Today’s been so fast! We got up whenever the rooster decided to wake us up…
well, it was more like the 3rd or 4th rooster’s crow. It was sometime around
6am, I guess. I haven’t looked at a watch since the beginning of the trip, and I
rather like it! 
 
Today was our first day of Kids’ Games, and overall I would say it was
a success! We worked really hard to bring the kids out of their shells. Bethany
& I are teaching the kids the memory verse, and Steph &Max are working
through the gospel colors over our two days working with the kids. I’m so
thankful the gospel is being shared so clearly with the kids and the adults who
are watching from the sidelines! Steph also had gospel bracelets that her church
made to hand out, so all the kids get to take home a reminder of what they
learned – awesome!

Tom and I had 13 kids on our verde/green team. There were 5 teams in
total, so I’m estimating that we had somewhere around 75 kids, if my math is
trustworthy. ;) It was a good number! It was also really hot, lol, so after we
finished, we all headed directly for the swimming hole.

All during that time, the girls were reminding me that we had promised
to work on our beaded jewelry again that afternoon, so around 4ish, we finally
got settled at home and broke out the beads again. There had to have been at
least 15 girls and women sitting around in a circle on our floor, with several
men and boys chillin’ off to the side visiting with the guys. 
 
After dinner and everyone went home (it gets dark in the houses really
early!), we were invited to join Hamer’s discipleship group/meeting. There were
about 5 men and 1 woman from the tribe, our whole gringo team, and all the
believers from the nearby village. I had heard from one missionary that worship
in some tribes is noticeably lacking joy and well…worship. Wow, was I blessed by
this group though!! The group of a ½ a dozen believers from the nearby village
are obviously so excited about the Lord and seeing this tribe come to know
Christ. The worship was heartfelt and full of loud, boisterous singing and
clapping. It was pretty evident that they love to worship and love the Lord! 

We were asked to share our testimonies a couple seconds
before the service started. Haha, I was praying the whole time that God would
give me the words He wanted the people to hear. Hopefully, He did! Worshiping the Lord in the middle of the jungle, with
the sound of the jungle in the background, in a dark room, with a mixture of
first-generation believers, with three different languages represented, seeing
everyone sing their hearts out to the Lord…definitely one of my favorite moments
from the trip. So blessed!

We finally made it to the village this morning at about 9am, after 3 ½
days of travel! (1 day flying to Iquitos, 1 day on a series of speedboats on the
Amazon, & 1 ½ days of chugging our way upriver in our own boat – all in all,
quite an adventure!). What a day…so many things I want to jot down & not
forget about. The Lord has already done so much within our team, with the tribe,
and in my heart.

We had been warned that the village was not your
traditional village – all the huts together in a clearing. That proved to be the
case. When we arrived on the outskirts of the community, our driver took us down
a tiny branch off the main river. It was about the size of a creek back home,
but a little deeper, thankfully! J As we slowly edged our way around the corners of this
narrow creek (trying not to hit any submerged logs or run aground on a sand
bar), we started seeing our first evidences of the community – dotted along the
dense, jungle banks were canoes and barely noticeable paths leading off into the
jungle. Most of the houses weren’t visible from the river. We had to have passed
at least 10 or 15 of these little “docks” – our first glimpse of the village we
traveled 3 days to reach!

At last we made it to Krista’s house (a Wycliffe translator who has
just begun to work on translating Scripture into their language – she is there
off and on, and during the time we were there, off) where we would be staying.
We were warmly greeted by some believers who had come from a moderately close
village to help Hamer, the Peruvian missionary we partnered with who traveled
with us to do discipleship training with some of the adults in the village while
we worked with the kids. Great people! We were so blessed by their warm, loving
reception, especially since we were a little unsure of how the tribe would
respond to our arrival. (The tribe had been hesitant to allow a team of
evangelicals to come, but thankfully, after Hamer talked with them, they
agreed.)

We got settled into Krista’s stilt hut/house – with 2
bedrooms, 1 main “living room” (if you will J), and a kitchen. The roof is thatched grass (or
something like that) and the walls and floor are these small strips of wood
lined up side by side = a cool house! It even comes with it’s own pet snake, or
so we’ve heard! =)

After settling in, we washed clothes down at the river, leaning over
the edge of a canoe to soak and scrub our nasty, smelly clothes. After that, we
began to have guests slowly appear in the yard and around our doorway. Three
girls (10, 8, & 3) and one little boy (Peter, 3) particularly made
themselves comfortable, sitting in the house, watching everything we did. 

After exhausting the 4 or 5 phrases I knew in their language& basically using up my poor,
limited Spanish, I was able to pry their names from their shy, quiet, giggles (giggling over
my humorous attempts to speak their language, I’m sure, lol). After a while of just sitting and
making small talk – really small talk with my limited Spanish, I noticed a little bit of fingernail polish on one
of the girl’s hands. Bingo! Something to relieve the awkwardness! Thankfully, I had (for some
reason) brought fingernail polish on our jungle trip. I know. I’m not really sure why either! ;)
Anyway, I dug though my bag and proceeded to paint all 3 girls’ fingernails amid their shy
smiles and giggles, and ever since, we’ve been best-buds! A huge praise for the Lord breaking
the “I’ve just met you & while I enjoy watching everything you do, I don’t know you” barrier.
Who knew? God used a ½ empty bottle of polish that I forgot to take out of my
backpack to make friends the first day – a huge answer to prayer for me! 

