Day 12 - Church and our Canete Performances

Today is Sunday. We stayed the night in Los Arcos de Imperial, which is part of the Nuevo Imperial district of Canete. This is one of the best hotels in the area and we are appreciative. The rooms are clean, the food is relatively decent, and the showers have hot water. Yeah! This morning we got to sleep in a bit - up by 7:30, breakfast at 8:00, and caught the bus at 8:30 to go to Sacrament meeting. I had called the district president on Friday to arrange the fireside for tonight, so the branch was aware we were coming. Between us and the regular members attending, we pretty much filled up the small chapel.

The talks were good, but I'm afraid Jim and Leslie Stark were about the only ones to really understand them. The first one was on the atonement of Christ, the second one was on the how Christ used the scriptures to face life's challenges, and the last one was on Christ as the Mediator. Good stuff.

Because we are staying in an area of Peru where you find people living in the humblest of circumstances, the people in this area work 6 or 7 days a week trying to sustain their families. Although it is very rare for Morning Star to do a performance on Sunday, because of these facts Kieri decided to make an exception and allow the group to perform. After sacrament meeting, we returned to the hotel and got ready to go to the location of the performance.

Jim and I decided to go check out the location before hand so we would be prepared for whatever we needed. We tried to flag a cab from our hotel for a while. When that didn't work, we hopped on a community bus the size of a VW Vanagon. We barely fit into the remaining seats sitting next to people half our size. In fact they started joking that we should have been charged twice as much as we we took up twice the space. When we arrived at the plaza center of the town. Jim and I exchanged puzzled glances as the square was all dirt and curbing. Not much else. No power, no platform or cement area. We hopped back in another bus heading the opposite direction picking up people along the way. One passenger got on with a large back of vegetables or oranges and laid down next to my feet. The next sensation I felt was something nibbling on my toes. I look down and quieted a squeal as the bag of oranges was actually a bag of guinea pigs who were trying to get out. I was glad to exit that bus when we arrived back at our hotel.

We needed to be there at 1:00 to set up and get ready for the show at 3:00. The stage was a large concrete slab (approximately 75 ft by 150 ft) surrounded by a brick wall. They had set up a stage for us, but there was only one set of stairs leading up to the platform and they were pretty narrow. Plus, the stage itself was about 6 feet in the air. So we decided to set up and perform at the end of the concrete slab.

There was only one electrical connection in the place. The electrical connection led to the lights for the field - one breaker, no plugs ins. A trip to the hardware store to purchase a plug-in plus the rod used for Rachel's dance number resulted in success after having the hunt down the hardware store proprietor and persuade him to open his store so we could buy what we needed. With a borrowed screwdriver, and a lot of care, we disconnected the wires leading to the lights and connected wires leading to our plug-in. Now we had power - joy and rejoicing!

The kids started the show at around 3:15pm with only a handful of spectators, but as the show progressed more and more trickled in until there were a few hundred by our estimate. We had to cut the show a bit short to accommodate a father's day celebration scheduled for later that night (and tear down and reconnect the lights), but the kids came through like professionals and were able to switch up in mid-steam and take everything in stride. It made me proud to see how they adapted to the situation.

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After the official show, Canete was setting up for another celebration. I think they used our appearance as a reason to throw a big party. So as we, the tech guys were cleaning up, music played and the the performers danced with adults and kids alike to launch the after show party. It was an great exchange.

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We loaded up the clothes and equipment and everything and were headed back to Canete by around 6:00pm. We had enough time to drop into the hotel (since we were driving right past it), change clothes and get ready for the Sunday night fireside in the Canete branch. We arrived at the chapel with a few minutes to spare.

Dagny played the keyboard normally stashed under the branch president's desk (since no one in the branch plays the piano), and the kids put on a fireside to a packed chapel (keep in mind, chapels in these rural areas of Peru seat probably no more than75 or so - still, it was a good number of people who attended). Everyone had practiced their lines, so the spanish was very understandable. Plus Kieri had made copies of the translation that we passed out to the members, so they were able to read along as the kids delivered their lines. It is amazing to me how music can be a conduit for the spirit. There were several instances were it was apparent that the spirit was touching hearts. Afterwards the branch president gave us a heartfelt thanks for coming and sharing the fireside message, and told me that this was something his youth needed to hear, and that it was good for his youth to to see other youth being faithful and strong. That alone makes all of the effort worthwhile.

With the fireside over at around 8:00, and all of us back to the hotel by 9:00, we sat down to a dinner of soup (yumm

y beef noodle) and a main dish consisting of thin beef steak, french fries, steamed vegetables, a fried egg and of course some rice.

All in all, it was a wonderful day. The kids hit the pillows around 10:00, and it was completely silent by 10:30.