The Special One: Part 2

This is part 2 to read part 1 click here

As I mentioned yesterday Our Pastor had 2 people for us to talk to. The second person our pastor told us to talk to was someone from our home church named Tracey. She had the exact same specialty as the woman I had been holding back on calling. The funny thing is my friend had been telling me for over a year I needed to meet Tracey but it just never happened in my short trips to the states. Aside from that we had dinner with a couple from our home church on Saturday night. We didn't really know them but they invited us over so we went :) as we were talking we shared about Timothy and that we were spending a little extra time to get him some help. The wife told us that she had been a special ed teacher for years (and only recently left that to become a vice principal) she told us we should talk to this woman from church named Tracey. I told her you are the 3rd person to say that. Can you help me find her at church? I don't know what she looks like but I want to meet her! She promised to call her and make sure we connected.

The next day at church our pastor instructed everyone to find a partner and pray for each other. Jose and I were about to pray for each other when this woman walked up to us and said "Hi, I'm Tracey. I hear we need to talk to each other." We prayed together and she gave me a sheet of paper with her phone number and said "Tomorrow is my day off. Lets get together and talk about Timothy"  By the time I got to restaurant where we ate lunch I had 2 Facebook notifications. A friend request and a message both from Tracey. She had cleared it with the clinic she works at to do all our work with her at the clinic pro-bono. She wanted us to meet her there instead so we could go ahead and get started. We made plans to be there first thing the next morning. We went to see my friend who had suggested I talk to Tracey a year before and she mentioned that she had emailed Tracey about talking to me. Tracey responded "lol, you are the third person who has contacted me about that. I'm getting together with them Tomorrow" It was so clear that God was putting everything together in the background I was on a happy high.

Monday morning we went to the clinic where Tracey worked. I sat in the waiting room and nervously looked at all the other parents and children waiting. I had no idea what to expect and Timothy was having a rough day so far. It usually takes a little over a week for him to hit his stride when we travel to the states and that was still a few days away. Tracey came out with a big smile hugged us and met Timothy for the first time. We went back into a room and watched her play with Timothy and ask him questions. It was so hard to just watch and not help him so many times when she asked him to do something and he didn't understand or couldn't do it. I kept telling myself "just watch, let him do it, she needs to see Timothy without help" He had difficulty with so many things. At the end of the evaluation she said we needed to get a hearing/speech evaluation as well. She wasn't sure he was understanding everything she said to him which effects the test results a lot. That evaluation would be someone else so we would need to see if/when she could fit us in and that would be kind of expensive (but still less than the other specialist we had talked to initially) She managed to get us an appointment that day. Jose called his aunt and explained the situation and she completely covered the cost. At the end of the day Tracey said she wanted to work with Timothy every day while we were there so she could help us come up with a home therapy plan. Every time I received a text or message from Tracey I would find myself crying and thanking God for his goodness.    

Timothy trying to make his hands and feet work together to grab the frogs and knock something down with them

swinging one of the things Timothy could do all day long

Spinning or earthquake on this board was another favorite 

Timothy has many challenges but he has a lot going for him too. His challenges have names like Sensory Processing Disorder, ADHD, and Aspergers/High Functioning Autism. But Tracey said something to us that blessed me so much and has been brought to my mind over and over. All of those things are names and every name must bow at the feet of Jesus. I learned about my son this past month and a lot of it was painful but some of it was sweet and inspiring. Timothy is very cognitively bright and super smart. So when you ask him to do something he can't like stand on one foot he will start clowning and fall in a cartoonish way. He has a million little coping mechanisms for a lot of the problem areas he faces. He figured those out himself. As I've read about kids like him they need those things and usually need help finding them but he's pretty great at problem solving in some areas. 

I'm only a couple weeks in from really knowing what we are dealing with. I'm still processing and I randomly think of things that make me sad or worry. But I was/am so blessed to have had this experience. So many people have stepped up and been so supportive of all of us. I never wanted Timothy to be branded as "special needs" but now I see it differently. He really is so special and no name or label being given or not given changes that.

