have been moving around a lot this year and we are more than ready to finally have a place to call home for more than a few months.
Also, in Cole news, he stood up on his own (without holding on to anything) for a few seconds at a time this week! Crazy!
Well, we are finally here! We arrived at our hotel in Lima last night at around 2:00 a.m. and we made it with all of our luggage, which we are very thankful for. We got to relax some today and we all took a long “siesta” this afternoon, so we are somewhat recovered from the traveling. We are staying at a hotel in a nice neighborhood near the coast in Lima called Miraflores, and it’s within walking distance to a very nice mall with lots of great restaurants and shops. This morning the guys met with a lawyer who is going to take care of our documentation and visas, and the meeting went very well. I think he’ll be very helpful to us. We were excited to eat some good Peruvian food when we got here, so this afternoon we found a place with a good buffet where we could try out a lot of things and we had a very yummy lunch. Tonight we returned to Larcomar (the mall) and walked around some and ate at the food court, then had some gelato for dessert. Tomorrow morning we’re all making a trip to Interpol to do background checks that we need to obtain our visas.
I had really been dreading yesterday since it would be a long day of traveling and saying some tough goodbyes, but it went much better than expected. A lot of our family members were able to go with us to the airport in Huntsville and spend some time with us before we left, and overall it was a very happy occasion, and it was great to be able to spend time with everyone. And although Delta really loaded us down with baggage charges, everything arrived safely and our flights went pretty smoothly. We sat behind the Reaves family on the way down, and Cole enjoyed watching Logan and Brody during the flight. All three kids have done exceptionally well so far, and we’re all thankful that they’re such good travelers. The Reaves family and the Cook family left from Memphis yesterday, Ron and Georgia Freitas left from Dallas, and we all met up in Atlanta and flew down together to Lima. The flight is around 6 hours, so it wasn’t too bad, especially since the time doesn’t change for us. Ron and Georgia work with Continent of Great Cities and they’re here with us for the next couple of weeks to help us settle in, which is a great help to us.
Thanks to all who have been praying for us. I know our safe and relatively easy journey yesterday was the result of a lot of caring people remembering us in their prayers. We feel extremely blessed!
We’re packing and leaving for Peru Monday. This is the last newsletter from the States. We’re excited, nervous, anxious, and tired. Please keep us in your prayers. Thanks for your support and enjoy the newsletter. Click the full screen button at the top of the viewer’s toolbar to get a better look at the newsletter
This time next week we will be on our flight to Peru! We breathed a giant sigh of relief today as we loaded our stuff on the shipping container after spending many, many hours in preparation! We still have a busy week ahead of us, but it feels good to have that part of the move over with. We also were able to spend some time with our teammates afterwards which was a lot of fun. Thanks so much to all the great helpers from Memorial Parkway who helped us load and especially to my parents who have spent many long hours helping us pack and label everything!
Below are some pictures from the day. The driver of the truck had a little puppy on board with him and he let the kids play with him while everyone packed. We had some great weather for packing, although it was a little chilly.
If I were to make a list of pros and cons of doing mission work, packing and preparing for an international move would definitely be in the cons list. However, I try to find a silver lining in things like this, and the silver lining here is that I think my organizational skills have improved a bit by doing all of this! For those of you unfamiliar with the process, here’s what we’re doing. Monday morning a 20 ft. container will arrive at out home in Huntsville on a moving truck. Our teammates will join us, along with their boxes of stuff, to load the container that we are sharing. We have two hours to load everything, and after that point, they charge us about $100 per hour, so we are soliciting help from our friends in town to try to get everything loaded quickly. The truck will then go to a port (I think maybe in Savannah) and from there the container will travel by boat to Lima, Peru (the capital). It will have to go through customs in Lima, so for that reason and for insurance purposes, we are making a detailed inventory to go along with each box with a price value estimate for each box just in case any damages occur. From Lima, it will travel by truck through the Andes mountains and into Cusco, where we are having it shipped to the home of one of our friends who lives there (since we don’t have our new house or apartment address yet). The time estimate for all of this to take place, according to the shipping company, is around a month. However, I have heard stories from other missionary friends we have that indicate that it will take much longer, so I am not getting my hopes up too much to have everything there before Christmas. But, whenever it does finally arrive, I’m sure it will feel like Christmas! It’s a big hassle, but I think it will be worth it just to have some things there to make us feel at home. We’ve talked to many of our friends who are missionaries to try to come up with a list of what to bring, and then as time has gone on and we’ve moved our things back and forth several times, several things have been taken off or added to the list. Please pray that our belongings will arrive safely (and quickly) to our new home in Cusco. I know this isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it will help us with homesickness, so for that reason, it’s important to us. : )
We’re here in Orange Beach, AL this week with my family for one last vacation before we leave for Cusco (in less than 3 weeks!). It’s been a fun week so far. We shared a condo with my parents, and my sister Ashley and her husband. We’ve eaten a lot of good seafood and it’s been a relaxing week. Cole is a little afraid of the ocean, so most of his encounters with water this week have been in the heated indoor pool. He really likes to kick around in the water in his little float, and of course he is a big fan of splashing in the water. He also got his first and second teeth this week. We tried to get a picture of that as well, but so far it’s been tough to get him to show off his new chompers.
We’re returning on Saturday to Huntsville and then Sunday we’ll be traveling to Birmingham to meet our new nephew, Jack! Barton’s brother Drew and his wife Julie just adopted a precious little boy, Jackson Andrew. I’ve posted a few pictures of him as well.
