My first day in Lima is ending - what a beautiful day. Lima is a typical heavily polluted Latin American city - home to 9-11 million residents - but today the sky was pretty clear and just before dusk it was blue! Most of the time I´m in Lima is wintertime here, so summer weather is a welcome change.
This morning we visited Wilma´s orphange. She has been ministering to children and women with children - many of these mothers being young and single (ie. alone, depressed, and anxious) - and is currently heading up construction of an orphanage that will house about 30-50 kids from one of the poorest areas in Lima. It´s a desert wasteland; people don´t even have running water or wells. They have to pay a sizeable portion of their income to purchase water from trucks. Wilma has given her heart and body to these people, which means doing things like joining her construction workers by grabbing a pickaxe and breaking up rock in order to lay the foundation. I would hesitate before taking a pickaxe to this ground, because I´ve never seen ground so hard. It never rains here. The only vegetation is cacti.
Wilma showed us around, making the empty, dusty, still-under-construction rooms come alive with her dreams. One room near completion housed 4 looms just purchased last week. She is teaching the single women how to weave bags, that can be sold in Lima or the States. The women learn a trade, earn an income, receive the love and teaching of Christ in the process, and receive care for their children.
Before leaving, we prayed for all the women there. I don´t know everything that happened, but one woman was healed of her headache and nightmares and another of kidney stones. I say healed because all pain disappeared in both cases and someone was given an accurate word of knowledge about the nightmares and acted on it. The lady with the headache was crying literal tears of joy. These people have such faith! We prayed short prayers and asked them how they felt. Both said they were healed and that was that.
Next we visited a family that Wilma knows who allowed us to enter their home and take pictures. We wanted to share with people what a typical home is like there. They lived in cramped squalor. One girl cried while recounting how her aunt had tried to sell her. The aunt, without her mom´s permission, had already sold her brother. The mother visited all the orphanages around there, looking for her son, with no success. These people really, really need to experience the love of Jesus, so we are really excited about what Wilma is doing.
Tomorrow morning we fly to Iquitos and will travel down an Amazon tributary into the high jungle for a few days. I will be interpreting for David, whose church purchased the 265 acres, and Clay, who´s company will be creating audioBibles in the local languages with the help of Wycliffe Bible translators. They are laying the foundation, so that by this summer, tribes can start coming in and help with the translations and learn better ways to live. Well, my bed beckons.