The special one Part 1

As I mentioned yesterday this trip to the states was really special. One of the things that I really wanted to happen (and have wanted for years) happened this trip. It was nothing like I expected, it was way better. For years I have been working with Tim on a lot of stuff all the while not knowing what was going on exactly. When I talked to dr.'s they said "he's just a little slower with some things. Not all kids walk/talk/etc at the same time." Then later in life they said "oh, he's just spoiled. You need to be more firm with him." But in my heart I knew there was something more. I figured out on my own that he has sensory processing disorder. Once I read about it I knew to an extent that Timothy has difficulty with many forms of sensory input. So I kept doing everything I could to help him on my own, praying for him and asking God to help us do the best we could. Last year he started doing some things that made me think he might be on the autism spectrum. But, honestly? I didn't really want to admit that. It's so common now I didn't want it to seem like I was jumping on a bandwagon. Plus I didn't want to label my kid for life.  Sensory issues can be worked through. Autism? That's a lifelong thing. 

Timothy and I just chillin' on the floor as one does

Reading pastors book

He wanted his face painted "like a lego mini figure" this is his mini figure pose

As we wrapped up the school year last year I had become so overwhelmed that we were talking about sending the boys to school instead of homeschooling.  All I could think about was "what will they do with Timothy. He just barely manages Sunday School and that is less than an hour. School is hours and they don't have special education here, plus nobody really has listened to my calls for help. What if they don't believe me and treat him badly because they think he is spoiled?" I decided we needed to get a diagnosis. Whatever that meant. I had read an article about sensory processing disorder, adhd and autism and at the end it had a link that said "if you need help getting your child diagnosed find a specialist here" I followed the link and found a list of people in Houston and 2 people in Peru. I made a few phone calls and found someone that was extremely flexible and said to give her 2 weeks notice before we went to the states and she would work us in. I started to relax, the only thing bugging me was the cost. An initial examination would be $500 and any follow ups would be $350. That may not sound like much to you but that's a pretty big chunk of our monthly budget and we didn't have any extra money to set aside. Jose's aunt had previously offered to help us pay for speech therapy because if anything that is what people recognize as an issue and she wanted to help. We talked to her about the specialist and she said she would help us. Everything was coming together. We scheduled our trip and worked out all the details but there was something keeping me from contacting the specialist. I didn't know why but I just didn't feel peace about it. Jose had the same feeling so we held off. Our first week in Houston we had the mens conference then spent a few days with family and our pastors. I really poured my heart out to our pastors. I told them all the things I had been holding back about Timothy. Immediately our Pastor had 2 names of people he wanted us to talk to. He talked to both people and scheduled a meeting with one of them. The first person was a mother of a 7 year old boy with autism. She met Timothy and said she saw a lot of similarity between our boys. We talked for about 30 minutes but she just shared her journey with us and gave us a lot of good information. I cried all the way through it. I kept apologizing and she just laughed and said she knew exactly what I was feeling. At the end we hugged and I felt a little more confident about our next step.

(Come back tomorrow for part 2)

Home sweet home!

Traveling to the states is a lot like pregnancy for some women. (not me because I'm not a fan of pregnancy as a rule. The results are what I like) I hope for it. When I find out we will do it I get excited and can't wait for it. I plan out what I'm going to pack at least a month ahead of time. I love being there and enjoy everything that happens, it goes by faster than I think. The last few days are really hard because I didn't get everything done that I wanted and I start to panic and swear I will never do it again. Then when it's over I can't wait until the next time we go.

This trip was no exception. We really enjoyed our time and made some new connections that we are really excited about. Got to spend some time with our family (both natural and spiritual) and soak in the love. We missed several people this time because of time constraints but we hope to catch up with those people next time. (see? I haven't been home for 24 hours and already I'm thinking about the next time. haha)  

This week I will be sharing something very special that happened while we were there. I'm still writing it but I wanted to post this to keep myself accountable. Tomorrow (Friday) I will post the first part of the story. But for now we are home, we are safe and our hearts are full from all the love we received in the states. As Paul told the Philippians I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, (Philippians 1:3-5) 

Now it's time to join this girl and crash! 

Traveling adventures

Whenever we travel it ends up being an adventure. Not just in the seeing new places meeting new people sense. But sometimes it’s a kiss-the-ground-and-hug-the-tree-when-you-get-out-of-the-vehicle-because-you-are-just-that-happy-to-have-survived kind of adventure. That kind of sums up our last trip to and from the states. But let me start from the beginning...
Our flight to Miami left out of Guayaquil Ecuador at 8am. Since we don’t have an international airport here in Piura, we have the choice of taking a bus 12ish hours north to Guayaquil. Or we can take a bus 16ish hours south to Lima. There’s also the option of flying to Lima which takes about an hour. But that can often be 2-4 times the cost of a bus x 4 tickets plus baby tax...we usually take a bus. Lately the cost of flying out of Ecuador was about half that of Lima so when we found some great tickets to the states we jumped on them. We had not been back for the holidays since we came to Peru 3 years ago so it was a big deal to find tickets we could afford.
Since we were flying out of Guayaquil our only way to get there was on a bus. Now when we were newer to the country we foolishly took a random bus to Ecuador that we later found out is not the safest thing (nor is it the most comfortable) since they stop for anybody that flags them down and have no regulations about what you can bring on. But this time we did the research and took the safest most comfortable bus. The only catch was theres only one per day. But it was scheduled to arrive about an hour before we needed to be at the airport so one of us thought we would be fine...the other one of us is working on having faith when it comes to the timeliness of public transportation.

