Vision Project to Tarapoto and Festival Danza

9 July 2017

Vision Project in Tarapoto

Each year we target a different region for a vision project. This year the project focuses on Tarapoto, a city in the jungle of the north. We will be donating eye surgical equipment, providing a US doctor visit, and donating glasses for thousands of children and teenagers from poor families.

Last week we received the medical equipment we are donating to the hospital in Tarapoto. We packaged all the equipment and will ship the donation to the regional government health department this week.

A/B Scan Ultrasound - this donation will be used to diagnose and treat various eye conditions.

Eye measurement lenses - part of the donation of diagnostic and surgical equipment

Cataracts account for half of all blindness world-wide. A cataract, caused by clouding of the eye's lens, is treatable through surgery.

Cataract (a clouding of the lens) is the leading cause of blindness world-wide but can be treated with surgery. This year's project involves donations of surgical equipment and the visit by a US doctor to teach and perform surgeries.

We will be coordinating the US doctor visit in a few months as part of our role as the in-country contacts. The US doctor will work with local ophthalmologists in teaching new surgical techniques and providing surgeries to correct cataracts and other eye conditions.

This week we hosted a visit from the Peruvian vision coordinator who happened to be in Lima for a conference. Carmen Tipian coordinates our equipment donations and glasses donations for the Dirección Regional de Salud - DIRESA (regional health department) in the San Martin region, which includes Tarapoto. We worked out further details of this project with her, and Sandy gave her a tour of our area offices (all in Spanish, of course. Sandy's Spanish improves every day!)

Carmen Tipian, government coordinator of our vision donations to Tarapoto, along with Alex Principe, our Area Welfare Specialist, and us. This year's vision project will serve this jungle community into the future by providing the surgical skills and the equipment that will be used to correct the leading cause of blindness - cataracts.

The following link is a video of the vision project in Puno, Peru, two years ago. The video shows how our vision projects work and gives an idea of the lives touched by these yearly projects.

            https://www.ldscharities.org/videos/peru-vision

Festival Danza

We were invited to the dance festival hosted by the church's Vitarte Stake here in Lima.  Youth from eight of the wards (or congregations) competed in this amazing dance program involving several hundred dancers.

Getting ready for the dance festival.

Each group selected dances representing different regions of Peru (including the coast, mountains, and jungle) and had traditional costumes and music from these regions.

Traditional costumes from regions throughout Peru.  This group represented one of the regions in the Andes Mountains. 

This group dressed in the traditional costumes of  Puno near Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian border.

Music was pre-recorded traditional Andean music (flutes, guitars, charangos, etc.) played over a superb sound system. The choreography was dazzling. We couldn't believe what a high-quality production this festival was.

  

Action-packed night of great dancing. The high-energy and quality of the dancing far exceeded what we had anticipated.

Preparation for the dance festival had been going on for months. We saw youth practicing in a church parking lot weeks before the performance.

Peruvians love their traditional dances. These kids were so enthusiastic about this cultural presentation - you could feel their energy as they danced and sang.

Up next - group waiting on the side for their turn to perform.

Some of the youth were even willing to share part of their costumes before the show.

Sitting and watching the show was a joy, but the action made us want to jump up and join in the fun.

A shout for joy as the dances went on into the evening.

The performance ended with a bang - a magnitude 4.7 earthquake hit north of Lima after the show finished. Unfortunately, we were in a taxi coming home and missed all the excitement. No injuries were reported, but people here in Lima are holding their breath awaiting the next big one.

Cheek Kissing in South America

A big culture shock in coming here has been the way most Peruvians greet each other - with a cheek kiss preferred over a handshake.

Cheek kissing is the preferred greeting - men to women and women to women.

You don't end up kissing much of the cheek - mostly just putting right cheeks together and making a kissing sound in the air.

I've been cheek kissed more here in 5 months than all of my 62 previous years of life! It's crazy! 

The confusing thing for me is knowing when I should give a person a cheek kiss and when not to do it. Sometimes I extend my hand to a new acquaintance rather than give a kiss. The person sometimes looks at me with an expression as if to say, "You are a very cold person."

Safe Food

When we come home from grocery shopping, we immediately soak all of our produce in "Dioxill." This is a liquid that contains mostly chlorine to kill micro-organisms found living on produce. We fill a pot with water, put in about 30 drops of Dioxill, and soak the produce for 10 minutes. Voila, safe food!

Dioxill - soaking veggies and fruits kills the germs on our produce.

We have been so careful with our food to kill the germs on our produce. Thank goodness that in 5 months here we haven't been sick yet!

More Tastes from Peru

Some of the best food we have eaten anywhere in the world has been here in Peru. Here are some shots of foods we ate recently. Prices at restaurants here are so low, it is sometimes hard to justify eating at home.

Roast Beef Salad with lentils and red bell peppers, and topped with Peruvian Aji (ah-HEE) chile salsa.

Cebiche is a Peruvian national dish made with any kind of fish.  They soak the fish in lime juice to prepare it (instead of cooking it), and then they serve it cold. However, the sauce they serve it with is often extremely spicy, made from the rocoto chili that is hotter than jalapeno. Probably half the restaurants in Peru serve Cebiche.

Cebiche and onions, a favorite throughout Peru.

We love living here in Peru and having this opportunity to serve. And so we approach another week to move this work forward and lift the lives of others around us. How lucky are we?