Ups and Downs

The title today is kind-of thought provoking for me, because the events of this week have been both ups & downs at the same time.  Billy's dad died on Wednesday night after a valiant fight with lung cancer during the past year.  He was diagnosed just after we left Texas for Costa Rica last summer.  Early this summer, it appeared that he had beat it and his doctors said that he was cancer free, so we rejoiced in this healing.  We had a great visit with him in June as he finished his treatments.  He was in great spirits, but continued to have troubles breathing due to the incredible damage in his lungs from the tumor and the radiation/chemo treatments.  On July 2nd, he was hospitalized because he couldn't keep his oxygen levels up and he had pneumonia.  At that time, a new, aggressive tumor was found in his lungs that was being fed by an artery and was inoperable.  He was not in any pain until this week - Praise God!  On Tuesday, he began having lots of pain and began to deteriorate quickly.  Everyone's prayer was that he would not suffer and his trip to heaven would be swift, which it was.  On Wednesday night, with Billy's mom and sisters at his side and Billy on the telephone with him, he died.  The whole family was together and everyone was able to say goodbye and they loved him (including Billy via phone).  So, of course, everyone is sad at the loss and going through a period of grief.  But also, we are so grateful that he wasn't in pain for long, that he didn't linger and waste away for a long period of time, that he didn't suffer, and that everyone had the opportunity to see him and love him and tell him goodbye.  It seems strange to find blessings in death, but they are there, and there are many of them.

So Billy has gone back to Dallas to be with his mom and his sisters for 3 weeks.  This, too, was a happy/sad decision... he was happy to have the opportunity to go home (via frequent flyer miles) and help his mom out and happy to have the opportunity to see Ryan and Miles again.  At the same time, he was sad to leave Peru, sad to leave the ministry, and sad/worried about leaving me and Sarah for 3 weeks.  We haven't ever spent more than 3 days apart - in 22 years! He cried as he said morning prayers over breakfast... this has been an emotional roller coaster.

Please keep Billy in your prayers as he travels (he has been on a bus for 8+ hours today, and will catch a flight in Lima tonight for another 12 hours of flying).  Please pray for his peace and safety and for God to be a comfort to him in the next few days/weeks of grieving.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a happier note... Alfredo the plumber is finished!!!  Hallelujah!  After he cleaned out our tank and hooked up the pressure pump, the hot water heater "exploded"... not exactly, but it sprung a multitude of leaks in it's sad little rusty body due to the high water pressure that Alfredo hooked up.  So then began the saga of buying a new water heater and getting that installed (2 days of no hot water).  But all is well now... we have hot water, we have water pressure, we can take real baths and showers, and we can fill the washing machine!  I was amazed to find out that it isn't really supposed to take two and a half hours to do one load of laundry! 

Now if I can only master the chair in the office... the office chair and I had a fight… more like a rodeo.  Unfortunately, the chair won.  I wasn’t able to stay on for the required 8 seconds.  It threw me off and into the corner between the sofa and the wall.  Charlotte (the puppy) found the whole show quite amusing – she looked up from her nap on the sofa, yawned, cocked her head at me, and went back to sleep.  I’m okay… good thing I didn’t break a hip or anything!  Liz doesn’t return to the house until next Wednesday because of Peruvian Independence Day holidays!!!  I would have been lying here for a long time, with Charlotte and Oreo (the cat) licking my face and me dying of frost bite since the office door is wide open.  Sarah probably wouldn’t have ever noticed… she would just watch cartoons in the house and feed herself out of the fridge and the pantry like those orphan kids you see on the news.  Maybe someone would have noticed that I didn't show up to Friday night worship or Saturday Kid's Club, but I don't know  - it being a holiday weekend and all.  Anyway - good thing I wasn't hurt.  Guess I should put this chair in "time out" like I used to do when my students fell out of their chairs in class!  HA!

It's Official!

After a week of traveling on buses, planes, taxis, etc. to get through the Andes mountains to Lima and on to Arica, Chile, we are now officially card-carrying residents of Peru.  What that exactly means to the average person, I have no idea.  But evidently it is an important step.  I just know that it was a GIANT hassle and it cost us a lot of money to get a rubber stamp in our passport that says we are "residents".  We also have official Peruvian identification cards now (look a lot like a drivers license from the USA) that we have to carry everywhere and be ready to show any one at the drop of a hat.  Now, we start the whole process again for Sarah... since she is a minor, she couldn't apply for residency until her parents were actually residents.  The good news is that the law changed while we were in mid-process and now we won't have to leave the country to get her paperwork processed!  We will have to travel back to Lima, but that is all.  Hallelujah!

