A letter from Sara Armstrong serving in Peru
november 2014 - an unexpected impact
We were delighted to help organize seven new mission partnerships in 2014. We never know the extent of the impact that teams are making as they travel and work in Peru. The Woodlands Community Presbyterian Church in Spring, Texas, sent a mission team in August to Ayaviri in the altiplano of southern Peru. Their work was to help with a synodwide training for young Sunday School teachers who would then establish Christian Education programs all around the area. It was an exciting week with training in three languages. At the same time, Dr. Jackson Dzakuma was visiting farmers and agricultural projects in the area. Here he writes about one day of his Peru trip:
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Prof. Florencio Yapa, Jackson Dzakuma and Dir. Santiago Condori Tinoco at the Sicuani Bible Institute
In the fall of 2013 our then Associate Pastor Rev. Christa Brewer “planted the word in my mind” that she would like me to consider a mission trip to Peru because the seminaries in Sicuani and Ayaviri needed the advice of an agriculturist. I gave very little thought to her suggestion. Then in 2014, as the summer drew nearer, she became a little more persistent. The rest is history. My charge, for the first visit as an agriculturalist—an animal breeder/geneticist—was to make recommendations as to what would be required in order to make the farms of the Sicuani Bible Institute and the Presbytery of Puno productive and profitable. We arrived in Lima, Peru, on the night of August 1, 2014, and went on to the Sicuani Bible Institute the next day. At Sicuani Pastor Santiago wanted to know what could possibly be done there in terms of agriculture on their limited space. While in Sicuani a lady (who would be cooking for us in Ayaviri) told me that she has a 37-hectare land in Quillabamba and would like to raise pigs and needed advice. We agreed to talk during the week. We arrived in Ayaviri on August 3. I was later introduced to Pastor Erón, Principal of the Instituto Bíbilico Ayaviri, with whom I would be spending the next few days visiting the presbytery farm and touring other farm facilities within the Ayaviri vicinity.
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Roy Ticona Arapa, Manuel Duran and Jackson Dzakuma looking at animals at Ayairi Presbyterian farm
On Wednesday, August 6, something extraordinary happened and I would like to relate it here. After the daily chores were done, my interpreter, our cook, and I sat down in the classroom to plan what we could do on her land. She started to describe the land to us. She and her husband have had some goats but had to get rid of them because they were destroying others’ farms. As she started talking about her husband, she began to cry. Her husband is an alcoholic and abuses her whenever he is drunk. He is a carpenter and they have taken a loan from the bank in order for him to work, but he had drunk away all the money. He has also gone after other women. In fact, I did not know how to handle the situation. Here was a woman crying and with a heavy burden and at that instant I was powerless. I felt like hiding under the table where we were seated. I could not look her in the eye, so I put my head down and began to pray. I prayed something like this: “Lord, I have always been an agricultural mercenary, never an agricultural missionary. Will you not help me?” It was a confession of my sins and my powerlessness. Suddenly a voice spoke to me. “You have a Bible, don’t you?” Then I came to my senses and asked. “Do any of you have a Bible?” None of us was carrying one, so I asked the translator to see if he could get one from the chapel next door. While he was gone, my mind started racing and the lady was still crying. How can I stop her from her crying?
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Jackson, Christa, Alyson, Linda and Warren—Woodlands Community Presbyterian Church mission team in Ayaviri
When he came back with the Bible, I asked him to open to Job 1:10. Then I told her we are going to pray and build a “hedge” of protection around her, just like Satan accused God of doing around Job, so that whenever her husband gets drunk, he could not touch her. The crying didn’t stop. Then I told him to open to Hosea 6:2. He read it and it wasn’t what I wanted. I told him to reverse the order and read Hosea 2:6. This is where God built a “hedge of thorns” around Gomer so her suitors would reject her. The lady’s face suddenly lit up and she told him to read the whole of the chapter. I told her we will pray to build a “hedge of thorns” around the alcoholic beverages so that any time her husband touched any he would be pricked by the thorns. Even if he gets past the thorns to the bottle, the alcoholic drink should prick his stomach so he would throw up. The lady had suggested selling his tools. I told her not to do any such thing and we read from Matthew 5:44-45. We will pray hard that God will turn her husband’s heart to work with us on the pig farm we would be undertaking. “We must win this battle through prayer,” I told her. She settled down, and then we prayed and also did some planning.
We left the seminary compound well after 10:15 pm; everyone was asleep and we had to wake them up to open the gate and let us out. It was so cold outside and all the taxis had stopped running. God in his abundant mercies did send us a taxi as we started walking back to the hotel. We were so grateful! I went to Peru thinking I was going to solve only agricultural problems. Little did I know I would be so spiritually challenged.
We are thankful to Jackson for sharing about the impact of short-term mission in his life. We are also grateful for the opportunity to see God at work in peoples’ lives on every team. We invite you to consider using your gifts to travel in Peru, and be used in unexpected ways by God. Thank you for your prayers and for your support as we build cultural bridges into new areas of Peru.
Sara
The 2014 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 57
The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 54
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