Peru Day 6 Thursday

Keith and I prepared some posters for Ann's message at the church. This was the day or our Vacation Bible School graduation. We invited all the parents to come with their kids. We were illustrating the story of Daniel to recap what we did over the last week. We did 4 posters: one of Daniel in the Lion's Den, one of Daniel praying, one of King Darius worrying and illustrating salvation through Christ. It took up quite a bit of time, but it was really fun and I got to be creative. The rest of the group either went to paint the second house or sorted through the gifts for VBS.

The kids started school at around noon. It was their first day back after summer break. They look so cute in their uniforms. We then went to Pachacutec. It's a shantytown about 40 minutes from Bocanegra. It's probably one of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. It was all these houses or shacks built on this andy hillside. It was pretty surreal. We didn't know what we were doing there. We were all pretty quite. We felt a deep sadness for the way these people are living. Check out the photo by Nate.

We went to a weird nature center and walked around a little. We stopped at one area and saw 5 boys by a shack. They saw us and started screaming. We couldn’t tell whether they were scared or just really excited. They came up to talk to us and they seemed so happy. We asked them if they knew Jesus. They did and knew several bible verses by heart. They knew some verses that I didn't even know. It was really unbelievable. So seeing those boys gave us hope for that place. We also saw Angelica from the deaf group. She just happened to see us. There are lot of nice places in Lima, but we needed to see this area. One of the boys gave me a big hug before I left and hung on to my goatee and wouldn’t let go. It was really sad to leave him.

After that we showered and went to the church. It was the VBS graduation and the place was packed. We had about 70 people in the church. (The photo is Miguel singing a song.) We did some songs then did chichua with the kids. Dan and I did a little puppet show. We shared with the church what we learned in VBS. Our timing was off, but it was fun. Then Ann shared the message. She talked about Daniel and she used our posters we made. She then shared the gospel.
We then passed out presents to all the kids. It was chaos for a little bit because we didn't quite enough gift bags for all the kids. We had to open the bags and give individual items. After church we packed for Cuzco and went to bed.