So, if you are following our plumbing saga, the news for today is... the plumber still appears to live in our house.  Yes, that's right, he is still here.  If it's not one thing, it's another (old timers can hear Rosanna Rosannadana speaking in their heads right now).  Today, the plumber has emptied our water tank on the roof and cleaned it out and he is going to put some new valves and hootie-doots and doomaflajies on it so that he can connect our pressure pump up.  If you couldn't already guess, I have absolutely no idea what he is doing!  I finally gave up trying to understand... it dawned on me that I didn't understand the plumbers in Texas, so why on earth would I even think that I could understand one in Peru!!!???  It didn't make any sense to me in English, so it certainly doesn't in Spanish!  Anyway, maybe we can take a real, honest to goodness bath/shower sometime this week... maybe.  Guess I better find out when Alfredo's birthday is, just in case he is still living with us when that occurs!  :)

I don't want to write too much "good stuff" because it is almost newsletter time again and I already have plans to fill it up with the "good stuff".  Sorry... you'll have to wait to read about ministry happenings later.  Suffice to say that we are busy and getting busier...

Random musings from Huancayo

Seems like I have nothing to really write about, but then I think about what I like to read in other people's blogs and I have decided that maybe I DO have something to say...

• Our visas are FINALLY ready for us to finalize them!!!  Hallelujah!  So we will travel to Chile (which is really a 5 day round-trip process) this week and finish the process that we started back before Christmas last year!  Bad news... we are incurring an extra travel cost of $1500 because this has taken so long AND we have to do it all again in a month or so because Sarah's visa has to be done separately.  Good news... we get to get another passport stamp from another country, we get to see more new places and meet more new people, and we can finally mark this off of our "to do" list!
• For those of you who have been following the story of Billy's dad... he has been moved to a pulmonary specialist hospital in Plano.  They specialize in working with people in his condition and have weaned him down to 50% oxygen now.  They predict that he could be up and walking again within 30 days.  The best part is that they have been able to give him HOPE again and his spirits are greatly improved.  
• We are loving Peruvian food!!!  Everything that food in Costa Rica lacked, Peru has embraced... mainly spicy hotness!  Almost everything is cooked with garlic and onions and a type of chile pepper.  If you have ever cooked food from Louisiana, you have used "the trinity" - onion, bell pepper, and celery.  Well, the trinity of foods in Huancayo is garlic, onions, and chile.  We eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.  Peru is big on potatoes, but we also have rice, too.  We mostly eat chicken at lunch, but have also been known to have pork and fish.  We have only had red meat/beef once, when we ate in a local place down the street.  
• I live with lip balm and Kleenex in my pockets.  The dry, cold climate makes your nose run constantly and your lips stay chapped.  At first, my hands were dried out and chapped, too, but that seems to be getting better as I get acclimated.
• Clothes... layers, layers, layers!  In general, I wear tights under my pants or skirt every day, an undershirt, a turtle neck, and a sweater, and a jacket if need be.  If we are in the full sun, I can shed the jacket and sweater if I'm hot (doesn't happen too often).  By 4ish in the afternoon, it starts to get cooler because the sun starts to dip down below the mountains and we are in the shadows again.  At night, Sarah sleeps in polar fleece footie pajamas under two wool blankets and a quilt.  I generally wear flannel or polar fleece pants, two layers of shirts, and socks.  Billy and I sleep under two alpaca blankets and a quilt, too.  I'm thinking that Victoria's Secret wouldn't stay in business very long here!!!  It's just too cold to worry about "pretty" in pajamas.
• We have met very nice people here and are enjoying getting to know the culture.  We have a long discussion every day with Liz regarding random topics that lead to lots of learning on our part... education, typical marriage age, health issues, language learning, how foreigners are viewed, worker's issues and government, etc.  We learn so much just from conversations over lunch in our home.  We also will talk to anyone who will listen... the taxi drivers, shop keepers, etc.  Billy spent an hour with an older couple who runs a corner store the other day - actually, he was walking and was "lost" and stopped to ask for directions, which led to coffee and conversation.  He plans to go back and make them a regular stop on his language route.

So, those are the immediate things on my mind this morning.  Billy and Sarah have gone off on a quest for Qtips... who knows where they might find those!?  They aren't in the grocery store.  Later we have to go get passport photos for our trip to Chile and go to Kid's Club this afternoon (Hallelujah!!! - the highlight of my week!).  Just another day in Huancayo...

