Helping out from afar....

It has been almost 8 years since the Lord brought me here to Peru to serve with Food for the Hungry (FH).  During this time, I have had the opportunity to learn about lots of different ministries going in Peru - ministries led by Peruvian nationals, as well as other cross-cultural missionaries.  I have also been blessed to be able to collaborate with some of these other ministries over the years and from those times of collaboration, several really wonderful friendships have been born.  

Recently one such friend, Meredith, asked me for some help with her ministry in the jungle of Peru.  I originally got to know Meredith when FH partnered with the Evangelical Free Church Mission after the earthquake in 2007.  Now Meredith and her husband Carlos, work with the Yanesha, an indigenous people group living in the jungle of Peru.  Carlos and Meredith work with Yanesha churches providing pastoral training, but they also have a heart to do community development work with the Yanesha as well.  

With two little ones at home, traveling to the jungle to help is not really possible, but I was able to recommend a friend, Betty (a former co-worker from FH-Peru), to help them carry out a weekend of community development planning workshops.  Together with Betty, I helped design the workshop activity guide, and in July Betty traveled to the jungle with Carlos and Meredith to carry out the workshop.  Below I have included bit more about the event, as shared by Meredith (she also shares about a great book: When Helping Hurts). I pray that Lord continues to bless the work of Carlos and Meredith with the Yanesha, and I hope that the Lord continues to allow me opportunities to help support their ministry if even from afar.  

Have you heard of the book? We just want to encourage you to read When Helping Hurts (Corbett and Fikkert, 2009) if you haven't yet. It will inform, if not transform your approach to helping others on all levels, like it has ours. This month we'd like to spotlight the difference between Relief,  Rehabilitation, and Development, mentioned in chapter 4.   Relief can be defined as the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis. Provider gives assistance, often material, to the receiver who is largely incapable of helping themselves at the time. (ex: the Good Samaritan)   Rehabilitation begins "as soon as the bleeding stops"; it seeks to restore people and their communities to the positive elements of their pre-crisis conditions. (ex: Nehemiah rebuilding the wall)   Development, the process of ongoing change that moves all involved-both "helpers" and "helped"-closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation (ex: Parable of the Talents, pp. 99-101).   Can you imagine what would happen if we applied relief to every situation? Or if we tried to develop in the middle of a major natural disaster?   From what we can observe, our Yanesha brothers and sisters are in need of development. They may not earn much money monthly, but they have crops they share, and fish and animals they can hunt for free. Crises usually come in the form of a medical emergency or a house fire. We see them trying to help each other even in these situations. We hope to encourage them in taking initiative for the good of their communities, and to be careful to help without hurting on all levels.

Betty leading discussion on the "Cycle of Transformation" Results of finding strengths, values, and opportunities from stories about community successes in the past

Since we last wrote, we held a community planning workshop, inviting a Christian social worker (Betty, see above photo) to facilitate discussion focused on helping the Yanesha church to think about how they can serve and bless their communities. These workshops help to identify needs, but they also seek to identify strengths already present in the community, with the goal of encouraging the ideas to come from within, rather than being imposed on them from without (from well-meaning non-profits and others...like us!) Along the lines of "When Helping Hurts" approach, we hope it will be the first conversation of many. A good number of the participants are shown below.