One week to go

Greetings traveller,
We had an epic water fight a while ago which was awesome. People then started throwing mud at eachother and really dirty water which i wasn´t up for - was still good fun though. Carnival has just passed - a festival where everyone goes a bit mental and throws water at eachother or sparys eachother with white foam. It´s officially boys against girls and the boys are particularly merciless - gangs of them were roaming the streets on Sunday looking for targets. The next most obvious targets are white people (such as myself).                       >>>>(peter throwing a water bomb at people.. haha)>>>>>>>>>>>>

 We also had a great time go-karting the other day - i took some of the older boys and then a few days later me and JD went with the even older boys and a new guy (Josh) who´s coming to stay at the home. I was zipping round the track when the manager asked me to pull over and said "Oi mate, NO professionals." I said "I´m not a professional." He said, "Well you should be." True story.I also had the opportunity to play some pro 

evolution soccer in a wee shop with some of the boys. It was great as i beat the most overly competitive boy in the world called Antonio with a last minute goal and felt compelled to celebrate wildly in the crowded shop - he took it quite well, on the surface anyway.
Haven´t been feeling too well - in fact i spent much of yesterday and today suffering from the effects of food poisoning but am now on the road to recovery. You´ve probably never seen such impressive vomiting - it was everywhere. JD and all of the boys and other interns took great care of me while i was bed ridden and all went to great effort to nurse me back to health. Abel (the pastor and house parent) even brought a TV into the room so i could watch the Royal Rumble - what a legend. I am gutted to be missing out on the Royal Rumble wrestling event we have been planning for the boys which is probably happening

 tonight - i was planning to main event. It was mentioned as a joke in the meeting we had to plan stuff but Abel loved it as he´s really into wrestling - back of the net!
Anyway, i´m heading to Lima relatively soon for the first leg of my trip back.
toga bogey

sunday 22 feb

What can i say? I will add lots of pictures as i feel i want to represent more of the group of kids to you, and also the place we live in. All the trip and activites have been possible because of your donations..

The first picture is the Arequipa center square PLAZA.

The main square has the big Catholic

cathedral which is made out of white
rock called SILLAR. This rock is from the Misti volcano that sleeps beside "the white city". We call down to the plaza when we want to change dollars and get some food.

Every morning if i look out my window i see Chachani volcano and the other picture on the right is Misti volcano.

I love to be reminded that just as this powerfull volcano is looking over the city so is God Almighty who looks over each of us.. He is more powerfull and wonderfull than anything you can imagine. Psalm 19 comes to mind every time..

Today we went for a trip.. we visted an old mill. It was really sunny and the kids had a great time.. they ran around and you would not think that they had a backround that has brought them to this childrens home.. and this is how God sees us -from whatever bad backround we have come from He sees you as people He loves..

This is Seth, another volunteer. Pray for him as he works with the youth and teaches photography to them.

And the rest of the team. Lidia, Julia and Andrew from the U.S, and Lisia from Germany, and Jorge who is going to be on the team for a year possibly. We met up with him and went go-carting with the older dudes...

Peter is really doing well with the kids - they love him to bits..!

Hold on to a good thing! ....................don't lose it...

friday 20th feb

Hi to all, it is raining here! I'm wet and full of mud because we decided to go off for dinner in Sabandia - a far off place in the valley, where you can't really get a taxi back. No one had a phone but they did have a quad bike, so Peter drove and i sat on the back, getting splattered by mud. The dude we payed 5 soles to get to a main road to get a taxi ran behind us. He didn't last too long as he got splatter in mud and was let behind. We stopped a taxi in the pouring rain but Peter had a 50 sole note only. But half way down the trip we got this changed in to smaller coins, like 100 & 50 cents..... hahaha..

A good end to a rather stressfull day. The boys did not obey - they were to go on a tour - there's more to this, but i can't be stressed to retell.. But the boys are not going tomorrow to Sabandia to enjoy the quad bikes and horse riding..

