Meeting Victoria

One of the hardest things about living overseas is missing our friends and family, one of the highlights of our home assignment is spending time with loved ones and today was really wonderful since it was the first time that Anjanette Jess and Sam met the newest addition to the Williamson family. Victoria is Jacqueline's (Scott's sister) daughter she was born about 6 months after we moved to Peru so today it was great to finally meet our cousin/niece. Congratulations Ian and Jacqueline she is absolutely delightful!

Chat to Cusco

What a blessing skype is! It was brilliant today to have a long chat with dear friends from our church in Cusco,to talk to each one individually and see their faces on the computer screen. A few months ago Anjanette invited one of her patients from the clinic to attend our church, how wonderful that in recent weeks since we have been on home assignment in the UK that she and her large family have started attending our church and it was great to chat with her today on skype along with the rest of the church.
Seeing our church family in Cusco reminds us how much we love them and miss them , this weekend we will restart our busy schedule visiting UK churches and talking about the work we are doing in Peru. It is encouraging and exciting meeting folk in our supporting churches and to have opportunities to share about our work but a large part of us is eager to get back to Cusco soon.

Family Nativity

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad! We had a lot of fun re enacting the nativity story with the family, in the middle of all the laughing and fun we remembered that we are truly grateful that Lord Jesus was born for us at CHRISTmas.

Santa's steam train

Many thanks to our Leicester link up group who paid for us all to have a train ride and meet Santa on the special Leicestershire steam train today, what a treat, the views of the snowy countryside were spectacular! The kids had Christmas crackers presents and snacks and the grown ups enjoyed sherry and hot mince pies!

Jingle Bells

Jessica and Samuel sing and play for you "Jingle Bells!"

christmas music from Jess and Anjanette !

Merry Christmas!

Enjoying being tourists

We are having a well earned break after 6 weeks of visiting and speaking at our churches and have been braving the cold and seeing the sights this week; the changing of the guards at Buckingham palace, a family trip to the theatre , some dear friends took Jess and Sam on the London eye and looked after them for the day whilst we experienced a real treat and enjoyed a day trip to Paris, what fun! and what a huge privilege to travel and see such amazing places.

Count down to Christmas!

As we prepare to celebrate Christmas and more importantly as we look forward to Christ's return it has been great to teach Jess and Sam about the season of advent.

They are enjoying their advent chocolate calendar, tearing off a paper chain each day, reading the Christmas story, burning their daily advent candle, we are teaching them Christmas carols and there's a lot of carol recorder playing going on at the moment too!

Huambutio Clinic

One of our dreams before we even moved to Peru was to establish a joint clinic/church plant in a poor needy area.
Well after consultation with folk from La Fuente clinic in San Jeronimo Cusco, more recently our bosses in BMS World Mission and a sense that God is clearly leading us to start this project , we are excited that we have had approval from BMS to start a clinic/church in Huambutio.
Huambutio is a poor village in the countryside a short drive outside Cusco, we have some church members from there who have a heart to serve the community there , the community and surrounding villages have no health care facility and are asking for a clinic . We are really excited about the opportunity to bless this community and to be involved in health, a church plant and education in the village.
Now to get to this point there has been a slight change of plan, you will recall that we were so involved with the community in Yucay with our relief work after the floods that we did consider that possibility of starting a clinic/church in Yucay. Two big problems with that would be the distance for us to travel to Yucay from Cusco and the cost of renting/buying land in the sacred valley, ultimately it was felt that we would possibly risk burning ourselves out trying to run such a project as well as our work in Cusco and that to effectively church plant we should live close to the community in Yucay, so imagine our joy when a decision was made for BMS to send a new church planting couple (currently in training at IMC) to look at the possibility of starting a church in Yucay, this is a huge answer to prayer for us and frees us up to concentrate on the work in Huambutio.
You may remember that last Christmas we held a chocolotada in Huambutio and always had intentions to focus some outreach work there, how wonderful that these dreams are coming to fruition. The intention is that the Huambutio clinic will be a branch clinic from La Fuente in San Jeronimo and that we will seek to find and train lay folk in the community to be health promoters for the villages so that the project will one day become sustainable by locals .