To love in truth

Today began with a chaotic, joyous wake up call: a human pile of boys jumping on Alec’s bed, loudly singing Happy Birthday to kick off his special day! The celebration continued when we reached the auditorium, where the entire group joined in for a full throttle birthday chorus.

It was a day of unexpected twists, deep emotional connections, a surprise blackout, and a major construction milestone.

As mentioned yesterday, we took a break from construction this morning so specialized electricians could prep the roof for a massive concrete pour scheduled for the afternoon.

Instead, our bus headed toward a local Special Education School. We were warmly greeted by the principal, who was thrilled to have our help. The school serves 80 students aged 3 to 20, living with various physical, intellectual, visual, hearing, and psychomotor disabilities.

In Peru, public school funding is strictly calculated based on student headcount, ignoring the fact that special education facilities require significantly more resources. The staff here work out of pure passion and sense of mission. We wanted to give them a much needed breath of fresh air and let them know they are not alone.

We split our group into four hard working teams:

• The front yard crew: cleaned up trash thrown over the fence by passersby, restoring a sense of dignity to the school's entrance.
• The garden teams (2 Groups): tackled the severely overgrown internal playgrounds. An all boys team took ownership of one yard, realizing their job wasn't to make it look like a manicured park, but to clear away dangerous hazards so the children could play safely.
• The kitchen overhaul squad: deep cleaned and reorganized the dusty, neglected school kitchen.

After the heavy cleaning was done, the volunteers paired up and joined the classrooms to meet the students. Today was the last day of school before the Fiestas Patrias national holidays, and the school was throwing a celebratory parade (marcha)!

Each classroom dressed up to represent a branch of the Peruvian military: the Army, Navy, or Air Force. Our volunteers escorted the children out to the main patio, raised the Peruvian flag, lit colorful smoke bombs, and watched the parade begin.

The students marched with immense pride. Our volunteers turned into the loudest, most enthusiastic crowd imaginable, cheering, clapping, and making every single child feel like a rockstar! Before leaving, we presented the school with 50 plush teddy bears to remember our visit.

On our walk back to the care home, a simple stroll through the city center turned into an absolute shopping spree. The kids went wild for local souvenirs: woven hats, warm gloves, local snacks, and, the absolute favorite, peruvian style "Patagonia" fleece jackets! Many of them genuinely believe they bought authentic high end outerwear... and we certainly aren't going to ruin the illusion!

We made it back to the care home just in time for lunch: a big plate of pasta... served with chicken (again!). But after a busy morning, nobody was complaining, they devoured it in minutes.

After lunch, our group divided for two very different afternoon experiences:

Equipped with bags of plush toys, math skills for homework help, and boundless energy, a team headed off with Joaquin and Kike. We don't have photos from inside, but when they returned late in the evening, their faces said it all.

As we watched them arrive from the rooftop, they came back laughing, dancing, and radiating pure, unadulterated joy. They were covered head to toe in bright paint! Their faces and t-shirts were splattered in brilliant colors, looking like beautiful survivors of a "war of love" where the only weapons used were spots of paint.

The rest of us stayed behind with our abuelitos. After cleaning up lunch and helping the residents, we fed them dinner and then headed up to the roof for a breathtaking moment.

A massive crane truck with a long boom pipe had arrived to execute the grand concrete pour. As the sun set behind the volcanoes, we stood on the roof watching the concrete fill the structure we had spent days sweating over. Knowing how much brick, gravel, and sand our volunteers had moved by hand to make this moment possible made the sunset look almost romantic.

When we got back to the retreat house, just as everyone was heading to the showers, the power went completely out!

If you were blindfolded, you still would have known the lights went off from the hilarious, goofy screams echoing down the hall. Rather than complaining, the kids embraced the blackout with total delight, gathering in the hallway illuminated by emergency lights to joke around.

Once power was restored, we enjoyed dinner and celebrated Alec properly with a delicious, rich chocolate birthday cake that disappeared in seconds!

Afterward, we gathered in the auditorium for our third personal reflection. Tonight, we tackled one of the most challenging topics yet: suffering. What has suffering taught me so far in my life?

“There is a truth that we often discover only by living: pain changes everything. It changes our gaze, it changes the way we perceive the world, it changes what seems important to us and what instead begins to seem superfluous. But pain is not just something to be endured or avoided. It is a threshold, a passage.  It forces us to look inside ourselves, to reckon with what we truly are. And there, at that moment, we either become truer, more sensitive, more capable of loving… or we close up, we grow bitter, we harden ourselves. If we do not face our wounds, if we do not give a name to the pain we have lived through, that pain rots inside. It becomes frustration, anger, cynicism. Only those who have let themselves be wounded can become capable of tenderness. We did not come to “save” anyone, but to learn to stay, to look, to share, to love in truth.” 

Tomorrow is Rosa's birthday, and another huge day of labor with the concrete mixer lies ahead! We are hoping the kids get to bed early tonight so they are fully recharged for tomorrow!