Hasta luego, Cusco.

Father’s Day, and our last Sunday in Cusco, were as good as we wanted them to be. We started by conducting Sunday School in the back of the abandoned lorry in our builders yard, using it as a prison in our discussion of the persecuted church.  We held our Sunday afternoon group in a field. The Father's Day service didn’t quite top last month’s Mothers Day service, but it’s never a bad thing to see Quechua fathers eating biscuits from a plate with no hands. We were given refreshments, which Sarah – Judas - helped to make, while I was being tucked up on a friend's sofa, trying to allay the plague I'd managed to get. The cup of what appeared to be orange jelly with sticks in seemed to be manageable - plus, you can’t say no - but to my dismay, it was warm. And when I tried to chug it, I encountered lumps. We got no closer to finding out why they put big pretzel sticks into the orange goo. Or why it was warm. Or why it was lumpy. I spilt most of mine on the floor.

This week, we face-painted the kids in our Sunday School, and only remembered after a little while of the congregation's laughs that we too had moustaches. We had another humiliating and intense afternoon of volley ball. Everytime we made a successful pass, they congratulated us loudly; everytime we were unsuccessful, they shouted "Inca strength!" at us, and everytime there was a brief pause, requested supportive chants in English. They thought it was hilarious. We won ourselves a lot of friends.

We've been reluctantly saying our goodbyes. We’ve had quite a few criers (including us), and we’ve been forced into promises to return straight to one of our preschools if we are ever in the area again. The church wanted to give us a goodbye service, which we were quite scared about, having seen their Mother and Father's Day services. We did our best puppy eyes and faces of fear (I said to one friend, "Look, Jose, we're very afraid of what they might make us do. We're your hermanitas and you have to protect us.") They got two chairs and the biscuits out, but the puppy eyes seemed to work and they presented us with gifts (including some great Peruvian hats!), told us how much they've loved having us, and then took a load of photos. In the evening service they did another formal goodbye, and got everyone up to hug us. They're very good at goodbyes, thanking us for our work in the kids' groups, saying they'll miss us terribly, telling us to come back soon. Everyone said how grateful they were for us being part of their church, which was particularly amusing from those who had stood up that very evening to introduce themselves as newcomers to the church...

It's very hard to answer the question "When will you be back?", because we have to be non-commital. (In response to our non-commitment, our favourite responses so far include "Well, what are you praying for?" and with another, we played the God card, and the chef whose chicken foot and neck we rejected a few weeks ago said "Of course, God has to want you to come back!") If it weren't for that final year of Uni next year, there's no way we'd be leaving.

Anyway, we didn't get to the jungle, but did go for a day trip to visit a friend's relatives. We pretty much had the perfect day, going for walks, and visiting an animal sanctuary, to see a condor and a puma and sit among parrots and other misc huge birds, who didn't seem to mind in the slightest that we were there.

Other than that, we helped to sell omlette sandwiches and coffee outside a church service, and we've been feeding our Peruvian friends banoffee pie, to their delight. We went to a friend's house and were served coffee from a plastic bag - grown and ground by her father, no less! (She then gave us some avocados freshly picked from her patio.) I visited the Latin Link STEP team in Urcos. We went to some more processions, including Inti Raymi, the annual ceremony for the sun god where hundreds of actors dress up as Incas and dance about in cloaks and great hats. Ironically, it was forecast to snow. (It didn't: this is Peru.) We went for breakfast in a French creperie, and went for our last cafecito with the team. I've nearly finished transferring the chords for the kids' songs into the Do Re Mi scale they use here. Fortunately I spent most of the nineties watching the Sound of Music so it wasn't too hard. We caught our preschool off-guard by teaching them "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"...in Quechua. We went to fairground, and tried ceviche (a dish of raw fish). We've coped with some more intrusive questions, and Cusco sent us off with a bang this week: having managed to avoid some fairly inevitable things for over three months, this week, I've hung out of the door on the busiest bus, lost my camera to a nifty pickpocket, and trodden in fresh dog poo - in my sandals - at Sunday School. Still winning Dodge those Rabies though, for the win.


We are going to miss this place: the beautiful tiny Quechua women, the church, the hospital, the kids in our groups, the constant sneezes, the view from the window (everyday, when the alarm goes off, and I say to Saz "open the curtain?" to bright, cloud-free blue skies, and we decide it's probably worth getting up), our brilliant friends, the dogs roaming free, into our kids' groups, preschools, buses..., the humming bird in the garden, everyone in arctic wear in the hot sun: fleece pyjama bottoms, hats, shoes and socks, body warmers, polo necks, blankets wrapped around them, the dogs outside our house, who we have slowly befriended, spotting glowworms, the shouts of "Las gringitas vienen!", our wonderful family of Browns, attempting to learn Quechua, and that same tune that's played at church, song after song, week after week. But we still have time left of squashed buses, impressive hats, stares, ponchos, Peruvian timekeeping, everyone thinking Sazzle is 14, everyone assuming we're sisters/twins/I'm Sarah's mum. And there will probably still be plenty surreptitious photography, beeps from cars, being hit on in taxis etc. This time with Joel.
We're very sad to leave: it's been such an incredible time. We've learned so much, laughed so hard, and been embarrassed and uncomfortable beyond anything we could have expected. But now, the journey of a lifetime begins: 3 friends, 5 countries, 8 weeks. The line up is incredible. We'll be in touch.



“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road