We got to the bus terminal to wait for our bus they were running late but the lady at the counter said they would make up for their time on the trip. Even so if all went according to plan we would still arrive with a little time to spare. My mantra was something like “this is a vacation just go with the flow” it worked about 15% of the time so that was a plus. Finally the bus arrived about 30 minutes late and we were off. We should have made it to the border of Peru and Ecuador around midnight or 1 at the latest but that didn’t happen. We got there at 3 am Jose bolted out of the bus like a rocket and was the first in line to go through immigrations. But we were still 4 hours (in a car) away from the airport and the bus had already taken 2 hours longer to get to the border than it should have. Not to mention the 50 other people on the bus who needed to go through the immigration process. Jose did some asking around and found out we could get a Taxi to Guayaquil from immigrations. It was the most expensive Taxi ride we’ve ever taken but we figured lose the money or lose the flight...so we took a taxi. The driver was very energetic and anxious to get on the road so we moved all our stuff and sleeping children and we were off...until we got just outside immigrations. He was on the phone saying “yeah, I’m right here in the turnaround, pull up behind me.’ As he pulled over. He started telling Jose. “You have to change to my brothers taxi. Mine is a “new line” (code for illegal) so the cities always give me problems. But my brother has all the right permits already. He will take good care of you.”
So here we are between the Peru and Ecuador on the side of the road in a taxi that can’t go any further with 3 sleeping children at 3:30 am. He told us we need to move to the Taxi behind us so what else can we do? we move as quickly as possible because at this point we need to be at the airport in 3 and a half hours. We get settled and close the door when all of a sudden a truck pulls up next to us with a police lamp shining in our faces. They think somethings up so they take our passports and make us go back to immigrations to verify that everything is legit. Now I can’t say that we disagree with the police. If that kind of thing had happened at the USA/Mexico border I’m sure we would have been in prison 5 minutes later. I know it looked shady to him. But at that moment all we could think about was getting to the airport. So Jose keeps telling the taxi driver and police that we are pressed for time. Thankfully I had told the immigrations officer outside our whole story while Jose was getting a taxi so he remembered me and verified that we were not doing anything illegal. Once the officer was convinced we were not fugitives or people smugglers or something they let us go. It is now 4am and we have 3 hours to get to the airport. Jose stresses to the guy that we.have.to.be.there in 3 hours. Taxi man says no problem and once again we were off. 

                       (reference photo stolen from internet this is basically what our taxi looked like) 
Now, I’m almost accustomed to not sleeping these days because of a certain 9 month old princess who still thinks the middle of the night is the best time to be awake since she gets me all to herself. But I’m almost basically narcoleptic for me. I find myself dozing off only to be snapped back awake by random things like the taxi driver taking a speed bump at full speed causing me to hit my head on the roof of the car. (taxis don’t have seat belts) so I did doze of for awhile. But after waking up like that ^ I couldn’t sleep for some reason. There were 2 things I learned about our taxi driver. 1 he should have been in bed instead of driving a taxi full of people I love and 2 apparently he learned how to drive using a race car game. He kept speeding way up only to slow way down. I don’t usually have a problem with motion sickness, but I started to think it might become one. Logan on the other hand has a huge problem with motion sickness. Poor thing was so sick the whole trip. But the main problem was the taxi driver was trying not to fall asleep...and he was not being very successful. I was watching his eyes in the rear view mirror and they were shut more than they were open. Aside from that he kept rubbing his neck and face in the universal man gesture of trying to stay awake. So Jose tells him to pull over and trade places. It took a great deal of convincing but he finally did it. Thats right my husband took over driving the taxi. Let me just say here that I never appreciated what a good driver my husband is like I did that morning. You almost would have thought he was driving an automatic the way he sped up and slowed down was so smooth. I could have slept if it weren’t for all the adrenaline pumping through my veins from the previous 2 hours of the car trip. We rode like that for about 30 minutes before the taxi driver started telling jose we need to pull over for gas. (which turned out to be code for he had to go the bathroom) When the driver returned to the car he swore he was good to go and took over the driving. Yeah, lets just say he lied ok? We got into Guayaquil after another hour of jerky, sleepy driving. We tried to soothe ourselves with the thought that most likely the bus would just be leaving immigrations by now for all we knew. We formulated a plan. I would run to the counter and start the checkin process while Jose got the bags and paid the driver. As we are talking Timothy starts asking how many minute until we get there. I told him I didn’t know but it would be soon. As we pull into the airport I feel a warm wetness spreading under my leg..the leg closest to Timothy. Normally he wakes up and stumbles into the bathroom as fast as he can. But this time there was no bathroom to stumble to. We pull up to the departure door and exhausted carrying the baby and holding Timothys hand I ran into the airport half soaked in fresh pee.