After lunch, our team split up and headed in different directions,
following a trail through the jungle that connected all of “the homesteads” (I’m
running out of ways to describe the huts, lol) in their community. Our goal was
to meet the families and invite them to come to our kids’ program, Kids Games
that starts tomorrow.

Our group passed maybe 8-10 houses, but only 2 or so had adults who
were home and sober. With 3 of the houses, the adults were basically passed out
from masati. Despite our limited success with connecting with the adults, by the
end of our mile+ hike, we had a good sized group of kids (maybe 20ish) following
us, chatting (but mostly giggling with us over our attempts to speak to them),
as we stomped through the mud and in Seth’s case, fell through the wooden planks
of a bridge…twice (getting an early bath of sorts :). All the while, I had two
little, brown hands tightly holding mine, lacing their little fingers in mine.
Apparently for them, if more than two people want to hold one person’s hands,
they solve the problem by simply holding the hand of the person that is holding
the other person’s hand…if that makes sense. So I had a string of 6 or more
little girls, all holding hands on either side of me. Oh yeah, I was a goner at
that point! I was head-over heels for their little giggles and shy smiles. Love
these little girls! 

After we got back to the house, we broke out the beading supplies and
all our little amigas happily settled around in a circle on the floor to make
bracelets and necklaces. There were maybe 8-10 girls with about that many boys
hanging out outside the circle. I had so much fun! We also went swimming/bathing
back down at the river. So cool, refreshing, and a bit terrifying all at the
same time, lol. No one ended up getting eaten by anything in the murky depths,
but we sure thought about it as we splashed around, laughing with the
kids.

That evening there was a rainbow in the sky – it ended up being one of
my favorite moments from the trip! – and Bethany, one of our team members, asked
a group of kids outside our hut if they had ever heard the story of the rainbow,
and they hadn’t. So Bethany and Juan (a youth that had traveled with us to the
village) proceeded to read them the whole story of Noah – so far one of the
coolest moments of the trip. The image of those 10 or so kids sitting in a
circle, with a rainbow overhead, hearing for the first time about God’s promises
and how He delivered Noah…that image isn’t going to leave me anytime soon. 

The Lord brought that image back to my mind tonight as we
spent 2 or 3 hours sitting with a flashlight handing from an overhead beam,
singing and praying, worshipping the Lord. This was by far one of the most
incredible times of worship we’ve had as a team, and perhaps one of the most
powerful I’ve ever experienced. So incredible! None of us wanted it to end, so
we sang and prayed, and then sang and prayed some more. Like I said, the Lord brought that image of those kids
hearing of God’s promise for the 1st time as they stared up at that rainbow.
That and remembering those tiny hands clutching so tightly to mine as we tromped
through the jungle. Oh man, the Lord used both to break my heart into pieces for
these people. (I’m sitting in a coffee shop now days after that happen, making a
blubbering mess of my mascara as I remember it, lol.) 
 
I’m not really sure what the Lord’s doing, but I’m pretty sure the Lord
gave me a small glimpse into His heart for these people. These people that have
gone millenniums, perhaps, without hearing that He treasures them so much that
He came and died for them, paying the ransom for them. He loves them SO much!
The cross leaves us no doubt of that fact. Oh how He (and now I) love these
people and want them to know their Creator’s great love for them! 

We were supposed to arrive in the village late last night (6/15), but
after 12 hours on the river, it started getting dark and we still had 3 hours to
go. Tom, our team leader, tried to talk our driver into continuing up the river
in the dark until we reached the village, but after hitting one log in the dark,
our driver put his foot down and started looking for a place to pull over for
the night. Long story short, we stopped at a hut/house on the river bank and
asked to stay the night. Thankfully, the family agreed.
 
The hut/house was a multi-level, multi-room, side-less,
  stilt house with about 10 pigs – make that 10 squealing pigs J - below the floor boards. We grabbed our tents & put
them up in one of the larger rooms. It was already pretty dark so we didn’t
waste much time outside, chillin’ with the mosquitos – we climbed into our tents
and slept in our clothes.

The next morning (6/16), we got up “late,” around 5:30am to the sound
of our driver calling, “vamos!” & revving the boat engine. We all scrambled
to get our tents packed in record time. Oh and just as a side story, come to
find out, (remember this house/hut was on stilts, so it was a good distance from
the ground) not all the planks on the floor were all that trustworthy… Haha,
this led to a series of events where at least three of us almost fell through
the floor, as planks gave way as we sleepily ran to catch our boat. (Apparently,
the family that lived there knew what planks in their house not
to step on…our gringo team, on the other hand, didn’t). Very humorous in
hindsight, but at the time resulted in one of the guys nearly getting knocked out
when he stepped on one end of a plank, only to have the other end come up and
nail him in the side of the head. Ouch! Yup, we are definitely
gringos…