I'm trying to think what we did yesterday..

the picture on the right is of the day trip before some boys were in trouble.. we took them to 2 museums, one of Peru Arequipa and other of pre-inca stuff. This trip and many others were possible because of your donations.
The picture is of three of the groups: older girls, younger girls, and the boys group i'm a tutor with. The younger boys group was not in this picture as they were still in the museum.



These days we have been going with the boys on individual trips, giving them 15 soles to spend. The plan is to go with a tutor. It's like a mentoring project. The boys get a bit of their time, and by going out with a tutor they also may open up more about stuff they want to talk about..

Peter is doing a great job with this. He has been taking some to a playstation shop to play and cinema and go-carting.. I took a boy, Jorge, to meet up with his granny because he has not really seen her or other people from his family.. This was quite a tour and took some finding, going from one family member to another and crossing all part of town.. eventually we did find her. She bought him and his younger brother that did not come with us a big bag of fruit.. After this we went into town and He wanted to buy some ornamental fish.. so we got a wee fish tank and two fish... but the last days his fish have died. so we have got two more.. He is 11 and really loves and is proud for his small family.. He has named the fish Peter and J-d.. the J-d fish died the other day.. i think it drowned..!

Lockhart one, Peru nil

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you´ll land among the stars." Les Brown, Author
"Controversy creates cash." Eric Bischoff, RAW General manager

Greetings traveller,
Life in Peru is a lot like the movie Apocalypto but with less running about and more fizzy pop. It´s also a bit like the movie Dead Poet´s Society but without Robin Williams. So if you can imagine a cross between those two movies you get a fairly good idea of what it´s like at the home.
We sometimes get to watch movies - almost all of them feature talking dogs. The talking dog genre is perhaps the most underrated of all the movie genres. We saw one yesterday where loads of dogs started running a hotel - crazy (or as the Peruvians say "loco"!)
I´ve had the opportunity to try to teach the people at the home English. Watching me do this is a bit like watching Peter Crouch try to play football. I always laugh when they can´t say a word in English - it sounds sly but you´d understand if you heard them - it´s hilarious. The English language makes no sense either - it´s ridiculously hard if you don´t already know it plus my accent is completely different form the American accent they´re used to hearing. Even when i definitely know the right words in Spanish people tend to not understand because i say them in a Northern Irish accent. Also, i tend to just throw one or two Spanish words into an English sentence in the hope they´ll understand eg. "What a belter day - proper scorchio so it is." This seems to work or else people just do what i do when they don´t know what people are saying - just nod, smile and say yes. I´m not going to try talking in a Spanish accent, however, as when i do i sound a bit like Manuel from Fawlty Towers if he was really angry.
Everything is opposite in the Southern hemisphere - the water in the toilet goes in the opposite direction, it rains up and hamburgers eat people. Everyone is also quite short which is good because it makes me feel big. In fact i´m 3 inches taller than Peru´s tallest man. The other thing that´s different is that people get up very early. I was sick for a while so when we were told in the staff meeting we would be getting the boys up before 6 i started searching desperately through my Spanish phrasebook for the phrase "wind your neck in". Remember it´s their summer holidays - personally i think that´s a bit early. If i was woken up that early in my summer holidays i think i´d go mental before too long. We get up a bit later now though so it´s OK.
