Week 2

This week we started to get into the swing of things around here. The first 3 days of the week I (Brett) finished building the church at 17 de septiembre where the medical clinic and the new location of the travel team will be for the next 7 weeks. Building is quite fun, chatting with the peruvians and joking around. However, the sun is scorching hot and the humidity here is absolutely ridiculous. You sweat so much water out of your skin, you wouldn´t even believe it. I drink close to a gallon of water a day and pee literally only once a day in the mornings.

Julie is going to be staying with the travel team at 17 de septiembre and teach a Vacation Bible School thing to different age groups everyweek. This first week that begins tomorrow, her and her partner Michael will have over a 100 kids to handle. I feel no sympathy though, haha. This group of kids is going to be from the ages of 5 to 8. It's going to be pretty amusing with Julie's limited amount of spanish. At least her partner speaks spanish so that'll be nice help. Julie and the other members of the travel team are living now in the church that we built for the area. Julie has a pretty sweet set up in the corner with her hammock and sheet hanging, she pretty much has her own room there while everyone else is in tents. Apparently she can hammer pretty well, at least that´s what she says. She made herself some shelves for the her clothes and nailed up some racks for towells and clothes.

On thursday, I hit the fields pretty hard at the base in 38. Man, that work is so terribly hard. There were two teams of us. On Thursday my team went to work on the fence. We're building a fence that encircles our entire base. I didn´t realize it, but our property is 3 and half kilometers long. And we have to put in fence posts and barbed wire around this entire property. And that was even the easy day! On Friday it was my turn to clean the lemon trees. This job is absolutely the worst job I've ever heard of. I had to take a machete and hack a 2 meter cirle around each lemon tree down the dirt. These trees are in the middle of the jungle surrounded by tons of plants, and grass, and weeds. It was so hot and humid, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Luckily the two peruvians i work with are pretty chill and are down to take many breaks and just chat about life. However, we have the next two months to completely finish the fence and clear all the lemon trees, so...that´ll be fun.

I am now in charge of running the sabbath school for the teenagers at the church I attend and will be preaching next weeks sermon. I will be teaching an english class every Monday and Wednesday night as well as doing a vespers every Friday night. I will be kept very busy here, but it has been a lot of fun so far. All of the peruvian workers are really fun to hang out with and it's good practice for my spanish. I seem to be picking up the way they speak quite rapidly. The peruvians have a very distinct singsong way of speaking and I've noticed myself starting to do that as well when I'm talking, haha. So...we'll see how I sound in 4 months.

Julie went into the selva on Tuesday with a couple of local kids to look for fruit. She went in with only shorts and a tanktop, not good planning. She came back with some pretty gnarly rashes and had to take some shots and pills before she literally scratched her skin off. The rashes looked pretty bad and she was definitely uncomfortable for a couple of days. I got to give her her last shot and did pretty well. It was not that hard though.

Julie came back the base friday afternoon to do some planning for her vacation bible school, but she didn't do any of course. We just hung out in the hammock and read a litttle. The weekends here are pretty relaxing and they go by pretty slowly. It´s nice to be able to see Julie once a week at least, I´m glad she´s not too far. We both got cell phones and can receieve phone calls for free at anytime, so if anyone wants to call or text us. Julie´s numbers is 0051061961549625 and mine is the same with a 4 substituted as the last number. It´s been fun so far, Julie is learning spanish very quickly and hopefully she´ll keep learning at this rapid rate. She'll be forced to learn with a 100 kids talking to her all at once. Julie's nickname is barbie, and mine is pollogordito (chubby chicken) for some reason. Not really sure what they're talking about.