The end of an era

The warmth of the jungle! It’s been great to be back in Nauta for the last two weeks meeting up with people and settling back into our old routine.

Our first week was taken up with the training week. We have really enjoyed seeing how the students have grown over the months, gaining confidence as they develop their abilities. Over the last two years we have changed the training course so it places much more emphasis on skills and character and the sessions include much more interaction. One of the main topics this week has been the book of Revelation. The picture is of some group work to create a drama: the brief was to do a drama of a church leader meeting a family where someone had recently died but using verses from Revelation to bring comfort to the family. This being Peru, every group felt that one person needed to represent the dead body.

At the end of the training week there was a small party to say ‘good bye’ to us and thank us for the work that we have done there. This involved everyone present standing to say a few words of appreciation and was followed by cake and a drink. They also gave us some lovely gifts to remember them by. We will be back in the future, but our role will be very different as occasional visitors.

The second week included more opportunities for meals with some of our mission worker friends in Iquitos and Nauta. But it also included some more mundane things. We had internal flights booked with Peruvian Airlines, who sadly stopped trading a week ago. So on Monday we joined a number of other people queuing at the Latam offices in Iquitos (one of the other airlines) to buy tickets to get back to Lima. We had tried to buy the tickets on line but the website kept crashing; but in due course we had new tickets (and a $250 credit card bill). On the Tuesday we had problems with buying credit on one of our phones, but a friendly assistant in the Claro shop rang up the company for us and sorted it out.

Finally on Friday we said our farewells and boarded the plane back to Lima where our attention now turns to meeting Latin Link folk and learning about the work they are doing. More about this in the next post