Another amazing day

The sights and sounds and love of todays diet of yet more amazing grace, is already blurring and mixing in my mind with all that I have experienced here in Peru.
Today we had a relatively late start but at 10am Lima time we were all ready to head off on our 5th and last project visit here in Lima.
The area surrounding this project had once been a fairly well off area near the airport, with housing made of brick. On the face of it this seemed a little strange compared to the squatters dwellings we are all now so familiar with. There were no fragile huts made with scavenged materials, homemade adobe bricks and asbestos sheeting, but the poverty was just the same. Houses that once held one family now hold many families each having only one small room to themselves and then sharing the communal facilities. I visited a home where 3 families (18 people) share a space no larger than a small one bedroom UK flat. Facilities is perhaps too grand a word as I know with certainty that any British family on a camping trip would be far better equipped than these people. Think "stable" and you may be getting close.

However, I really must not focus on the physical and material aspects of the wonderful people I had the privilege of sharing time with, but on their amazing riches!
Their eyes convey a love deeper than any I have ever seen before, and all that they do is Christ in action.
The humbling generosity of the welcome we recieve at each project and sheer excitement of the children blended with a deep desire to fully express a gratitude that is far larger than I personally can begin to grasp.

Over the last 10 days I have learned many things.
The first was that I fully grasped as heart rather than head knowledge, that we are all the same. The child playing in the project in Lima or Chiclayo is no different to my own son playing at school in Scotland. It is only their own individual circumstances and location that differ. That nasty dirty entity that is poverty, a lack of hope that strangles a new born baby, child, teenager or adult of his God-given potential.
Poverty has many ugly faces and I am beginning to grasp that it is the same the world over wherever it is allowed to flourish, whether in Peru, the slums of any other developing country, in the life of a homeless abused teenager on the streets of Aberdeen, or even in the heart of a materially wealthy millionaire who does not not know Jesus.

This has been an amazing life changing experience and I thank all who have made it possible and all who have shared this time with me here in Peru.