Safe on a deer hunt...

Safe on a deer hunt

Rain Recovery

Charo's nativity, close-up

Rich took this photo and then carried her packages to the bus station, man, they were heavy 

Mandolin maestro

Shucking some corn

Catching some zzzs

Toughy

hand-pump bike

Dogs on the tracks

Blue eyes

From Quillabamba

We enjoyed a relatively calm week. There was no district meeting since some of the missionaries travelled to Machu Picchu. Near the end of their missions, all the missionaries are able to take a long day and visit Machu Picchu. 

Tuesday Rich helped the Poulsen’s with their propane gas and took them to the printer to have business cards made. Julie worked and we met for lunch at the Cusqueñita. It’s a noisy fun “picanteria,” where they serve traditional food and have a show of traditional dances. We had a lot of fun and enjoyed yummy trout, rocotto relleno, pastel de papa and choclo.

We have been experiencing a bit of trouble with our computer at work. Wednesday we had to calibrate it at different F-stops and email the results to Salt Lake City. We also had to retake books that had some blurred pages. We can’t figure it out, we haven’t had any retakes in nearly two years and suddenly… We did notice that on some of the pages that the ink has bled into the paper, so that could be the issue, but if they’d just look at the printed portions the auditors would see that nothing is blurred. Oh well. There is a section for comments about the book we are photographing so now that will be filled with every description from bleeding ink to completely warped and water damaged pages. We’re hoping more detailed comments will help us avoid these retakes! 

Julie taught her English classes this week and received a thank you card from Marvid for the little Christmas gifts she gave him. It’s a store bought card with vicuñas pulling Santa’s Sleigh. The vicuña is a relative of the llama and alpaca and lives wild in the Altiplano. It produces small amounts of extremely fine wool, which is very expensive because the animal can only be shorn every three years, and has to be caught from the wild. The Inca valued vicuñas highly for their wool, and it was against the law for anyone but royalty to wear vicuña garments.

Marvid wrote such a sweet note on his Christmas card to Julie in English and said that “my heart is jappy, jappy Christmas and New Year.”  The h & j still cause some confusion, but what a cutie. 

Leah received a new german shepherd puppy “Lando,” for Christmas and he ran off on the 8th of January in Albuquerque. Leah was trying to get him in the car and she lost her grip on his leash and he took off. They were across the street from a high school which has an enormous campus and a huge open, cross country track on it. She looked all over there, and Glenn came to help but with no luck. They visited all the shelters and vet offices in the area and left Leah’s name and phone number just in case. 

Naturally Leah and all of us were heart broken. Leah flew home to Salt Lake on the 13th of January and when she landed she had a text message saying that someone had seen her missing puppy on Facebook and that they were sure they had seen the same puppy on the high school grounds! Leah immediately called Glenn who was in court but was able to call the guards at the high school and they said “yes, we’ve seen that puppy but we can’t catch him.” Glenn was finally able to get to the high school along with several other strangers who through Facebook and texting were there trying to help catch the dog. Technology is amazing! Finally, after several tries at corralling him, and prayers by Glenn, his family and all of us, Lando seemed to recognize Glenn and came running full speed right to him. What a miracle! He still had his leash and collar on, and had lost weight from not eating for six days but other than that, he’s perfect!  Leah drove back down to Albuquerque on Thursday and is so happy to have the little “run-away” home again. Whew! 

Rich left for Quillabamba with the other counselor and one of the records auditors on Friday. They had meetings to attend to on Friday evening. The road to Quillabamba crosses from Cusco at the foot of the Veronica peak an impressive massif 19,334 feet and the pass itself, Malaga goes over at 14,160 feet above sea level. As always, never lost on us is that we live and work along the spine of the Andes. 

It is crazy that sometimes we refer to the campesinos here as people who live in the mountains. Cusco sits 1,000 feet higher than Leadville Colorado. It is all relative.

From Malaga, the road winds down from above timberline to a mere 3030 feet above sea level. Because it is sheltered by the Andes, even that high the vegetation gives way precipitously to jungle foliage. Before you know it, you leave the few pines high up and move into the mango, banana, coffee and other tropical plants that is called in local jargon, “eyebrow jungle.” The road is insanely windy but the beauty of it takes one’s breath away. Equally, photos just cannot do it all justice. 

In Quillabamba, Rich and the others worked with several leaders, training them in aspects of church discipline and in membership audit procedures. Sound thrilling? Still, work with these men is always a true joy. We have come to love so many people here, in so many ways. We will certainly miss this mission when the time comes and it all feels like it is passing very quickly.