Fund Raising

One of the weirdest parts of being here in Peru for me (David) is that we have to rely on donations.  Without the help of family, friends, and churches, none of what we are doing here would be possible.  When we left to come here, we were a long, long way from meeting our cost estimate.  It was a step of faith, and it has been amazing to see how God has provided.  While we've been here, we have experienced some setbacks in our finances.  Living here costs far more than we expected, as we have realized that we can't eat only the orphanage food like we were planning too.  More importantly, our student loans are refusing to behave.  We were planning to defer them due to "economic hardship" or "unemployment," and were informed by the people we talked to at the Department of Education that that wouldn't be a problem.  However, they've now decided that we don't technically qualify for these options, for reasons we won't bore you with.  This means that while we're in Peru, we'll need to pay a bit over $2000 in student loans.  Lucky for us, you have all been incredible in continuing to support us even though we've been off the radar for a while now here in Peru, leaving us only $700 short of meeting our costs.  If you'd like to help, feel free to use the widget on the blog here, to send it to my parent's address (7128 Rolling Hills Dr Hudsonville Mi 49426), or to the David and Courtney Busscher Mission Fund at Hillcrest CRC.  Your donations, care packages, prayers, and encouragement have made our time here possible, and we thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.  -D and C

PS--someone took care of this within 24 hours of us writing this post, which is absolutely amazing.  The minimum amount for our student loans will now be covered, but if you would still like to contribute, we will be sure to put it to good use!

Summer

We’re getting back into the swing of things here at the orphanage.  The official summer schedule has started, which means we’re all busy spending a lot of time with the kids.  Every day, I (David) have tutoring time with the five oldest kids here who are still in school.  During the school year, this normally revolves around completing homework given to them at school, but during the summer, it’s my job to come up with things for them to do.  I’ve decided to put them through the process of researching for and writing an essay.  In their school, it seems like their homework is just to copy and paste answers from Wikipedia, so for this project I’m making them use additional resources.  We have a book series of middle school reading level on important people in history in various fields, and I’m having the kids compare/contrast two people who are in the same field and decide who they think was more important.  Papers are being written about Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Jackson and Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson and John Lennon.  After a week of working an hour a day, we’re still in the research phase, although I’m encouraging them to try and develop a thesis and outline now.

After tutoring, I work with a house’s worth of kids in the garden.  It’s a challenge to find work that I can have a bunch of kids doing at once with minimal supervision, and especially hard to keep the younger ones from destroying things in the process.  It went alright this week, but it’s going to be hard to keep them interested in pulling weeds.  They’re far more likely to pull each other’s hair and start a wrestling match in the middle of my fragile plants.  Speaking of the garden, here are some pictures of what my first nearly five months of work have accomplished.

This is a patch of aji (peppers) and nabo (it's like a mix between white carrot and an onion, and it goes in soup)

These are all little lettuce plants that I transplanted from their germination patch

These are all radishes, except the near-right corner, which has a few lettuce plants that we're ready to transplant

And this is the whole garden

After working in the garden, I have an hour of reading time with the Amigos, the house of older boys.  I’ve decided to read the Chronicles of Narnia aloud to them in Spanish, and they are loving it.  At first I wasn’t sure if they would be interested or pay attention, but now they actually get excited when I walk into their house holding a book (who woulda thought?) and they beg me for just a few minutes more, just a chapter more, just stay here til it’s done, when I try to leave at the end of reading time.  It makes me very happy that they’re so excited to have me read to them, and I hope that this encourages them to read more on their own as well.  We’ll almost be able to read one book a week, so I should be able to finish the series with them this summer (and don’t forget, now is summer).  

In the afternoon, we put on various “classes” for the kids.  I’m in charge of outdoor games, so I spent the afternoons this week playing soccer, jump-roping, soccer, volley-ball, soccer, and sand boarding.  (if you didn’t notice, they’re a bit fond of soccer).  Behind the orphanage there are some pretty steep sand dunes, and I got to take both of the younger houses sand-boarding this week.  It’s a blast watching the 7 and 8 year olds trying to make it down the hill standing up, and only succeeding half the time J.  It was also very fun to play there with the three-year-olds.  They were very scared, but really enjoyed riding down the hill in the arms of us volunteers.  Of course, the hill is steep and sand is difficult to climb, so by the end of the time out there I was walking up the hill carried at least two kids and three boards.  What a workout.  

In the evenings, we have some time to just hang out with the kids.  They’re more calm and tired out by then, so that ends up being the best time for us to have quality conversations with them.  It’s fun to just sit with a bunch of kids in the coolness of the summer evening and talk about their hopes and dreams.  That, or get pranked with a bucket of water and/or a giant group of people waiting to throw you in the air.  Less restful, but fun nonetheless. -D

Brief Update

First, some photos from Christmas celebrations.

