Disaster Relief

Well Praise the Lord, I'm back safe and sound from Peru. The trip was absolutely incredible and though I'm still pretty exhausted and sick (I lost my voice as part of a nasty infection last Wednesday) it was a wonderful experience.


One of the more interesting damaged buildings.

I arrived in Lima on Friday night, and spent Saturday and Sunday with Carlos preparing everything and researching what we needed to do for the following week. The rest of our team showed up Sunday night and early Monday morning we loaded up our mountain of supplies and medicine and drove south to Pisco. The eastern portion of Peru between Lima and Pisco is absolutely barren desert that drops into the rugged Pacific ocean under a perpetual haze of fog and dust. Driving into Pisco was like driving into Baghdad everything was so destroyed and similar: dusty desperate people begging on the side of the road, ruined homes and buildings covered in a fine brown layer of dust and trash blowing along in the strong cold wind.



We worked at three sites where in cooperation with Operation Blessing and Camino de Vida, a large church in Lima, refugee camps are being built to care for the families in those areas. The neighborhood where the first camp was located is ironically called Vista Alegre or Happy View. There we were working in cooperation with a local pastor and church and the camp will house 40 affected families. The two other camps are much bigger and in a neighborhood called Leticia and are home to 440 families. Overall our target population was somewhere around 1,500 people.

Each day we held our medical camps attending the most critical needs first, providing medicine and high quality consultations. Additionally we distributed packages of personal hygiene items and pillows to each of the families in these three camps. A key part of our work was coordinating with the local community leaders to provide the organization and security needed for the effective functioning of the camps. We also were able to provide valuable input into the construction plans regarding public health concerns.



I'm not a doctor and so I spent my days running around organizing various groups of volunteers (we had short term teams from California, Baton Rouge and daily buses of church volunteers from Lima). Though CDA was just one of all these groups working on the site, because Carlos and I could translate, because we had vehicles and because we were the first to begin working at the sites, it was a neat opportunity to coordinate a lot of the efforts. Driving 4 Wheel Drive trucks through the rubble and desert was also a lot of fun. Transporting all the equipment and personnel from camp to camp, and our team from our hotel in Chincha (about 45 minutes north of Pisco) and getting food and drinks for us was also part of my job. All in all, it was absolutely incredible, the work was tough and dirty, the hours long, the people were beautiful, helpful and grateful, our CDA team functioned like a well oiled machine (well-oiled by jokes and pranks : ) and it was incredibly rewarding.



Thank you so much for your prayers! We were all safe, we were able to help more people than planned, valuable relationships (both personal and work related) were formed and we were able to demonstrate the love of God in both word and deed.

I have a bunch more photos from the trip on our family photo website. Check them out at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jimchynoweth/PiscoPeru