El Fin, Por Fin

We be done. We arrived in Lima at about 3pm today. We have a 2.5-day Debriefing thingy at a camp near Lima, then I hang out in Lima for a few days, then I fly home the night of the 31st. My last blog post told of Lampa. The afternoon after my last post, I had a perfect opportunity to talk to a 9 yr old girl about Christ. The girl, Ayde, lives at the hostel we stayed at in Lampa. We were there for a few days, and I made an effort to get to know Ayde early on. She was kinda shy, but we became friends. I got to know all of the people living and working at the hostel: Ayde, Señora Julia, Zefarin, Anni, and Señor Mendez. The day before we left, I got a perfect opportunity to talk to Ayde in the afternoon. She and I were the only ones out in the little courtyard at the time. I got one of my children's Bibles, got her to quit cleaning for a minute, and we sat down and read some stories. She didn't accept Christ that day, but she listened very intently and we had a good talk. She is growing up in a Christian environment and I'm sure she will continue to read the kid's Bible I gave her. We left Lampa the next day, and I had a hard time saying goodbye to the whole family. I built good relationships with them and they didn't want me to leave either. We made it all the way to Nuñoa the same day we left Lampa, after a combi ride, bus ride, and truck ride. We found the Nuñoa team and spent our days doing whatever we could. We did our skits at a church, did puppets for children's church, and performed at a private school. We weren't able to go to other schools because the public schools are still striking. We played soccer with kids in the afternoons. Honestly, we were ready to leave Nuñoa ASAP. The people there all have staring problems. EVERYONE stares at the Gringos as we pass by, and the kids always say stuff and laugh at us. It got super-irritating really fast. We got to know some of the kids, but most of them just tried our patience. We left Nuñoa Monday at 12:45pm. We stopped in Ayaviri and Juliaca and changed vehicles before finally ending up in Puno. We stayed the night in Puno and visited Lake Titicaca on Tues morning. Titicaca is the highest elevation navegable lake in the world. On it are "floating islands," which amount to a big tourist trap. We boated out to some actual floating islands, all with nothing but little huts on them, and women selling souvenirs. We stayed out there for a couple of hours, bought some cool tapestries, and boated back. We had to get out of Puno and head back to Juliaca ASAP so that we wouldn't miss our 4:30pm bus ride. We at lunch in Juliaca and finally boarded the bus at about 5:10pm. The bus was supposedly gonna arrive in Lima at noon the next day, Wed. We stopped in Arequipa for about 45 mins at 10pm that night, but we otherwise didn't stop during the whole trip. We went all through the night and finally got into Lima at 2:40pm today, Wed. The total length of ride: 21.5 hours. Fun, fun. We crammed into a taxi and moved into a hostel as quickly as we could. We all took showers for the first time in days. For me, first time in 10 days. We ate at Friday's (yes, the same Friday's) and loved every bite of it. Tomorrow, we chill in Lima and then head to the camp for debriefing. It's nice to be back in true civilization and not be stared at for being a Gringo. A lot of my time left here will be spent shopping for myself and others. If anyone has a request/idea for a present, PLEASE write it to me in a comment or something.

Revelation 17:4-6