The Georges in Peru's blog | MissionsHub.org

Can you bring us 2 dozen white eggs?

22 Apr 2025

We get lots of visitors and since we live a bit off of the beaten path, some ask if they can bring us anything from the 'big city'. This year, I wanted to give out colored boiled eggs at our highschool group event, but since we can only buy brown eggs here, Mary Beth told Erin Connally, "White eggs to paint for Easter, please!" They managed to get them all of the way here without breaking any and we shared our tricks for painting eggs.

Mary Beth with the Connally family

At the youth group, the kids were surprisingly unphased by the eggs despite it not being something one ever sees here. At least I've never seen Easter eggs here before. The highschoolers gobbled them down as Pastor Elvis shared a devotional in the park after playing volleyball.

Hope you had a blessed Easter with friends and family!

"I've been bitten by something!"

24 Feb 2025

One proof that missionary life isn't without benefits is that mothers of small children can almost always afford a maid to help with household tasks. From 2011 until 2016, Adriana Choque was our house helper. She always had a gentle, humble spirit and was the person that really encouraged us to start helping out and attending her church, Vida Abundante. She also made it possible for me to do more ministries outside of the home because she could accompany Amy who had seizures several times a month after her brain tumor in 2004.

Last Friday afternoon, she was hanging laundry when she was stung by a wasp. Shortly after, she started having difficulty breathing in within minutes she had died from a blocked airway from an allergic reaction.

Saturday was the burial, so we went to Arequipa to give some words of comfort at the cemetery. I often preach that everyone needs to urgently make Jesus their Savior and Lord, as one doesn't know when their number will be called. I think it was easier to make my plea real as everyone considered what happened to Adriana. I know she is in paradise now as she had been trusting in Jesus since before we first met 14 years ago.

In Peru, there isn't refrigeration or embalming, so burials are done quickly. In this case, Adriana's body was in her niche less than 24 hours after she died. Pray for Julio and their three sons and families during this hard time. Adriana had just turned 62 years old. She was a pillar in the church and VBS was cancelled because she was going to be teaching one of the classes and the training/prep day had been scheduled to be on Saturday.

VBS Landing

13 Feb 2025

Galaxy Express was a success with 15- 25 kids attending each day. We enjoyed having Teah, now known as 'Robot' to the kids, here to help out. She did a fantastic job even though her 'Spanish Language Module' was broken. It was a week of fun and learning and many of the kids, and even some of their parents, came back for church on Sunday!

Above: The kids enjoyed pushing Teah's buttons

Above: Allen running the telescope (kalaidoscope) for a child who is enjoying 'looking at the stars'.

There is always a new creative way to have fun.

Take off time for Summer VBS

23 Jan 2025

Next week is Vacation Bible School week here at the La Punta Baptist Church and we are expecting about 30 kids to come. What does this mean for a small church plant in Peru? It means the pastor and missionaries pull out the stops on their artistic abilities, roll up their sleeves and get working. The pastor found a great resource on-line- Galaxy Express- that has given us all the materials we need and a much needed boost to our limited program. The goal is that by the end of the week, the kids will have learned that God is Magnificient, Impressive, and Marvelous and that He wants them to Call on Him, Answer Him, Obey Him and Talk to Him. I, Mary Beth, have been practicing the songs’ dance moves. I’m sure everyone from my home town is now either laughing or has their mouth hanging open since dancing is definitely not my thing. Yes, in Peru choreography is an essential part of VBS and since neither of us can imagine the pastor doing it and Allen has talents in more pressing areas- I’m the one that has to figure out the moves. Thankfully, I have achieved some experience after 19 years on the field, and thankfully, Teah, a brilliant young lady from Canada is going to accompany us the week of VBS. Hopefully, she is also practicing her dance moves this week in the frozen north! Hopefully, we can sync up when she comes. Yesterday, Allen, the Pastor and I worked on some signs and the background. Today we made a rocket photo booth (photo booths also go with Peruvian VBS, though I can’t remember anything like that at the VBS’s of my childhood). We spray-painted some bottles to use as rocket-packs and even made some kaleidoscope ‘telescopes’ for the kids to play with while waiting for others to arrive. Hopefully by Tuesday we’ll have everything ready to go.

Quite the Quiet House now!

09 Jan 2025

Tuesday, Paul and four friends left our home for Arequipa, marking the end of Christmas break for us. It was great having all of the kids and significant others here except for Sarah and Zach, who were with his parents this year.

Ben brought his girlfriend, Sofi, from Germany/Chicago/Argentina and Mia brought her boyfriend, Rafa, from Romania.

We treated them to pizza from the pizza oven a couple of nights!

For the first time since we've started having church in La Punta, I didn't play the piano! Rafa did! He's an amazing pianist!

Church Anniversary

17 Sep 2024

The first weekend of September our church exploded with people, jumping from the usual 20 to around 70 in attendence. Why? The church anniversary.

Church anniversaries are an integral part of churches here in Peru and usually pretty big celebrations with visitors from other churches and food prepared for after the services.

