The Georges in Peru

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!

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.

She got to help take care of her first emergency patient on Sunday morning!  Sarah, Ben, Mia and I (Allen) went out for a chilly, breezy (it is the Windy City after all!) run on the waterfront before church.  On the way home, we saw a man slump forward in his wheelchair on the sidewalk.  We stopped and approached him, "Sir!  Are you okay?"  He didn't respond more than an agonized breath.  We flagged down a police car which stopped.  "Do you have Narcan®?" Sarah asked.  "No, we're coming back from a parade."  "I need to start carrying Narcan," Sarah remarked.  A policeman looked in the man's pocket and pulled out a little ziplock bag with a cut off straw in it.  "What's that?" I asked naively.  "They snort heroin out of these little baggies."  The man's breathing was really slow, depressed by the heroin, just taking 2 or 3 per minute.  Fortunately,  after about 5 minutes, a policeman with Narcan arrived and gave the man a squirt in the nostril.  "This will amaze you," I told Ben who was watching the whole event.  Narcan (Naloxone) is a drug that blocks the receptors that opiods like heroin activate.  If you block the receptor, the drugs lose their effect.  In 30 seconds the man suddenly came to life, moving around and agitated, and most importantly, breathing! 

Later, on our way to Ben's house near Taylorville, IL, we stopped to buy some gas and the gas station had a box of Narcan nasal spray, freely provided by the Illinois government for anyone who wanted it.  We each took one.  

When I was in 9th grade, we learned about birds in Mr. Brogie's science class.  We also had to learn the scientific names of the common birds in Nebraska.  "Why do we have to learn scientific names?" I asked.  John Chace, a year older and wiser than me, responded, "Well, if you are speaking to someone from a foreign country and you say, 'Barn owl,' he won't understand you, but if you use the scientific name, 'Tyto alba,' he will.  I definitely felt that that was a contrived response and John was probably repeating what he had been told when he asked a similar question back when he was an impressionable 9th grader.  Really? Is reaching an impasse with someone over a bird's name ever going to happen?  Hardly.

Fast forward 42 years, I am at the local bird sanctuary in Peru and we meet up with Michael, the ranger at a bird lookout.  "See anything interesting?"  "Los willets han vuelto (the Willets are back)," I tell Michael.  Blank stare from Michael. I wished I had known its scientific name!  I described it a bit and he taught me its Spanish name 'Playero de ala blanca' and said 'Tringa semipalmata'.  He clearly knew the value of scientific names!  Then he asked if we had seen any Tyto albas.  That was a scientific name I remembered!  A barn owl!  "Yes, we have!" I said, proudly showing him a picture Mary Beth took of one a month ago.  He was duly impressed and even gave us his phone number asking us to let him know if we saw another one!

"How is she going to get here?  It's 4 km from her house." Mary Beth reasoned. 

"I think she'll come.  She has her ways to getting around." 

"She doesn't even have a watch!" 

"Maybe she can look at a cell phone or watch the sun.  She's smart.  She's found ways to make things work.  She'll figure something out!" I said confidently as we drove home from her place Thursday morning.  We had gone with Pastor Elvis and his wife Rosita to Ana's house (not her real name) to help her with her well.  It had somehow filled with sand and she had to carry water from a nearby creek (see last post), though it didn't look like her well had gotten flooded as we had understood before.

"What do you know about wells?"  I asked Elvis, hoping he had more experience than I had.  

When we arrived with shovels and buckets, we realized the shovels were useless.  But if one of us crawled down into the well, maybe he could pass buckets of sand up to the other.  Ascertaining that the well walls weren't a cave-in risk and after Elvis' own admittance that he wasn't skinny enough, I volunteered to go down.  I crawled into the bottom of the well (it was about 2-3 meters from the surface to the water level) which was so narrow I could barely bend my knees enough to scoop out a bucket of wet sand and pass it up to Elvis.  After a few minutes of such manouvers, I was standing in water.  I continued digging until I couldn't reach any further down and we drew filthy water from the bottom until it was less filthy and we couldn't get much more out.  Rosita went with Ana to get some forage for her sheep while we dug out her well.  After they returned and the job was done, Ana exclaimed, "Thank you so much!  God really does exist!"  

"He sure does!  Come visit our church Sunday!"

"I'll be there.  What day is today?"

Ana was at the church door at 10 am sharp!  She reports the water comes out clean and tasty now.