San Jose de Quero: Life Outside of the Teepee

I'm in a new teepee now. Ya see, my grandma paid for this program called Florida Prepaid years ago before I even decided to join the Seminole tribe. You basically pay for a student's college expenses at the rate they are currently at, so if a dorm cost $1,500 in 1999 you paid that rate instead of the $2,400 expense it is now in 2012. Well, my granny, who was big on education, paid for me to live in a dorm through this program for four semesters. It's already paid for, and living in an apartment that I paid for completely was making me broke. So which would I rather live in..a teepee (apartment) that I have to spend money from my personal savings on, or an already paid for teepee? Yep, I choose the free teepee (aka a dorm).

I'm in a new teepee, alright. A dorm is totes different from an apartment, in good ways and bad ways. But not only am I in a new teepee, I'm also a new person.

Why? I lived life outside of the teepee, outside of the life I know oh so well. This summer, I lived in a rural village in the Andes of Peru for two months sharing the Gospel by helping shepherds in their fields, teaching English in the high school, and teaching new Christians there the Bible.

Little moments of my life at Florida State take me back to my life in that beautiful village called San Jose de Quero. It will just come to me randomly, and I start to miss that place where I left a piece of my heart. Lyrics from one of my favorite artists (Brooke Fraser) songs after she went on a journey to Africa and was torn by a woman she met there keep coming back in my mind; "Now that I have seen, I am responsible/Faith without deeds is dead/Now that I have held you in my own arms/I cannot let go of you tonight/"

So I have to tell what I've seen there, how I've lived there. The best way I know how to do that is through pictures, and through these pictures, I will tell what I have seen in life outside of the teepee.

Helping the Shepherds
I worked with an indigenous people in South America called the Wakana Quechua. The way most of these people live is by being shepherds. Here you can see my pal Carmen and I with some of the cows in her herd.

If you really want to show people that you care about them, you should live among them and be a part of their everyday life. I mean, that's what Jesus did, right? So since these people would work with their livestock 5-6 hours a day, I would go out there and help them take their sheep and cows to graze.

Very rarely was the trek easy up to the fields these people in the village owned. It would be a good half hour to an hour of a hike through some tough terrain at 13,000 feet. Plus, I knew nothing about cows or sheep. The people would always laugh at me. "Does anyone in the United States own cattle?" they would ask me. "What would your mother say if she knew you were working as a shepherd?" Carmen would often say, shaking back her head with laughter. "This distance is really far for a gringa, huh?" she would snicker. But everytime I thought that I couldn't make it up the mountain, I prayed that God would give me the strength, because He gives us the strength to do things we cannot do alone. And sure enough, even when I was very sick with food poisoning, He gave me the strength to make it up..every single time.

And when I made it to the field, I was so amazed by the beauty of God's creation and the peacefulness of life I couldn't find in the United States. Back home, especially as an university student, it was all about deadlines and jumping from the next activity to the other. But here, I found la tranquilidad. Calmness.

Teaching English in the High School
My ambitions in life are to 1. work with people from other cultures and to share Christ with them through my actions and 2. to teach people about other cultures, particularly teenagers. So when I was given the chance to teach English to a group of 100 or so high schoolers two days a week, I jumped on it.

It honestly had to be the ultimate teaching challenge. For one, I speak fluent Spanish. But having to teach for four hours in your native language and teaching for four hours in your second language...in a completely different culture-are two different things. Secondly, the regular English teacher just gave me the classroom and said, "Ohh...just teach basic verbs. I'm leaving now..have fun!" I had absolutely no idea what the students already knew, what they were supposed to be learning, or had no textbook, worksheets, whatever to use for teaching. Finally, I was a white girl with a funny American accent. Earning the respect of the students, many who had never met a gringa before, much less one that knew Spanish, was a hard task.

But I did a few things. First, I was very strict with the students to show them that while I was white, I didn't play. I took pride in the difference I saw in the students from laughing at me the first week to being in silent fear the third week. I even used myself as an example of how a foreigner could learn a second language, so they had no excuse for not taking English seriously. Secondly, I tried my best to make class fun. We discussed American music and whether or not the Biebs sang like a girl. We talked about my crazy last name of "Rambo" and if you still called Shrek "Shrek" in English. I even helped them translate "Everything" by Lifehouse into Spanish, and we talked about its Christian meaning and jammed to it in class. Finally, I managed to hunt down their teacher, and he at last gave me some stuff to teach the students.

I had a lot of compassion for these students. Growing up in the lower class in your country as a purely indigenous people meant that they never really had anyone that believed in them or that they could do great things. Very few went to college; most of them became shepherds like their parents. Their teachers were dedicated though-they were a group of teachers who lived in the city an hour and a half away and were devoted to helping lower class Peruvians succeed. I think about these students a lot. Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to go back to that high school and teach English there for a year or two.

Discipling
I have never met a group of people that hungry for God, simply put. Things that we take for granted in the States are things that these Peruvians thirst for. I discipled believers in three places-in their homes, in a Bible study two missionaries I was working with founded, and in a tiny church in the neighboring village of Usibamba.

Carmen was a believer that I would disciple every Monday. She would feed me a lunch of potato soup and cheese, then we would hike up to her field with her livestock. As I and my teammate sat on her manta, she'd ask me to tell her a story from the Bible. I would tell her stories that Jesus taught, the ones called parables. Sometimes she'd ask me to teach her about doctrine, such as if the Bible really does condemn alcohol or dancing. But no matter what, her eyes would grow big every time we talked.

I think the church in the village of Usibamba had the biggest impact on me. From the moment that Rolando, their elected pastor, told his story of going from being the town drunk to the man who wouldn't shut up about Jesus after he became a Christian, I fell in love with this beautiful group of people and cried at every meeting I went to with them. One of my favorite songs that they taught me became one I think of daily, "Ya no tengo madre/Ya no tengo padre/Solamente Cristo/El es la verdad/Ya no tengo padre/Ya no tengo madre/Solamente Cristo/En mi corazon." (I don't have a mother anymore/I don't have a father anymore/Only Christ/He is the truth/I don't have a father anymore/I don't have a mother anymore/Only Christ/In my heart." By the way these people would listen to us and their leaders teach the Bible for three hours each Sunday and still beg for more, you knew that Christ really was all they wanted. I will never forget the genuine joy I saw in their eyes everytime I looked at them.

In the Teepee
It's nearly 1 AM right now, and I have to be up in six hours if I'm going to the gym to work out like I should before my morning classes. The demands of tomorrow are already calling my name.

Will I write more about this later, for I still have stories to tell? Possibly. But there is rarely tranquilidad in the life I live now in the United States. Papers, exams, campus ministry events, international ministry events, relationships-are all things that take up my time now. I love it. But I know that there is more than this.

There is life outside of the teepee. There is more than paper after paper, trying to keep up a 3.5 GPA so I can get into graduate school. There's San Jose de Quero, that's the beautiful life I know outside of the teepee. The beautiful people, the calmness, the joy in the eyes of the people there all lie there.

But there is even life outside of San Jose de Quero. That life is the life that called me to San Jose de Quero in the first place, and that is the new life I found in Jesus Christ six years ago. And I pray that this life outside of the teepee is the life that will continue to be number one to me.