Several people from our church have asked us over the last two years “When we can have a church beach day?”… Well, what better way to celebrate our anniversary than by taking everyone to the beach!? We prayed for sunshine and started planning. Friday evening we had a movie night, Saturday a beach day while our Arequipa invited guests began arriving, Saturday night a special church service and Sunday morning an even more special church service with food afterwards.

All in all it was a great success! ...and a lot of work. Oof! Thankfully though, this year Pastor Elvis and Rosita took care of the main meal and divvied out the making of the side dishes between willing church members. That meant all we had to do was make the cakes and host. Even though we had only about half the number of Arequipa guests as last year, we doubled our local guests and even had a few family members of regular attendees come for the first time! I also realised how much our kids program has grown over this past year. Praise the Lord!

The Misty Mystery

27 Aug 2024

This week it misted for 2 nights and a day! You might not think this such a big deal, but the ladies that meet weekly at our house did! The meeting was canceled due to the ‘rain’ and we heard stories of people’s struggles thoughout the rest of the week. We live near the Atacama desert. Most have heard of the Sahara desert, but did you know that the Atacama is even drier? The mist our town received this week added up to about 1cm which is more than we’ve seen cumulatively since arriving here two years ago even though it’s cloudy and humid most of the winter.

So what does one do when it rains? Everyone had buckets out to catch the drips, some had to empty theirs quite often! We also had buckets on our ‘roof’ which is really a half-open 3rd floor where do our laundry, hang our clothes and have a little shop bench. There is a spot where the roof comes together tilting inward on both sides with a drain pipe in between which doesn’t necessarily catch all the run off so we put out buckets to reduce the need for mopping. We look at it and say, ‘Bad design!’, but who cares when it only rains once a year!?

Here there's no street drainage so we got puddles!

Felines and Felons

13 Aug 2024

You think today's politicians are weird? My life is weird. This afternoon I was cleaning cat poop off of the flat Sunday School room roof where neighbor cats like to do their dirty business. I suspect it hasn't been cleaned in the 20 years since our house was built. One has to climb up with a ladder and one can't see it easily, so I can understand why it's not been cleaned before. When I was nearly done sweeping up enought to fill a five-gallon bucket I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. I usually don't answer such calls, but I'm expecting an important call from the municipality, so I answered it. It turned out to be Juan*, a man who has been coming to church lately. He came to church late on Sunday because he had been fighting with his half-siblings about who owns their house and the police had to break it up. Today he called saying he was locked up at the police station along with his half-siblings and he was hungry. Could I buy him 6 bananas, a kg of oranges and two daily specials from a restaurant? I pointed out to Juan that all the restaurants in our town were closed by 4:30 pm, but I could still bring him the fruit and we'd find him some food. Mary Beth quickly cooked him up some chicken to put with our leftover rice and cornbread and we walked to the police station. "Hi. We hear you have Juan locked up and we brought him some food." We've been in town long enough now, we didn't even have to say who we were or prove we weren't smuggling him any weapons. They led us back to find Juan in a very austere cell with just a foam mat on the floor. Juan insisted on paying us for the food, but we told him to keep his money for now as something might come up that he'll need money for before he gets out tomorrow. Pray he and his siblings can learn to get along! Weird.

Don't call us, we'll call you!

13 Jul 2024

I've had a hernia since September of 2023. We've gone to Arequipa twice before to get it operated on but the surgeon didn't have the needed equipment. We changed surgeons and finally, after our third trip to Arequipa, I finally got it fixed. Yay! Please pray for an uneventful recovery.

The day after surgery, I was doing my devotions and the passage for the day was 2 Chronicles 21. Back then, even if you were king, having a hernia could mean dying a horrible death:

2 Chronicles 21:18-19 After all this, the Lord afflicted Jehoram with an incurable disease of the bowels. In the course of time, at the end of the second year, his bowels came out because of the disease, and he died in great pain.

I'm happy to be living now and not 2800 years ago in Israel!

I was bemused by the location of the nurse call button! It is impossible to access as a post-op hernia patient without getting out of bed. I needed the nurse once and called her on my cell phone. It's a new hospital. Still working out the kinks.

Special Connections

25 May 2024

The obvious highlight of our trip to North America was spending time with the family celebrating Sarah’s graduation, it was a huge blessing to all be in one place for the 2nd time this year! We even got to see Zach’s parents who came out from Niger for the occasion.

Another highlight for me was spending some time in Manitoba. We haven’t been back in 2 years and I was missing it tremendously so it was good to get that bug out of my system.

One thing I was really looking forward to about the trip to Canada was seeing my new nephew Jed, so I was sad to find out a few weeks before we left that my brother and his wife were going to be on a missions trip with their church to Brazil that week.

I’ve been learning from 2nd Corinthians lately about God’s comfort and was super blessed to experience it in real life when our paths ‘just so happened’ to meet on our ways back home. Our planes landed in Miami within minutes of each other and Allen and I were able to deke out of International Departures for a few minutes to say 'Hi' before flying on to Lima. Words cannot express the joy, not only from seeing Jed, but from the confirmation of God’s care and thoughtfulness for our hearts' desires.

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