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Jaén, 19th of May 2003
Dear friends,
unfortunately we couldn't translate all of our letters to our supporters and friends into English, but this is our 17th and last letter and it IS coming in English, too! It will be our last letter from Peru, because the 11th of June we'll be moving back to München! Unexpectedly the Adoption Bureau gave us permission to leave the country earlier, whoopie! In the meantime we already applied for Francisco's passport and visa which he needs to enter Germany because he is Peruvian.
We are very excited about going back to see our families and old friends,
although on the other hand it's hard to leave what has been home to us for
the last two and a half years. Our new friends, Radio
Marañón, the amazing Peruvian landscapes, our tropical
garden, ...
Will we see our Peruvian friends ever again? Many of them probably not. :-(
Well, poco a poco we are emptying our rented house and sorting out what to
take back home and what to sell or give away. At the same time we are
trying our best that Francisco leads a life as calm as possible. He had to
go through enough trouble already in his short life and there are many more
changes to come in Germany. But he's doing great and seems to get used to
new things easily. Last Saturday he already turned ONE! We celebrated his
birthday together with many children and two other birthdays (one of them
was his daddy :-) and ate threee wonderful birthday cakes in the auditorium
of Radio Marañón. If you want to see fotos of cakes, smiling and playing
children, be our guest. This time on the webpage of Francisco himself:
http://francisco.spiegl.de/
(even babies are up to the latest nowadays :-)
On the 2nd of May we celebrated too: a preliminary baptism. We decided to wait with the "real" baptism until we get back to München to share it with our families. But the "auxiliary baptism", sometimes also called "baptism of the poor" is a widespread Peruvian custom. Anyone can do it (not only priests) as only plain water is used instead of holy water. It's mainly practiced if the family momentarily doesn't have enough money for a regular baptism which usually implies a great family reunion. But often also still in the hospital right after birth to assure that the newborn already has God's blessing until his baptism :-). Besides this nice custom has the additional advantage for the child that it will have two more godfathers. Especially when living in poor environments godfathers (and large families!) are an important financial backup for difficult times.
This means that Francisco now has a Peruvian godmother and godfather! Roxana and Marco are two good friends of us. Both accepted with great joy and Francisco likes them a lot, too.
Okay, we should return to packing our 3 suitcases, 2 backpacks and 2 boxes - we only have 2 more weeks, uffda! :-)
At this point we'd like to thank all of you very much for your support and your readiness to accompany us during our life in another world which isn't really that different. We thank you personally for your friendship during these 2.5 years which we wouldn't want to miss, during which we have learned a lot and made many new and exciting experiences. And we thank you in the name of all our Peruvian friends, aquaintances and also listeners of Radio Marañón whom you have helped directly and indirectly in various different ways to improve their lifes a little bit. Material gifts, financial support or/and simply our presence, conversations with us about our world allowing them to peek a little bit into a foreign world and to learn that not everything there is so great as TV and movies make them believe. And that these "gringos" are humans just like them. Humans that don't have everything or know everything. Humans that can be funny, that can be mad and that can be good friends who show true interest in them, even if they live far away, speak a different language and look differently.
Our final conclusion of our stay is: there are many different cultures, living conditions, languages and skin colors, but the people themselves are the same whereever you look on our wonderful planet!
Let's hope and pray together that this simple fact will be a widespread triviality one day. We'd be just one step closer to the ONE world!
Thank you and God bless you! Love and big hugs from,
Heidi, Andy and Francisco.
Many times our Peruvian friends carried us on their hands!
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