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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

At Least I Wasn't in the Back

The second night in Peru Kevin invited me to the "jungle" with him and I almost jumped at the chance to go on that adventure and turns out this trip will forever be remembered as "the adventure". It wasn't actually the jungle and more of a mountain/camping adventure.

Five AM on Friday morning I hopped into the combi (what they call vans down here) along with Pastor Auden, seven members of the worship team, two of the house moms at the orphanage, three of the kids, Kevin, and Fred. That's right there were 16 people in the combi.... Fortunately we were only taking one of the house moms and two of the kids to Trujillo so we only brought 13 up the mountain... Still doesn't sound like a comfy ride does it?? Well being one of the token tall white people around.. they all took pity on us and let us sit in the front for most of the trip, which was a little less of a squish than the others in the back. The only bad thing about the white people sitting up front was that we kept getting
pulled over by the cops looking for a reason to bribe us out of some money. Too bad for them we were all legit and never really had any problems. Auden was the only one that they wanted to question more about his driver’s license.

Auden is the token Mexican by the way and apparently the only Mexican to have ever come to Huaranchal (I'll get back to that later on.)



Otuzco

The ride up the mountain was fantastically gorgeous and not too bad considering the restraining quarters that we were in. We stopped in the quaint little town of Otuzco where they were working on a gorgeous catholic church that was right in their town square. Too bad they weren't serving lunch yet though because that pushed us into the next town for lunch, which was about two and a half hours away. Even though I was pretty hungry at this point.. lunch was most unaesthetically pleasing to both my mind and my stomach.. It really wasn't all that bad, but it was basically rice, beans (which i don't like very much), a chicken carcass that i couldn't get any chicken off of, and potatoes. I thought I was doing pretty well by eating everything but about half of the beans and the gristal and fat on the chicken.. Auden still made the comment.. "Well you can tell who the newest missionary is here." Granted I haven't completely adapted to food down here just yet and I am still a little spoiled when it comes to food.. but seriously I couldn't get anything off that chicken bone. Maybe.. just maybe by the end of this I'm going to try and work up to trying one of the chicken feet that they put in their soup down here...

Anyway.. off that horrible topic, after lunch we continued on for what was supposed to be the last two or three hours of our ten hour journey and..... dun dun dunnnn..

How many men does it take to change a flat tire?????

Apparently it takes about twenty four hours and entire village.

One important factor was left unchecked before we left for this
adventure.. Spare Tire?? Apparently not. :-( Seeing as we were basically off-roading for most of our road trip and didn't have a off-roading vehicle we really could have used that spare tire. A few amazing miraculous things happened in spite of our debacle.
1. We got the flat right in front of the only house that we had seen in about 15 or 20 minutes. The woman who lived there let us sit on her porch and even invited us in for dinner and some Spanish soap operas that were being run on a battery operated TV.. There was no electricity out where we were. Kevin and I didn't eat dinner in there though.. mainly because we saw that her little boy had scabies, which kind of put us off from eating anything that came out of that house.
2. Our combie buddies that had been traveling in front and behind us for most of our journey stopped to help. They lent us their jack and tried their spare on our combie, which didn't fit unfortunately..
3. Our combie buddies took Pastor Auden to Huaranchal to try and find a spare.

Unfortunately again.. none of the tires in Huarnchal fit the rim for our combie so Auden was going to have to get a ride to Otuzco to try and find a spare. We started making camp for the night in the middle of nowhere.
4. I laid out my sleeping bag on the porch and watched the clouds sweep over the moon as
everyone tried to figure out where they were going to sleep. We just happened to stop in a breathtaking part of the mountains. I was pretty okay with my bed I had made when we got a call from Auden.
5. Auden had talked to the Mayor of Huaranchal who was sending the city comune out to retrieve us. Little did I know, but a comune or camion was in fact a dump truck..

That's right a dump truck :-). We loaded everything from the van, including a drum set, keyboard, speakers, guitars, all of our luggage and ourselves into a dump truck and headed on up the mountain to Huaranchal courtesy of the Mayor himself. The bed of the dump truck was amazingly clean apparently, which i didn't get to experience because they rushed most of the women up into the front cabin. This dump truck was pretty much a haus and had no troubles trekking up the rocky terrain except for some of the corners, which I’m sure was terrifying for everyone in the back looking out because we would have to back up near the cliff in order to make the turns. The ride was not exactly pleasant but the girls in the front actually tried to befriend me after I asked to learn some of their songs. Karen who is going to school for English even tried to talk with me a little bit. I told her that I would help her with her English and she said she would help me with my Spanish :-). It was a very squishy ride and extremely bumpy but apparently we had it pretty good in the front because the guys in the back were being thrown around pretty badly. They had to stand up and hold on to the top of the dump truck the entire time.

So after this CRAZYYYYYYYYYY(but in a good way) adventure up the mountain we unload our gear from the back of the dumptruck (.. its still seems really crazy just saying that) and settle in to the nicest hotel in Huaranchal for 15 soles.. about $5 dollars a night :-). I even got a HOT SHOWER!! and an amazing bed, which my back was definitely appreciative of after the ride of a lifetime up a mountain.

Auden ended up having to go all the way back to trujillo which would have been about 7 or 8 hours each way just to get a tire. He didn't make it back to Huaranchal until 2pm on Saturday. He was definitely working on the strenght of God at that point.

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