We used to have meetings every day at two with staff and interns. I didn´t know what was happening but i sat there in a vain attempt to pick up some Spanish. Sometimes people started making very funny hand gestures (you can only imagine) while they were talking seriously which was hilarious and it took all of my self restraint to not break into a really loud laugh - it was even funnier because i didn´t know what they were talking about and no-one else laughed.
It can be very hard to get enough good food - i´m fearful i´ll lose my trademark curves. I´ve been trying to eat loads when i get the chance - after this i need to go and buy loads of fruit to build up my immune system which has taken a bit of a battering. I´m constantly getting scammed by people selling stuff on the street/people in general because i´m foreign and people assume i don´t have a clue (their assumption is correct). I stand out a bit and may as well wear a t-shirt saying "I love being ripped off" although i fear if i wear such a t-shirt it may only make the situation worse. A fruit lady tried to shortchange me so i just stood there and made the international symbol for money (rub the thumb and forefingers together) until she gave me more money back. Lockhart one, Peru nil. Hopefully i´ll build up a repuation over Peru as someone not to mess with - maybe i´ll tip one of their stalls over to create an example.
My main method of transportation would be taxi - they´re handy but the drivers are mental - i wish you could see the constantly terrified expression on my face as they drive me around. We got a great driver (quite a big, old man) who started doing a dance when this great techno beat came on the radio. He was loving it and so were we. I also saw a van which had a transformer sticker on it - why are there not more of these? If you have one then people will think that your car is a transformer.
We went into a travel agents because they advertised free biscuits and tea if you let them talk to you. I spilt my free tea overmyself a number of times (due to a problem with the polystyrene cup but i´ll not go into detail). The man had a very high voice and, again, it was very hard to not break into a very loud laugh. I wish he´d told me off in his very high voice when i spilt the tea - he didn´t - but that would´ve been hilarious.
We got the chance to take a cheeky day trip to the beach which was great. An old man on the bus was wearing a helmet as he´d bumped his head on the roof on a previous bus journey. I hope to become an eccentric old man like him. The beach was great and i got sunburn again - i´ll never learn. Today we went to the zoo in Arequipa which made Belfast zoo look brilliant. I enjoyed it though - there was penguins and monkeys which kept me happy. The wee kid i was to look after wasn´t as interested in animals and just wanted to go to the play area. He was sick of the way i was pointing at animals and deliberately getting their names wrong. Anyway, we missed the fantastapottamous which only sings twice a day. I also enjoyed criticising zoos in other cities which i´d never been to claiming they had a labrador as their main exhibit and also claiming Belfast zoo had animals "you could only dream of".
Well, until next time keep up the good work and make sure you stay updated. If you need to know any specific details try typing your questions into a website called ask jeeves. If that fails i suppose you can send an email or even leave a question underneath the blog although i probably can´t respond as this technology is beyond me.
Ciao,
Peter Lockhart

