The Georges in Peru

"You haven't written much in your blog lately!"  Let's just say, "I've been busy."  I won't bore you with details of the busy time leading up to the wedding, but instead tell you about the event.

Friday morning the 29th, I woke up at  6 am for the big day.  'Woke up' isn't exactly true.  That would imply that I had slept some, which I'm not sure that I had.  I quickly fell back on my experiences as a marathon runner to get me through.  I've run several marathons without sleeping hardly a wink the night before and I don't feel that it made much difference in my performance, so my wedding day could be the same.   The wedding dinner team was already clanging about the kitchen and setting up tables when  the 37 North Americans and our pastor and his family were eating breakfast.  After breakfast, my groomsmen, Erik Tullberg, Keelan Kaiser, and Jerry Busselman, tried to help me put my clothes on properly while the girls did their hair in the other bathroom.  Too bad they didn't remind me to put sunscreen on my head.  At 9:00am the photographer started lining us up for the requisite shots.  By 10:30 we done, with enough time to wait in the wedding tent for the mayor.  She arrived exactly at 11 am as scheduled.  A week before I had asked the municipality secretary if the mayor was punctual and she only would say, "The mayor gets there when she gets there," with the same air as the Queen in Princess Diaries saying, "The queen is never late.  Everyone else is simply early."  The buses full of guests from Arequipa had just arrived and after they unloaded, we started the civil wedding.  The civil wedding is quite sterile.  No pomp.  No fluff.  I didn't even get to kiss the bride!  The mayor read the legal articles pertaining to marriage, had us sign the forms and put our fingerprints on them (how do you wipe off the ink on your finger while wearing a white wedding dress?).  She did say some nice things about what a wonderful woman Mary Beth was and then that was it.  But we were married!  I said several times the week before that as long as I'm married by the end of the day it is a successful wedding.  Everything from this point on are bonus points!  Mary Beth and I disappeared for 15 minutes while the waiters served fruit kebabs and drinks and then at noon we started the religious ceremony.  

The religious ceremony was a fusion of American, Canadian and Peruvian customs.  Everything went as planned, except the sunflowers on stage were already starting to wilt having been cut 6 hours before and not put in water soon enough.  We did parts of the wedding in Spanish and parts in English, only translating the question, "Who gives this woman to be wed?"  as we felt Jim and Linda should know exactly what they were answering when he said, "Her mother and I."  The sermon was in Spanish.  Our vows were in English as that is our heart language despite years in Peru.  After getting to kiss the bride, we jumped off the front of the stage and ran out the back appearing at the reception dinner 15 minutes later.  

The wedding was held in a tent for 400 people on the camp soccer field.  We had about 275 guests.  During the reception, a gust of wind carried away the tent.  Providentially, it was after the wedding and the only damage we suffered was our piano getting smashed.  Peruvian custom is for the newlyweds to go from table to table during the dinner and greet everyone and get pictures taken with them.  We did this during the meal and then handed out the sunflower-shaped cupcakes that my sister Carolyn had made.  Peruvian tradition is to toss the boquet and an exagerratedly big bowtie matching my already silly-sized bowtie to the unmarrieds and then have a mock wedding for the winners.  My brother-in-law Keith performed the 'Mawage' ceremony in a bishop attire similar to that from the Princess Bride movie, which was a hit.  Ben caught the bowtie!

By 4:30 pm the buses were loading to head back to Arequipa and Mary Beth and I escaped shortly thereafter to begin our Happily Ever After.

As an interesting note, my parents were married on the same date, December 29th, 1954.  My sister put this picture up on the cake table of them and brought the candle that is pictured from 63 years ago!

I marvel at pastors of megachurches that preach several times per day.  Sometimes when I have to preach twice in one day during the second service I pause and wonder, 'Did I already say that, or did I only say that during the first service?'  I'd definitely lose track if I had to preach 4 or 5 times in a morning.  November is missions month in the Alianza (Christian Missionary Alliance) churches in Arequipa and I preached about the church's role in promoting missions in three different churches this morning!  They were such different churches, I think that helped me not forget if I had said something before.  One thing that I noticed in all three churches was that when I mentioned that Peruvians are often better suited to being missionaries (less political stigma in Muslim countries, more relational culturally (happy to extend a conversation even if it makes them late for another event) and lower maintenance (They don't need Starbucks to survive)) I got a lot of pleased/surprised looks from the congregation.  So, that's a new record for me:  3 different churches in one day!  I have no desire to break that record, though I could ask my pastor to let me preach tonight to go for four...

My 84-year-old friend, Alejandro, died Thursday.  We met at church 7 years ago, but I still had the honor of leading him to Christ about 5 years ago when we were talking one day and he told me how scared he was of dying.  He had been in the hospital on and off for the last 3 months with gangrene in his remaining foot.  His other leg was amputated 3 years ago because of an infection from poor circulation.  

I've been struck by how close one is too death in Peru compared to the United States.  In the US, it seems everything is done to distance one from death until you die yourself, at which point you can't really escape it.  The dead are quickly covered up and whisked away in the US.  In contrast, Alejandro was left in his hospital bed for over 2 hours until I arrived and could help his niece move him to a gurney and take him down to the morgue and put him into the cooler.  Mary Beth went with me to the hospital and impressed me by not being shook up by dealing with death in its raw form.  She even helped move the body.  Yesterday was the burial.  At all of the services I've been to in the US, the casket is perched on the casket lowering device until everyone has left the cemetery.  In Peru, in contrast, I helped lower the casket into the grave that was so freshly dug, we had to wait 15 minutes for the gravediggers to finish excavating.  The dirt was filled in immediately.  The whole thing seems less mysterious and scary here I think.

Tomorrow, I will help his niece clean out his house.  Pray that she be ready to accept Jesus as her Savior then after hearing the Gospel several times in the last 3 days.

No, not our wedding!  Saturday, Mary Beth and I went to the wedding of a friend of hers that she met through her camp ministry.  Since we've been planning our own wedding for the end of December, we took special notice of how things are done here and how our own wedding will look.  After seven hours at this event (and we left before the cake was served!) our North American brains spent a lot of time ruminating about how to speed things up!  This wedding had a bit of excitement when the newlyweds sat down to eat and an angry and/or crazy woman entered and knocked their food onto them before being dragged out screaming and kicking!  We never did find out who she was.  For our wedding I think I'd prefer the custom of pinning money on the newlyweds.  Or handing out bottles of Inca Cola and Coca Cola to all of the visitors.

We heard through the grapevine that when Mary Beth and I were at church in Omaha in July some murmured, "How tall is she?!"  

In December, before we were dating, we put a ruler across our heads as we stood back to back in the kitchen and one of the kids announced, "She's about 1 centimeter taller!"  A month later when Mary Beth and I started talking about dating, we discussed what were our 'deal breakers'.   I jokingly asked her, "You remember I'm shorter than you.  Are you okay with that?"  Thankfully, she said it wasn't a deal breaker!  I've told lots of people that Mary Beth is taller than I am, though something wasn't quite right.  She kept saying she is 5-feet 9 and 3/4 inches tall, and I'm just over 5 foot 10 inches.  Canadian inches must be bigger.

Friday, we had a medical campaign and Mary Beth helped translate for a physical therapist who was taking care of this very short patient!  Mary Beth looks like an Amazon woman in comparison!  We showed this picture to Mia, which led to everyone wanting to get measured.  I guess Mary Beth must have shrunk since December, because she is now 2 cm shorter than I am!  

She's 176 cm for us metric people.