Oxapampa is a charming city of 10,000 inhabitants situated in a broad river valley in the upper rain forest. The town was founded by Austrian immigrants in the middle of the 19th century. Life in central Europe was difficult at that time due to famine and war. In 1853…
The Perene River, a tributary of the Amazon, floods during the months of December through April. The rushing waters leave generous deposits of sand along the shorelines, making nice beaches for bathing during the dry season. The village of Boca Ipoki lies on the shore of the Perene River…
The city of Villa Rica – population 14,000 – was founded by European settlers in the 19th century. The area is known as La Tierra del Café (the Land of Coffee). Italian migrants, who appreciated a good cup of java, began planting seedlings on the surrounding hillsides soon after…
San Francisco and Azulis are sister villages with a combined population of 447 inhabitants. There are close cultural, familial and social ties between these two native Yanesha communities. On the first day of our visit to Azulis, in fact, we met families from San Francisco who had traveled there…
The community of Azulis is named for the clear, blue water of the river nearby. The village was established by four native curanderos (healers) and their families a century ago. In the 1950s missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Wycliffe Bible Translators) ventured into this protected valley and…
Living in a foreign culture — getting to know a new host family and figuring out how to accompany the people they work with each day — is a challenge for our students during these six weeks of service. They are stretched in new ways as they leave the…
This morning the students, all 21 of them, boarded a bus for the central region of Peru to begin their six-week service assignments. Three will volunteer in Tarma, a beautiful city located in the Andean highlands, teaching in a Catholic school and working with children in a program sponsored…
We said goodbye to our Lima host families by inviting them to share an evening with us. We played games and enjoyed a program of drama, dance and song. We also shared American-style refreshments prepared with delicious Peruvian ingredients — sandwiches, salads, kettle corn, cake and passion fruit juice.
As we approach the end of our study time in Lima, we deepened our perspective on what it is like to live and work here by listening to speakers who have migrated here from other places and then traveling to the edge of this sprawling metropolitan area. Father Jeff…
Lima — the City of the Kings — was founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro. For almost three centuries it served as the political and economic hub of the Spanish Empire in western South America. In 1821 Peru gained independence from the Spanish crown and Lima became the capital…
