Mes del viento

August is the windy month, when Peruvians enjoy flying kites. Thanks to Uncle Stan and Aunty Dina who sent us wonderful good quality kites that took seconds to assemble this year's kite flying experience was completely stress free and very enjoyable! We had great fun flying kites in the sacred valley with our friends today (public holiday) the mountain scenery and blue skies were spectacular!

Learning what it means to be a church family.

spending time with Daniella

We love our church family


celebrating with Claudia


comforting Sylvia


This has been a difficult week for our church, Manuel was the first church member to die and we have been supporting Sylvia at the hospital, the velorium, the funeral and afterwards. We also had a fun celebration as we celebrated Claudia's birthday together, Claudia is from Columbia, we know how it feels to be far from family and friends on your birthday so the whole church had a big party to celebrate with her , the celebrations actually started by singing happy birthday to her at midnight when our church prayer meeting finished!
God is reminding us that church is not somewhere we meet once a week, nor is it just a building, we are journeying together striving to live and worship together and to love each other sacrificially like the new testament church did.
El Puente church is rallying round Sylvia cooking meals, hosting her in our homes and helping her with practical arrangements, she needs to wait 3 months to receive her husband's pension and so meanwhile church family will love her and support her practically.
Our house has become the hub of the church, every day people from church are in and out of our home to share meals with us, to visit, for meetings, music practice or just to pop over play in our garden. This week we have all prayed together, laughed together and wept together, we are delighted that in the midst of all this new people are attending our church, we hope that they too will feel welcomed and loved and find a spiritual home at El Puente.

Cemetery with a view.

We would like to thank you on behalf of our church family and also Sylvia's family for praying for us all following Manuel's death. Sometimes we can tangibly feel the strength of peoples' prayer supporting us and helping us. That has been our experience this week and is certainly the case for poor Sylvia at the moment, it is hard to believe that her husband and also her brother were buried on the same day, the strength that the whole family have shown has been extraordinary! After a church service in Cusco Scott drove the family for 90 minutes then held a small ceremony in their garden in the sacred valley followed by a final farewell in the cemetery. What a beautiful peaceful resting place for dear Manuel, the cemetery is surrounded by snow capped mountains and bright blue skies.

Manuel

Manuel was a faithful member of El Puente, sadly he died this weekend , he loved his God and his family dearly. Please pray for his wife Sylvia and her daughters and grandchildren who are also part of our church .This is the first death we have experienced in our young small church , we pray that the whole church family will be a great support to them and that they will experience God's comforting presence as they grieve.

Fundraising to buy our own church building

Happy birthday Margaret, thankyou for holding a fundraising garden birthday party to help us purchase our own church building in Cusco!



As you saw from the photos of our church anniversary celebration last week , when we have special events and visitors El Puente is bursting at the seams and people were standing in the doorway and in the street! Our small church space can comfortably sit about 40 people (we had about 75 at the anniversary celebration), however we do not have a suitable space for the childrens' Sunday school activities so at the moment the children meet and have their class in the homes of the missionaries who currently live close to the church, this is just a short term solution to our space problem.

More importanty the rent in the middle class area of Cusco where we work is expensive , it is covered by some of our supporters for which we are very grateful, but in the long term we need the church to be sustainable without the expats leading the church and also paying the rent , so we are saving up to buy our own church building.

Our small church in Cusco will be thinking up creative ways to make some money but we are also seeking some help from our supporters in the UK to meet this cost. (It will be at least £100,000 for a small one storey apartment.) We have already received some generous donations from some wonderful churches and individuals and currently we have raised about a third of the money we need. BMS World Mission have established a special project fund for this purpose and money can be sent directly to BMS earmarked for the Cusco church building project.

We are able to live and work here in Peru because churches and individuals give money to BMS for which we say a HUGE THANKYOU, we do not want to detract from this regular giving which makes it possible for us to be here.

We would like to thank dear Margaret, our BMS link rep from Union in High Wycombe, she recently celebrated her birthday with friends but asked for donations for our project in lieu of gifts .

Please think and pray about whether you can make a donation to the Cusco church building project and if possible like Margaret please enjoy yourself in the process! Every little helps.Thankyou .

Celebrating our 2nd church anniversary at El Puente

Here are a few photos of our church anniversary celebrations. Pastor Pedro and Chi Chi (teachers from our language school in Arequipa) came to speak and share the occasion with us . We had a terrific service, a few of Anjanette's musician friends from other churches played in the band which was a special treat. The service was followed by 70 of us going out for Peru's national dish pollo a la brasa (chicken and chips!) We were delighted that 10 people from Yucay and many other visitors also came to join the festivities too! God has been so faithful to us over these 2 years,I don't think we could ever imagined being part of such a wonderful loving church family 2 years ago when we started out. We are so happy that our church is slowly growing, it was a real joy to welcome new people into church membership today as part of our celebrations.

Trip to Lake Titicaca

B



In between running the Huambutio holiday club and celebrating the church anniversary we took off a few days during Jess and Sam's 2 week school holidays to visit Lake Titicaca in Puno.Samuel has been learning about lake Titicaca at school and was so excited to see it.
We went with our visitors Alan and Beverley and our dear Aunty Margaret (BMS colleague from Lima.) We celebrated Margaret's birthday with a trip on the lake to some of the islands. It was fascinating to see how simply the islanders live compared to our busy hectic technological lifestyle. The scenery was breathtaking, it was very relaxing travelling on the lake and was a wonderful experience.

Huambutio holiday club

Thankyou for your prayers, we all had a lot of fun running the kids holiday club in Huambutio.What a great way to teach our church about mission, this week most of our church members were serving this poor village on the outskirts of Cusco. We walked around the village inviting local children to the club and were delighted that many joined us straight away, some adults even asked if there were activities for them too! It was a joy to see people from our church serving in this way for the first time and great fun to sing songs, play games, do crafts and teach the children bible stories. This video below shows what Pastor Scott and a few friends got up to in the courtyard whilst the rest of the team was busy beavering away during craft time!