Alan and Sandy in Peru

What a wonderful time celebrating my 55th birthday with the REAPSouth team. We gathered at Mike and Kathy's apartment for a birthday lunch. The picture is of me with the birthday cake that Kristen baked and decorated for me. It was so good. A big thank you to everyone for such a wonderful birthday.

We have completed language school, but after a short break we are studying again with a tutor. She is a wonderful Peruvian lady and has such a good spirit about her. Today we went on a field trip to the grocery store and made purchases and used our Spanish with her. She rides three different buses for a total of 11/2 hours to get to our apartment for class. Sandy and I met separately for class because we are at different levels.

It was an interesting day. We have been having problems with our telephone and internet service. They called from the mission office yesterday and reported the problem. Well, the service tech showed up this morning and of course he speaks no English. Our housekeeper was here this morning and she speaks no English. Our tutor speaks very little English, so communication was interesting. We finally had to call a young Peruvian lady on our team to translate for us. He could not understand the vonage phone that it wasn't for local calls. He thought we were using two phones and only paying for one. So he diagnosed the problem and then we had to call the phone company again and schedule another service call to fix the problem. Same language problem again but anyway it is fixed and cost us nothing, and that was the best news. Even small jobs become large and complicated when you only speak a little of the language.

Our English fellowship and Bible study is going great. We still have about 18 to 20 students and each week we see one or two new faces. We continue to build relationships with them and they are so eager to learn. They are such a blessing to us and minister to us every week.