Often, when we are at school, Amauta and Jimmy will decide to take us on walking field trips to get acquainted with more of the city or to practice more vocabulary with our Spanish.  Tuesday’s field trip was to her former university’s zoo! It had your typical monkeys (monos), foxes (zorros), bears (osos), condors (cóndores), an ostrich (avestruz), rabbits (conejos), a puma (puma), ocelots (tigrellos), owls (búhos), parrots (loros), a peacock (pavo real), a deer (venado), an alpaca/horse (alpaca/caballo) and a warthog (chancho).  And now you have your Spanish fix for the weekend.

Some of the animals we saw:

David has been sick some of this week with the same “out of it” feeling that I had awhile ago.  He’s better, but I went by myself to school on Thursday and Friday.  Amauta and I went and got our haircuts on Friday for “school” because we wanted some girl time (and I really needed a haircut).  I was able to carry on a conversation with the girl cutting my hair and then later Amauta and I had a deep conversation over cake (she’s a fan of going out for carrot cake verses coffee and frankly, I’m ok with that).  It was so cool to be able to understand and hear some of her past and how the Lord was teaching her a lot about where I had been in the past as well.  It felt so good to have a friendship on a deeper level here and to communicate all of it in Spanish! Thanks Lord!!  (and David is feeling better this weekend)

This is the cute hole-in-the-wall place we like to go for good coffee and desserts:

Clark Barnard, the national director/leader of YWAM Peru came up from Lima for Saturday and left Sunday morning specifically (in his words) “just to say ‘hi’ and officially welcome you to Peru.”  What an awesome guy!  If you remember, we had a divine encounter with Clark where we met him the first time at the YWAM DNA Conference in Chiang Rai, Thailand.  He had a neat follow-up story after that conference when he flew out on the same plane as Loren & Darlene Cunningham (founders of YWAM) and the rest of the conference speakers.  Loren was so encouraged and impressed to see Clark come all the way to Thailand from Peru just to hear the original vision of YWAM come from the founders that Loren invites Clark to sit on the plane with him.  When Loren asks Clark what the mission is for YWAM Peru and whatnot Clark said that “It wouldn’t be my place for me to tell you the vision for all of Peru. I could make a strategic 5 year or 10 year plan for the future with our national board, but if it’s alright to say so, you would have to ask each of the pioneering people and families.  It’s my vision to see this grassroots movement of individuals and families fulfilling the specific calling that God gave each of them to do.  It’s about hearing those things from God and watching people fulfill dreams.”  (Loren Cunningham smiled and told Clark not to change a thing about this vision).  We spent Saturday and Sunday morning with Clark soaking in a lot of wisdom and hearing lots of stories and we were so encouraged by his visit.  He’s a lot like us. He considers relationships to be very important.

This is a picture of Clark (on the right) when we last saw him at the DNA Conference (with David Hamilton one of the first YWAM pioneers in Peru and Chile):

We also have all of our travel information in line and ready to go for the JUCUM Regional Conference.  We’re excited (God seems to do lots of stuff in us over conferences we’ve noticed) so we will make the trip from Cusco to Lima, from Lima to Iquitos where we will travel with Clark by boat to Leticia.  Please pray for amazing worship, relationships to be built and for us to be open to what God is saying and speaking over the Northern Cone of South America from Dec. 6-15th.  The actual conference is the 8th-12th.

Thanks guys for your prayers and encouragement! Let us know how you are doing! Love, The Carters