Peru Day 2

Day 2: After spending the night in a hotel in Lima, we left early in the morning to go back to the airport.  From Lima, we flew to a city of about 350,000 people called Pucallpa.  Pucallpa is about a 1 hour flight over the Andes Mountains and into the jungle close to the border of Brazil.  As soon as we arrived in Pucallpa, we all hopped into 2 four-wheel drive trucks and began an 11 hour drive south through the jungle to a small town called Puerto Bermudez.  Along the way, we stopped in a couple small towns for lunch and dinner, as well as a couple of other times due to one of the trucks breaking down and having to take small detours.

The drive, though extremely long and bumpy (not a good combo for people who get motion sickness), was very valuable to our team.  It gave us all an opportunity to begin getting acclimated to slowly being more and more out in the middle of “nowhere.”  There’s not a whole lot to do during an 11 hour drive, except look at the scenery and sleep.  Considering the conditions of the “roads” we were driving on, sleeping was kind of hard to do.  It’s a pretty surreal experience to be in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

At this point in the trip, there are a whole lot of uncertainties of what will happen in the next few days.  We got word this morning that the mayor of Puerto Bermudez was arrested yesterday.  The mayor happens to be Asheninka (that is the people group we will be working with all week).  So, the rumor is that all of the Asheninkas from the villages in the area will be making their way to Puerto Bermudez to dispute the arrest. Will it be a peaceful dispute?  Better yet, will the people from the village we are planning on going to (Madre De Dios) even be there when we get to their village, or will they have left to come to Puerto Bermudez as well?  As a team, we are trusting that God will show us the way, protect us, and give us the perfect opportunities to share with just the right people.

~ by Austin W. on May 22, 2009.