Traveling, Visas, Timing, Strikes, etc...

First, let me start this out with a prayer request... Billy's dad has been given the news that his lung cancer is terminal.  A tumor about the size of a grapefruit is in his lungs and is fed by an artery... it is inoperable.  He is on 100% oxygen and they have said that he could have hours or he could have a few months... who knows.  Billy is, of course, upset and saddened by this turn of events, but feels good about where his dad is spiritually right now.  Please pray for Billy and his sisters and his mom as they go through this time of grief and stress.  Please pray for peace for his dad as he prepares for heaven.

Billy cannot go home immediately, which brings me to the "travel, visas, and timing" portion of the title.  First of all, under perfect conditions, it would take Billy 2+ days to get from here to Texas.  But, of course, we don't have perfect conditions.  Our residency visas are not final and we cannot leave until they are.  The clock is ticking because we were approved on June 25 and we had 30 days from that date to finalize.  The catch is that they sent Billy's visa to Houston and mine to Chile!  So now we are waiting for our visas to reunite in Chile so we can fly there and finalize them.  Could be in a week or so.  Add to this the national strike... Peru is having a strike - something about the miners not getting correctly paid.  We are advised to not travel until the strike is over.  Tomorrow and Thursday, we are advised to not leave our home unless absolutely necessary.  So here we sit...

Billy will eventually go home to see his mom and his sisters and hopefully, his dad.  Sarah and I will stay in Huancayo.  We don't feel that it would be good to put Sarah through any more transition right now.  We have plenty of help and friends here to help take care of us while Billy is away, and we feel really at home and really safe here, so we'll be fine.  If this had happened while we lived in Costa Rica, I would NOT feel fine about it... I never felt safe there!  But we feel great here.  Billy will go home for a week or two and all will be great with us.

Please pray for Billy and for travel and visas and strikes, etc.  Thanks for all that you do for us.  Thanks for being prayer warriors on our behalf.

We're Finally Here!

Sorry for the GIANT lapse in posts.  The past few weeks have been pretty full and blogging was way down on the bottom of the list.  However, we now have something of value to blog, so here goes:

We left Texas on Monday, June 23 with 12 bags and boxes (to the tune of $1000+ in baggage fees).  I think the American Airlines lady was actually smirking as she told us our total cost for luggage!  The security people were very nice and came out to tell us that they would have to open all of our bags (which were zip-tied), but that they would be happy to re-seal them for us if we had extra ties, which we did.  Then they came back out to let us know that all of our bags were inspected and all was well and re-sealed.  We thought that was above and beyond for what they have to do in their job.  After a two hour delay in Houston, we flew to Miami.  We then had a two+ hour delay in Miami.  We finally left US airspace at about 1:20 a.m. and arrived in Lima at 5:30ish Peru time.  After two more hours of waiting on bags and going through customs, we met Arthur and Genaro and headed for the hotel for some real rest (as opposed to airplane sleep).

We drove to Huancayo on Wednesday and spent most of the trip sleeping and trying to breathe this thing they call “air” here in the Andes!  We are felt LOADS better Thursday after sleep, aspirin, and food.  The stress headache and back pain miraculously disappeared when we arrived :)   

We walked by our new house Thursday morning just to see the outside and write down our address and we happened to arrive when the old tenants were there getting a couple of things they had left (namely, their toilet seat) and the caretaker was there getting house ready for us… so we were able to go in and actually see our new home.  It is GREAT!!!  We are very happy with it.  There is lots of space and lots of sunlight.  We cannot move in until Saturday night, so we are spending the next days getting our “stuff” in order – we spent all day today trying to find two mattresses, a stove, a fridge, and a washer and dryer.  This is not an easy feat when you are not familiar with the brands AT ALL, are trying to get accustomed to working with a different monetary system, and just trying to find the actual stores in which to shop!  Thank goodness we had Genaro with us (a twenty-something Peruvian who works with the Iveys)!  He didn’t do so much translating as he did just trying to keep us straight with monetary issues and making deals.  No telling what kind of trouble you can get yourself into when you are oxygen deprived!  When it was all said and done, we had bought all of the above mentioned things, arranged to have them delivered and installed on Saturday night, received discounts and bonuses, and still made it home for dinner!  And somehow we managed to come out of it with a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a set of knives, and a skillet “for free” – HA!  We’re exhausted!!!

