3/20/09

Adios Nashville, Hola Peru!







Friends,

I’ve always been enamored with maps: grand, silken-canvassed rare gems, matted and framed and only to be admired under glass, or simple, pencil sketches scribbled on the backs of napkins, the kind Joni Mitchell immortalized in “Case Of You.” My prized souvenirs from many a road trip over the last 15 years have always been the blueprints of the land where I briefly planted my footsteps.


This April, the road bends south: way south, as Michael and I will leave behind the rolling hills of our Tennessee home for the jagged Andean sierras. We’ll spend April and May in the Peruvian village of Curahuasi, and we are very excited at this opportunity to plug into the local culture and to experience a very different way of life.


Our destination is the Diospi Suyana Hospital, where we will be living and working. Michael and I were invited to Diospi Suyana by two of Michael’s friends, now missionary physicians, who left Nashville last year to serve in Peru. Diospi Suyana Hospital, which means “God Is Our Hope,” was founded several years ago by two German physicians who dreamed of building a missions hospital to serve the Quechuan Indians living here in abject poverty.


Curahuasi, seated in the Apurimac region of Peru and 125 kilometers west of Cusco, is at an altitude of 8,500 feet above sea-level. Approximately 750,000 people, predominantly indigenous and direct descendants of the Incas, live within a three-hour radius of Curahuasi. We will do our best to update you on life from 'al sur del equador' (south of the Equator)!

3 comments:

frontrowseat said...

I. Am. So. Jealous.
But happy for you, too. I'll be following your blog.

Jonathan said...

Have a great time!! This will be something you remember for the rest of your lives, take it all in.

Jonathan said...
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