Opening Blog: Tuesday, June 29th Feast of Peter & Paul

At home, each of the pilgrim travelers is making his or her final preparations for our service trip. While we are all excited, some of us may be more excited than others. I, for instance, spent a couple of months in Peru back in 1990, before our student participants were even born. Those were difficult times: Peru was experiencing two violent armed rebellions, "Sendero Luminoso" or "Shining Path," and "Tupac Amaru." The first was a Maoist-Communist rebellion and was brutally present in the sierra; the second was less-known but still the source of problems. In addition, the country had just been through a difficult presidential election pitting the well-known novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, against Alberto Fujimori, the first Peruvian of Japanese descent to become president. Peru is undoubtedly a much better-off country now than then but the man who had just finished his presidency in 1990, Alan Garcia, is the present president of the country once again. And, of course, for millions of poor Peruvians, the incremental changes in the standard of living is almost irrelevant.
In this blog, we (for I assume others in our group will want to write) will track our nine day foray in Lima. I hope it will be a forum for education and transformation for all.