Mission Peru

by Kaelan DeLorenzi, Redwood Park Church 

Hello, my name is Kaelan and I am one of the students involved in the Mission Peru trip. These last six days have been insane; as a team we have accomplished so much. We have played with kids, gone out to eat, bought alpaca sweaters, and even (get this) worked! As of today the last two days have been construction all day. Yesterday I helped clear brush and cut grass with machetes and also create a gravel road leading to the compound. Today, however I did much more. I helped make bricks for a while, then helped make the road again, then was reassigned to moving sand to create a  community center, then finally was reassigned to deliver bricks to people whose houses were damaged by a flood that hit this region a few months back.

When I first went to help with bricks Daniel, the executive director of Inca Link, drove me and a few others to an older man’s house to bring in 2,000 bricks. We did not finish. I was a little disappointed we could not finish what we started but then at lunch I was told that they needed volunteers for delivering more bricks. I jumped on that opportunity and within a half hour I was back at the older man’s house. We finished that 2,000 brick delivery and then moved another couple hundred into another house while some more volunteers brought in another 2,000 to another person’s house who was affected by the flooding.

Later on I had time to decompress after a long day. I realized that none of this would be possible without God. Without the strength He gives us none of what we are doing would be possible. The things we are doing may seem simple and at times even pointless but as Luke (the Director for the Inca Link Interns) is sure to remind us, these simple jobs we are doing are just little trickles, the beginning of a (sorry for the cliché) snowball. Just bringing some bricks into a house for a few hours makes a huge difference. Sometimes it may be hard to keep the mentality of Christ when working but in the end we are not doing these jobs for ourselves we are doing, as Mathew 25:40 says, we are doing these things for the least of these.