The wedding hounds and dancers

Ways to use a plastic bag 

Cute

Art strike

School addition

Geese gaggle

Alpaca hat

Yep, that's a fridge

And those are TVs

Not from here...

Peruvians are specialists in hairless breeds...

The flower girls

The matrimony pooches

Hyrum and Anali

The Caporal dance troop

Wilson, Abraham's wife, Abraham and you can guess the rest

We invited some friends that used to live in Espinar to dinner last Sunday, but at the last minute they were unable to come. We enjoyed a quiet Sunday visiting with children and grandchildren and getting some rest before the new week.

We had a productive Monday, Rich set apart a missionary and we attended our District Meeting. Our week was busy, Julie taught Orlando, Marta and the little boys Marvid and Yahir their English classes. After class on Thursday with Marvid and Yahir they asked if they could just spend the night so we could have class again on Friday. It was so cute.

Julie stayed home on Thursday because the Claro telephone company people were finally going to come and hook up the new internet. They actually came about 9:15 am, right when they said they would. They were very professional and had it all done in about 30 minutes. We are thrilled! It isn’t perfect but as close as one can get to perfect in Peru. It is a fiber optic connection and is fast and we don’t drop calls on Face Time or Skype like the old system. It only took us two years to get something that works well!

Marta has four history interns working with her to organize years of judicial paperwork for the Cusco department government. We are talking about thousands upon thousands of individual papers that need to sorted and organized into some kind of system. What a project! 

Marta asked us to show these interns what we do, so we explained our work and showed them FamilySearch.org and we looked at some of Julie’s family lines. They were amazed and excited to set up their own accounts. It was a fun afternoon.

Saturday we traveled to Sillacancha, a little town out of Calca in the Sacred Valley. We attended the civil wedding of Hyrum Montalvo and his bride Anali. Hyrum is the son of Nilda Peña, a good friend from our time living in Tintaya. The wedding was outdoors at a hotel, it was very nice and only started an hour late…which is really great by Peruvian standards. Anali has been a member of the church for a year and they will travel to Lima on Monday to be sealed in the LDS temple there. They are a great young couple and it was so fun to be with them and visit with friends from Sicuani.

There were a couple of elegantly attired schnauzers that played the role of some times ushers at the wedding. Then, they rambled pretty freely among the guests. However, they were very well behaved and in hysterical garb.

They actually met when they performed in a dance group. Some of the other members of the group performed at the wedding and had Hyrum and Anali dance with them. It was a lot of fun. 

We finally excused ourselves about 3pm, caught a bus to Calca, then another bus back to Cusco. We had about an hour to regroup before we headed off to the Saturday evening adult session of the Cusco Stake Conference. Elder Alexander Mestre of the Seventy was the visiting authority, he’s from Maracaibo, Venezuela. It was a good meeting.

We walked up to the church on Sunday morning for the conference session and Julie played the piano for the meeting. The Cusco Stake has a very good choir, it was a real surprise. Most congregations sing A’Cappella since not many play the piano. And most of the congregations sing their own versions of the hymns, even though they all have access to the hymns on CD’s to at least learn them correctly. But they don’t. The Cusco stake choir sang part of their song A’Cappella and actually stayed in tune. It was very nice.

Our friends that were supposed to come last week for lunch came today after the conference. Abraham Cuyo and his brother Wilson were in our branch in Espinar. When we lived there Abraham was a deacon and Wilson was in primary with Julie. It is wonderful to see them grown up and productive adults. Abraham served a mission and is an accountant with Sunat (like the IRS) and his wife Nadir is a 5th grade teacher. They were married in the temple and are such a cute couple. Wilson just graduated as an accountant and is looking for work. We had a fun lunch and they loved reminiscing about our time in Espinar and what they remembered about us  and our family. They really enjoyed looking at photos of our kids and grandkids and have great memories especially of our boys, William and Glenn. 

We are so blessed to have marvelous friends in so many parts of the world!