Porque Jorge, Porque?

Hello, my name is Zack Yarbrough and I am a junior at Sterling College. I am studying Secondary Education with an emphasis in Math and Physics. I play basketball at Sterling and also lead a praise band for our chapels there. After my first mission trip to Nicaragua last summer I was hooked and had to travel to some distant land once again to see lives being changed. Short-term missions work has found a special place in my heart.

Today was our third day in Peru and for many of us our bodies were even more upset with us than the day before. We have been doing a lot of very hard work but thankfully the weather has been great. It never really changes. It is always cloudy. It never rains. And the temperature stays around 65 degrees all the time.

We started the day once again in the Via del Milagro (Miracle Village) where we spent the entire morning finishing the work with the massive pile of dirt at the church. The floor of the church is now much closer to being finished and it was encouraging to see the progress we had made.

Today my new friend Jorge did not show up at the work site. Yesterday a ten-year-old Peruvian boy named Jorge wandered onto our work site and sat on top of the mountain of dirt we were moving and watched us work. After a few failed attempts to make conversation with him in Spanish, he proceeded to flick rocks at my forehead from the top of the hill. For the first five minutes I liked to believe that this was the Peruvian way of showing loving support and encouragement and that I simply did not understand this gesture due to the cultural rift between us. This was not the case. However I think he just wanted some attention or he enjoyed watching this tall white “Gringo” asking him “Porque Jorge, Porque? (Why Jorge, Why?) . Later we had some more successful conversations and he eventually helped us with our work, a little. The reason Jorge was with us that afternoon was because he was skipping school. After giving him an uplifting life talk about how school is important, I told him that he should go to school tomorrow. As much as I missed his mischievous smile as he flicked pebbles at me, I was glad he didn’t show up because that hopefully meant he was at school.


After lunch we came back to the school and assisted the other team with the building project. We twisted rebar, dug holes, pushed wheelbarrows and in the process, some of us even sustained a few minor injuries. If you have ever read the book “holes” then you know what a day of work looks like for us. Later in the afternoon the girls set up a face painting stand in the courtyard by the classrooms which became a huge success. Some many kids were swarming the girls that I couldn’t even see them. Seeing the smiles on the faces of these kids made the hard sweaty manual labor all worth it.


Friends and family, I miss you dearly and will see you soon enough with many good stories to tell and life lessons to share.


Te amo


-Zack