 It was cool to see how many groups wanted to come in at Christmastime to give gifts, throw parties, and distribute paneton and hot chocolate!  We wish we could have this sort of outpouring of love all year round!

 Christmastime here is during the summer, so it often includes lots of sunshine and trips to parks and pools! 

We also had the opportunity this Christmastime to travel home to Michigan to see our family and friends!  We were even fortunate enough to see snow our second day in the States!  However, we had a terrible time getting our flights to work so we could arrive home as scheduled.  The evening before we left for home, David checked all of our flights (isn't he great?) but found that one of them had been delayed about 6 hours, which meant that the rest of our flights were adjusted, causing us to have an extra day of travel and arrive home a day late (missing parties and appointments).  He stayed up the rest of the night finding an alternate way home and speaking with various airline representatives, well, if by the "rest of the night" you understand to be until 2:00am, when we had to wake up to get ready and leave for the bus station to catch a bus that would take us north to Chiclayo, from where we would catch a flight to Lima in time for our regularly scheduled Lima-Miami flight. There was a lot of desperate praying going on, but each time we ran into problems, things still worked out in the end.

Since arriving back to the albergue, we have reached a total of 14 volunteers--that's twice as many as we've normally had over my time here!  It's a lot of fun; everyone has a lot of energy, and the kids are getting lots of attention and love. We have loved coming back and seeing all the kids, but we have not loved coming back to all the mosquitoes.  I have 41 mosquito bites right now...forty-one!  I've started a strict regiment of applying bug spray multiple times daily.  We also bought a fan to help keep us cool at night since it gets quite hot here.  Quite a change from Michigan!  -C

Christmas!

Hello people of mostly cold and wintery lands.  To all of you, Christmas is probably almost synonymous with snow and winter.  Here in Peru, however, that is not the case.  In fact, here Christmas marks the beginning of summer vacation!  Courtney and I went out to the beach at Huanchaco last week to soak in the sun and do some Christmas shopping at the same time :-)  It's funny seeing palm trees growing from the ground next to the fake Christmas trees covered in lights.  Courtney and I had a very nice lunch surrounded by Christmas decorations, sand, and sun.

In other news, the kids are getting excited for Christmas.  Various groups have been coming here and having all kinds of fun events for the kids, including giving them presents, which they of course love.  We as volunteers see the kids getting candy, cake, and toys for Christmas, which are all wonderful things, but for Christmas us volunteers have decided to get the kids something more useful.  We're going to replace their old, gross, boring, stained sheets from America covered in dinosaurs, princesses, and other such awesome things.  Sheets for 41 kids, brought from America, aren't exactly cheap.  Each set will end up costing about $20.  We as volunteers are working to raise the money to bless the kids in this way.  If you're interested in donating, you can do so with paypal on the link on the side, or shoot me an email if you want to do it another way.  Chau!

We're here for the KIDS

And of course, last but not least in this crazy slew of overdue posts, we've been playing with and caring for the KIDS!!   I (David) get to interact with lots of different groups of kids each day.  When Bryson is busy or isn’t here (like when is in the US for Thanksgiving right now...), I drive the four special-needs boys to their school in town.  We listen to a radio station that plays popular music, and sometimes American music.  They overplay their most popular songs, so the boys now know some of the songs and most of the choruses.  They have various levels of difficulty in speaking clearly, but we all sing along none the less, at times with excessive head bobbing or even all out dancing.  Sometimes in the mornings I get lucky and Jo needs help with the kinder boys, like today, when I supervised their snack eating while staging epic dinosaur action figure fights.  

Every afternoon at 12:30, I walk over to the school to escort the preschoolers back to the orphanage.  The little preschool girl from the orphanage has quite a bit of trouble talking and is very shy, but now we have our routine where I hold her hand, we walk down the path, and I ask her about her day.  She is very particular about holding my left hand—if I happen to carrying something else in my left hand and I hold out my right hand instead, she gives me an impatient look and stubbornly waits for me to stop this crazy right-hand-holding nonsense and carry things with my right hand instead. 

Then, every afternoon between 2:00 and 5:00, I’m in the library doing individual and then group tutoring, as well as monitoring recreational internet time, for the older boys and girls at the orphanage.  My specific tutorial kids are the older boys, but I help with individual tutoring for a couple of the girls and I monitor internet time for all of them.  

In addition to these normal scheduled times, there are other random needs that come up that the volunteers help with.  Last week, Courtney and I spent a couple hours babysitting the baby girl and the three kinder boys.  It was very fun—long enough to be able to connect with the kids, and short enough for us to not get tired and them to not get bored or naughty.  Here are some pictures from our fun:  -D

The kids love "vueltas," where you pick them up and spin them around.  This picture happened after I started with one kid, then had one in each arm, after which the third felt left out so I just added him to the middle.

So cute...and the kids too ;-D

Courtney made an under the chairs obstacle course/maze that the boys very much enjoyed