A recap of this week may help you learn what life with the Norris’ is like.

Let’s start with last Sunday when we headed to church for the 11:30 a.m. service. The Alabama Team is here so we were able to renew some old acquaintances and finalize plans to assist them in their ministry this week. At 5:00 p.m. we attended the weekly Leadership Class and stayed for the 7:00 p.m. evangelistic service. A full day at church, struggling to grasp a few granules of food for thought this week and just loving on the Peruvian Christians!

Monday morning I continued to work on the laundry from the CrossWave Team, finalize our monthly newsletter and send it out and then we joined up with Alabama in the early afternoon to help with their VBS program. About 45 children attended. We returned home for a quick bite to eat and then headed off to church for the ministry provided by Pastor Tony and Pastor Phil (7:00 – 10:00 p.m.)

Tuesday morning I finished the laundry pile! (82 bath towels and 32 sets of linens for twin beds) Alison, a recent college grad from Statesboro, GA, has been staying at Pat’s Place for two weeks, and is working with a team from North Carolina connected with another evangelical church here in San Juan de Lurigancho. She came to use our internet, and to type up a brief autobiography to share that evening. I had to complete our monthly finance report. Don and I went grocery shopping (big deal you think, but it is when you are depending upon your legs to get you there and back with bags of goodies and the apartment steps to conquer!) Don, Alison and I were invited to speak to a group of Peruvian students who are learning to be translators. Our friend Martin is their teacher. We secured Saul as our taxi driver and left about 5:00 p.m. to go to the school, returning about 9:30 p.m. We all spoke to the students and they translated our abbreviated life stories! It was a fun evening to meet these 10 young adults and to work with them.

It was a nice change to spend time at home in the morning on Wednesday so I began the task of translating the Leadership Class handout. It’s a 45 page outline of scripture and comments by the Pastor. To go to the class (taught in Spanish) is pretty difficult for us, so I’m translating the material ahead of time. That way, we can follow along a little easier. In the afternoon we returned to work with the Alabama team in VBS and then before the evening service we filled coffee orders for the AWANA fundraising program. We skipped dinner to do so, and went right to church to hear the Word of God preached again in English by Pastor Tony and Pastor Phil and returned home at 10:30 to eat a bowl of cereal!

Thursday was a day we were able to be home in the morning. I worked on the translation of the class materials and in the afternoon we attended a school celebration with the families from Pat’s Place. The children were all dressed in traditional dance costumes and each class was divided into five pods, with each pod presenting two dances. The first grade dances began at 2:00 p.m. and at 6:00 p.m. (when we returned home) the third grade was dancing. We were cold, and chose to return home. We missed some of the older children’s participa-tion, but loved on all of them while we were there, took lots of pictures and enjoyed the part of the program we observed. Today we heard that the last dance was at 12:30 in the morning and one of the girls from Pat’s Place performed at that time.

Friday we had two visitors in the morning for a quick meeting. One was about the coffee fundraiser. The other was to purchase tickets to a concert by the Shama Boys here in town. They are young boys from the ages of 6-16 who have been rescued from living on the riverbed and sniffing glue. Shama is a Christian organization, which has an orphanage for the boys. The boys are taught song and dance, and some play instruments, and once a year they have big concert to raise funds for the orphanage. The rest of the day we walked to the Mercado, I made some home-made lentil soup, and Don worked on a chapter in “Lumps of Clay”. Today Diana (our 3 year old energy filled little Peruvian granddaughter) was here for 3 hours while her mother cleaned. She’s such a joy to have around. Between doing puzzles, listening to preschool songs on the laptop, and snacking she keeps pretty occupied at our place! This afternoon, we had two drop in visitors again. Richard brought some coffee beans for us so that we could complete the order for one of our Alabama friends. Martin is currently working on his laptop arranging the vocals for the youth service tomorrow night, completing some tasks for his students, catching up with some FaceBook friends and email while he has the opportunity. Our home continues to be open to friends and drop in visitors are not at all uncommon.

Saturday – that’s tomorrow! We will leave at 8:00 a.m. to go to a market one hour away from home to purchase fruits, vegetables and staples for another orphanage. The Good Shepherd is where Isabelle (a woman in her mid-60’s) cares for 28-30 children by herself. Once a month we have the opportunity to buy them groceries, and spend some time visiting with her family. A friend of ours, Fanny, is a translator and she gives up her Saturday morning to assist us in this effort. By the time we leave home, travel, shop, visit, and return home, it is a 5-6 hour chunk of time out of our Saturday every month. The North Carolina and Indiana Christians who provide the resources for shopping cannot imagine how much these visits mean to this family. In the afternoon we will stop by the “Family Extravaganza” that the Alabama Team is conducting as an outreach for the church and help in any way we can, before returning home for the evening.

Welcome to our world – it’s hard to put on paper the things we do, but we are kept busy and although it doesn’t appear as tho we are in the business of ‘saving souls’, we know that some sow, others water, and our responsibility is to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We come along side the Peruvian Christians in an effort to assist them as they reach out to their neighbors, (and mothers and children in their care) meeting their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs.