peru! we went to peru!

So i went to peru. in the middle of april. just because. 

i didn't plan it. i didn't deserve it. i didn't even believe it. 

literally, it was on the calendar and i said it outloud "i'm going to peru!" but, it wasn't until i was actually in the miami airport with the sharpe family that i realized this was happening. 

let me back up. my parents sent me to camp longhorn when i was twelve. a huge blessing and a financial stretch at the time and a struggle for a quiet, shy girl who rarely enjoyed spending the night at friends houses. (i wasn't quite as lame as that sounds, but after my cousin died when i was in third grade, i worried sometimes i'd wake up and not get to see my parents again. irrational, i know, but...)

so there i was, camp longhorn. three summers pass and i become besties with a girl in another cabin who is from (gasp!) oklahoma. 

fast forward through the trips to each other's hometowns senior year, and the long summers working our tails off by day/playing by night and loving every minute, and the trips to colorado and chicago and dc and overseas through italy & switzerland & paris. 

so here we are, at peru. i left the states a pretty grateful girl. i returned with refreshed thanksgiving for everything in my life. my friends - what a glorious ray of sunshine that renza is in my life! and her family, to treat me as their own for an entire week and not even think twice. and my family - for encouraging me to break out of my comfort zone, for saving the monies to send us to camp, for reminding me how special renza is and what a great person/friend. (and they think other camp friends they met while we working for tex and visited the lake house are great, too!)

peru was spectacular, and beautiful, and full of history and delicious food and dusty streets and incan trails. i loved so much of it. but i was struck by the poverty that was everywhere- along the road side as we cruised by in our cushy tour van, on the street corner as we headed to a delicious restaurant - it's the same in every city and every country, the difference between the haves and the have nots, but something about peru was different. they're not third world and yet they seem quite ...behind. so many of the towns - and some of them were "major" towns - had homes that did not have windows. one tour guide came from a village that still has no electricity. they don't use many agricultural machines or many of the advances we know in the US. 

I don't mean to sound filled with pity or haughty thoughts about how great america is and "oh the poor peruvians." there were plenty wealthy ones, and plenty middle class doing just fine i'm sure. but, i felt blessed, thinking about my luxuries back home - my washing machine and dryer, my laptop, my air conditioned car, my paved wide open freeways - and not just the materialistic things. some of the guides we talked to spoke of catholicism as routine, rout, still forced as if the spanish inquisition threatens to return. but, this is not true in my corner of the bible belt. we have churches filled with passion, fervor, desire to walk with Christ, as cliche as it may sound. sure, we have religion based on tradition and rules and habit, and we all fall into that sometime, but, we have options. that was one thing i did not see in peru. options. both in faith and life, education and career. 

i was blessed to spend a week in the beautiful, majestic, historical Peru. i was blessed to see their colorful, beautiful textiles and taste their crazy flavors and vegetation and Macchu Picchu. Oh, Macchu Picchu, deserves its' own post. I was blessed by the conversations with good friends and the sights we saw together. and i was blessed to return home, to my land of the free, to my family and the familiar. i was quite blessed to return home to a particular boy i know, whom i adore and fills my life with happiness daily, and who picked me up from the airport wearing a suit, his hair gelled drastically to one side, holding a sign that said "robinson." ah, what a weirdo. we're meant to be, i think. 

it was wild week, full of hiking and spas and laughter til your face hurt. that's just like renza, and the wonderful pair who raised her, DonLog - full of adventure, laughter, wisdom, and kindness. I am blessed to know them, and to have spent a week in Peru with them. now enough of my rambling; as they say, a picture says a thousand words.