Today (Friday), we are off to find kitchen items - dishes, pots/pans, etc. - and of course, a toilet seat.  We need to pick up some blankets and some cleaning supplies, too.  Tonight, we will attend the worship service that the ministry here started awhile back... we attended it when we visited here in Dec. 2006 and it is still going strong.  The praise band practiced in the Ivey's living room last night (every Thursday night).  

Sarah has made many friends in every store and has decided that she is in the market for a puppy, a kitten, a guinea pig, a fish, and birds for her new house.  The house had an old bird cage hanging on the back porch and she took it as a “sign” that she really should have some.  She even has the man who runs our hostel talked into taking her to the market on Sunday to buy a puppy!  Is there such a thing as a zoo ministry???  I hope not!  

So, that’s how our last few days have gone.  We will let you know when we get internet service… we are “borrowing” service from the Iveys right now.  

Our new mailing address is:

Billy and Laurie Drum

Jr. San Jose 230

Urb. San Carlos

Huancayo, Peru

Thanks for following us and praying for safe travels and easy transitions.   Things are going well, we have met some great people, we are all healthy and happy, and it seems that we will quickly be involved in some ministry aspects.  Can't ask for better than that!  We will put some photos up on the blog as soon as we can... we need to find the camera in all of this luggage first!

This week in the USA...

Let me start out by saying that if you have ANYTHING else that you need to be doing, go ahead and do it... this blog entry will be totally pointless and will be an incredible waste of your valuable time.  However, I feel obligated to post once a week (or so) and sometimes my life just doesn't seem all that exciting.  Several of my missionary peers feel the same way (that their lives are equally as boring as mine) and that they really don't have a lot of incredible information to post on a weekly basis, but none the less, there are "blog police" out there who get all fussy if we don't post each week, and then they whine and say things like, "Why haven't you posted in 8.26 days???  I've been waiting on pins and needles for your next post!"  You know who you are...  

So, here are the random thoughts and events of the past week or so...

We are still "home" in the USA, awaiting our June 23rd departure date for Peru.  We continue to wait for our Peruvian visas, which are delayed - again.  It appears that we will now have to enter the country as tourists on a 90 day visa and work from within the country to get our residency visas finalized.  This means that when the visas are ready, we will have to leave the country and travel to Chile, then re-enter the country as "residents".  Which means that we will incur the unbudgeted cost of extra travel to Chile.  Oh well - such is business in Latin America.  

We have been super busy speaking at church services, dessert receptions, dinners, etc.  I think that we are finally finished with the "scheduled" speaking engagements.  However, there is a long list of people who still would like some time with us and want to meet for lunch, or dinner, or coffee, or whatever.  We are flattered and overwhelmed that anyone really wants to sit and eat and talk to us!  My stomach has had enough, though... it is in a constant state of "complaint".  It has become a running joke now - everywhere we go, someone tries to send home food with us (which is so nice).  However, my mom's refrigerator is overflowing and our waistlines are ever growing.  This morning is Billy's weekly coffee and donuts date with his accountability/bible study men's group and I begged him to NOT bring me donuts!  I didn't eat dinner last night because I'm so miserably stuffed, and I don't intend to eat breakfast either.  So if you really want to meet with us and talk, that's great... but I'll be having water, thanks.

Sarah has learned to swim since we have been home.  My mom is a member of a gym and she arranged for us to have a one month membership so we could take Sarah to the pool while we are home.  (I realize that at this point in the story, some of you are making the connection between my overeating and the gym membership... just hush!)  So we have been taking Sarah to the pool and she has decided that she no longer needs her ring and she can swim "like a grownup".  Within the past few days, she has thrown away the ring and started swimming like a fish!  She is now the proud owner of dive rings, which she is working diligently to recover from the bottom of the pool.  "It's hard, because my booty floats!", she said on the first day of her attempts.  Yesterday, she was able to jump in and swim to the middle of the competition-size pool without help.  She and Billy also spent almost an hour doing stunts... Sarah being thrown by Billy, doing flips and standing on his shoulders for two-man stunts, etc.  The lifeguard in me was having a fit, but the swim team in me was so proud!

Our old lab died this week.  He was 15, so he had lived plenty of life for a lab!!!  Actually, about 10 years ago, he had heartworms and we did the treatments to try to save him from that, at which time the vet told us that he might have another 3 years in him.  So we feel like he really got a lot more out of life than was to be expected.  He was Ryan's dog... Ryan got him when he was in kindergarten.  Ryan is now a junior in college, so he and Rex have been together for a long time.  It was a pretty tough blow for Ryan.  Not that we didn't expect it, and not that we didn't know that sooner or later Rex was going to die, but you're still not ready to deal with it when it happens.  So late the other night, Ryan and Miles and Billy buried Rex in the garden at my grandmother's house, and we all shed a few tears and said goodbye.  It has been a year of goodbyes and losses...