(it might look big from this picture but this is all the check in counters. There are maybe 30 stations) 

Our checkin counter was by the door (thank God for tiny airports) and there was a sign above the counter. “Check in by 7:50 required” I looked for a clock it was 7:50 exactly. But there was a line. I got in line and waited. Jose walked in with all the luggage and the taxi driver pulled away. I pulled out some clothes and waited in line until the ticket counter person could see me and Tim then we dashed off the bathroom to change clothes. We were on our way

And that was just what it took to get to the airport...

Exciting Update

 Hey guys! We’ve had a lot going lately and theres something I’m really excited to share with you.

 Last year we got connected to a couple of Pastors from Argentina who have a mission to fight sexual child abuse in Latin America. They wrote a children’s book that we used last year as our Christmas campaign. We were able to reach over 1500 children directly with the material and over 2500 children through local teachers and schools.  Over the past year we have learned a lot more about what they do and have been equipped to help children fight against sexual child abuse.  This has brought our understanding to another level and made our commitment to help rescue children even stronger.
 We learned that 1 out of every 3 children in Peru will be sexually abused before puberty.  The studies they did also indicated that the abuser is usually someone the child knows and possibly someone who lives in the home.  The statistics are likely very low because only about 5% of the children abused actually report it.  This is a continuous spiral that repeats itself from one generation to another. We also learned that there are 4 ways someone can sexually abuse a child.  The first is what most of us think of when we hear the term sexual abuse - It involves touching and is what is considered sexual molestation.  The second and third type of sexual abuse are exposing the genitals to a child to be aroused or to have the child expose their genitals to arouse the abuser.  This is where most children feel it is hard to defend or confront the abuser because there is no physical evidence of a sexual violation. The last, and probably for us the most eye opening and impactful and least known form of abuse, is exposing a child to pornography.  Children are sponges so full of creativity that when their minds are distorted with images it becomes a permanent part of their formation and development.  This fourth form of sexual child abuse has grown over the past 20 years through media and technological advances.

Armed with this knowledge and the host of resources we were given access to, we went into 3 different schools we were invited to speak at and did assemblies with all the kids, parents and teachers.  That led to something we never expected, 60 other schools in our city reached out to us and asked us to come and do the same! These 60 schools mean we would be able to reach 9000 children directly just this year. Our indirect impact would also be to the siblings of the kids we reach and any other children the educators have contact with.
 Our plan:

•  Go into 5 schools per month with this material

• Equip parents and educators with tools to prevent future abuse

• Help train children ages 3-10 in a fun and age appropriate way to protect themselves. 

• Provide counseling for any children/parents who have been effected by abuse. 

• Follow up with the schools to support them in this fight. 

• Continue to train up family counselors which we have been doing since our family conference last year.  

 Every piece of the puzzle is important in helping our community with the awareness and effective teaching and training to combat sexual child abuse.

We are so excited to get started but there’s one thing missing. You! We need your help. For us to make this happen, and reach these 9000+ children, it will cost $10 per child. That helps with everything from transportation to the school to giving each child their own copy of “Cuentos Que No Son Cuentos” or "Fairytales that are not Fairytales” - the book that started this whole thing.
 If you were thinking of giving a charitable donation for Christmas, this is the perfect opportunity.

Help us bring hope to this generation of children.  Partner with us to see the lives of children transformed all over northern Peru.

If you would like to give into this project and are a member of our home church Powerhouse please give through here just mark it missions or on Sunday mark missions and write in Peru on your offering envelope.

If you are not a member of our home church and would like to give please go here

Thank you all so much for all your support
God Bless
Kat