monday 9th FEB

by J-D..

The visit from the New York pastor has been a lift for every one.. he has taught us new songs in spanish and he is alway encouraging us. we all have been blessed.

Some days its been hard to get stuff happening but one day i spent time with Agusto, the disabled boy, we used to take care of. He has now moved to the smaller kids dorm ¨house¨. He likes it there i think. He is always smiling. The day i had time to spend with him was when the other boys were out. Peter took some to play Ps2 in a wee shop, and others were in school. Agusto and me, after eating a very large mango, decided that we would plant it and it would be his plant, so we went round the home and found stuff to make a plant pot for his mango plant.

Here you can see how happy he is with this project. He is holding up the mango seed that he planted. Agusto does not speak words but he is very affectionate.

David Bolos has now left to the U.S. to do touring churches to flag up the intrest for help for the childrens home. The 5 Interns will be be in charge to orgnise stuff now.

This is some of the younger dudes that are in our care. The home is thinking of moving the 4 younger ones into a smaller dorm and separate living space from the others that are currently in our care and dorm.

Luis from the younger kids .

Roberto

Crazy Fredy

Blog Standard

Greetings traveller,

I was disappointed today to find out today that the language i´ve been speaking isn´t Spanish - it´s just a language i invented or "made up" so that explains a lot. I had a quick look at the news in the UK to keep up to date and see what i was missing. The main news headline was "Carol Vordemann to front Tory Maths Clampdown" so i don´t think i´m missing too much. I also found out it has been snowing. I tried to explain in Spanish to some Peruvian that there is snow in Britain but apparently said "John Snow has taken over Britain." They looked understandably concerned. Got beaten at chess by JD recently. What makes it worse is he kept calling his pawns "prawns". The six nations is starting so hopefully we can organise a trip for all the kids to go and watch it - they´ll learn to love it. Ireland should be good with Paddy Wallace ready to make a name for himself on the international scene with his dazzling ability *TRUMPET*. We´re trying to organise an olympic games style tournament to keep the kids (and us) entertained. Each team will represent a country and take part in various events which will test mental or physical ability (and sometimes both). I have an ambitious pyrotechnics display planned for the opening ceremony which promises to get the games started with a "bang" (excuse the pun). Also, the home is being visited by a pastor from New York who´s cool and says things like "Fuggetaboutit!" I think this is brilliant and am going to start saying it all the time although i´ve yet to learn the correct context.

Keep it real and keep reading the blog - careful you don´t fuggedaboutit!
PS . The WAZZZUUUP! craze is on the brink of once again catching on in Peru and also you say SCORCHIO if you skin someone in football.
Peter "Rockhard" Lockhart

monday 2ed Mar

Hey, i have been drinking lots of Inca Kola, i still have to have a good empanada, but next door to this place sells a good range.. i could be tempted!

To day is our day off but we did lots at the home before we got downtown.. today Peter and I went with a boy called Jesus, to visit his granny. we took a small bus. An hour later we got to the edge of Arequipa. she lived in a very small place and had lots of chickens running around. it was so good to be on this trip to see Jesus meet up with his relatives that he does not meet much. and to understand little more of the backround some come from.. i dont know the full story of him beeing in the home. but i'm sure like all the others there is a sad story..

I will get to see the files on all the kids some day i asked to see them so that i can understand and may be see in any way i can be more of help to them.

I forgot to say last week we took the boys swiming.. it was good fun peter brought a american football with him so we used that. lots of splashing about and sun burn... :)

the camping is going to be changed to the 20th- 21st.. so pray for that..

this is the list of all the boys that we look after..

we like them all and have good fun with all!!

Jesus ..not happy all the time and in moods a bit..
Roberto..easy going and does what you tell him..
Benildo...he has left to visit relatives and wont be back this week..
fernando.. he is an older boy in uni so he helps us out with the kids a bit..
Jorge .. it has been thought that he will move from the boys teen room to the kids room.. pray that this goes well and that it works out best for him.. he will be with his younger brother there also.
Fredy.. this dude is class but very hyper all the time and we having hard time to get him to obey
Agusto.. hes a disabled dude he had a older brother Ruben.. and we help him as much as we can.. he cant talk just sounds.. i have been teaching him to wash his hands and make his bed.
Henry.. hes quiet, but really good at football.
Ruben.. hes an older boy, brother of Agusto.
Avelino.. older dude.. so not much of a hand full
Moises,.. hes a hand full .. today Peter and I carried both moises and fredy to the area where they had to do the house duties...


Today im tired even though i went to bed early.. we played a game in the footie pitch called hand ball.. where you use footie nets, but all you do is to score in the other teams net. you use your hands and run.. no real rules.. there is a dude from the U.S.. here for 2 weeks and every time he had the ball, every one of the other team just hung on to him untill he was on the floor.. it was a fun game i could not stop laughing, more because i never played well but ended up in the middle of the rumble each time..

Just back from Sagafalla bella a super store where they have a cinema also.. checked out the films and noted down the prices.. so maybe we can take the chicas and chicos (girls and boys)there one day..

oh also will be org a trip to the zoo soon.. the other girls from the U.S interns are more involved in planing this..


Sunday- Peter me and russel went to the Alianza church in town.. it is more like Strandtown,, has two services..

My notes of it..
Nehemiah 3

--today its your turn.. God calls you!

--where would you be on Gods list?

(Nehemiah 3, lists: Those that didnt work, did work, and worked enthusiastically!)

--God wants to call on your life, what are you doing with it?

--together we can change the world for God!

our program:

sun off every other week,

mon day off

tues off 2-9pm

weds not off

thurs not off

fri 2-9pm off

sat not off.

God bless and thanks for your prayers..