Today we will do more sorting and decision making... we are trying to finalize our packing for Peru.  We need to get it done so we can let the team in Peru know exactly how many bags and how much weight we are bringing.  They need to make arrangements for transportation once we arrive in Lima and some of our bags will have to be shipped by bus from Lima to Huancayo.  So we are trying to decide what we need, what is practical, what is not important, etc.  It's not my favorite activity... remember, I had a nervous breakdown trying decide whether to keep clothes hangers when we moved last year!

Well, if you made it this far in reading this post, I'm worried about you.  Surely you have better things to do!  They have counselors for this sort of thing... Seriously, thanks for hanging in there with us and supporting us, and caring enough to read even the most mundane things about our lives right now.  Within a few short weeks, we will have more exciting posts from new and exciting places... just hang in there :)

Home... whatever that means

So we are finally "home", whatever that means nowadays.  I have been perplexed by trying to answer the question "So, where are you from?" lately.  Several times this week, I have been in situations where I was meeting new people, etc. and they always ask me, "Where are you from?" or "Where do you live?", to which I have no real answer.  Home used to be here (Texas), but now we don't really feel like we are "home"... we are just visitors, back "home" for a time.  We don't really have a place to put our stuff, a closet was partially cleared for us, the living room is piled high with luggage yet unpacked... it just doesn't feel like home really.  Costa Rica isn't home, although it was for the past year - and we REALLY miss our friends from the language institute.  Peru isn't home yet, although it soon will be.   We don't have housing arrangements in Peru yet, we don't have our visas yet...  Everything is just a big LIMBO right now and feels kind-of weird.  

We are pretty tired.  We haven't been in Texas for a week yet, and already I have been to Dallas for two days to see my brother direct his Spring pops concert, been to a big welcome home dinner in Navasota (really neat - they even had Welcome Home Drum Family on the restaurant marquee), filmed a video at the church, transferred the title on the used car we bought for Miles, made a video / slide show for next week's speaking engagements, designed and printed bookmark prayer cards for next week, and have done countless hours of shopping that we needed to take care of before Peru.  We have sent Ryan back to TAMUK for a week or so and gotten his VW bus insured.  Culture shock on the USA end is compounded by the North American lifestyle of "super fast, super efficient, pack in as much as possible into one day" attitude.  It is taking it's toll on our very Latin American cultural mindset that we spent so many months getting used to... slow, calm, laid back, nothing happens fast, everything takes time, and you'll only accomplish 2 things on your list on any given day.  I really got used to that!!!  

By the way, my plan to eat my way across Texas came to a pretty quick demise.  Our first meal on the ground was at Chili's on the way home from the airport.  Billy and I didn't sleep that night because our stomachs were rebelling (more food and more fat than we are accustomed to).  On the second day, we had a nervous breakdown in the grocery store when my mom asked us to pick out a couple of bags of potato chips to go with sandwiches at lunch... there are WAY too many kinds of potato chips in this country!!!  We finally just threw up our hands and told Mom to pick.  That night, we ate at La Casita and again, my stomach was not very happy with me... I made a trip to WalMart to buy Tums since this seemed to be quickly becoming a trend.  In Dallas, we ate dinner at IHOP after the concert and I only managed 1/2 of my plate.  Sarah fell asleep in my lap and I could have done the same -- we just aren't used to these late nights!  In Costa Rica, it wasn't unusual for us to pass out in bed by 8:30 or 9 each night!  The mental exhaustion of language learning and a different culture was rough and we really needed lots of sleep.  Since we have been "home", we haven't been in bed before 11:00 yet!  Last night, it was 1:15 before we turned out the lights.

And there is no relief in sight... Today Billy attended his old Bible study coffee at 6 a.m., this weekend my girlfriends are taking me out for some pampering and lunch tomorrow, our old small group from church is having a social for us tomorrow night, Sunday we deliver the sermon at two services, have a Q&A forum at the Sunday School hour, attend at going-away reception for a pastor/supporter, hold another Q&A forum at a dessert reception in our honor in the afternoon...  Yep, I think we will be pretty exhausted by the end of Sunday.  If anything, we just haven't had time to really feel the effects of culture shock because we are so busy and so tired!

Love to all of you.  Pray for us and our transitions in the USA, and for the transitions that are in the works for our move to Peru in June.