When I opened this site, almost nothing you see here existed

When I opened this site, my kids didn’t exist yet. Miriam wasn’t around either — I didn’t even know her yet. It wasn’t even called familiarosasmaya.org: it was called ircontecnologia.org.

I opened it with a fairly specific intention: that there would be a place in Spanish where someone could find missionary information and experiences. Because when I started down this path, about thirteen years ago, that was one of the hardest things to find.

The decision to serve as a missionary took its time. But once I was firm in it, figuring out how to serve turned out to be just as hard. There was good information in English, but almost all those doors were closed to someone like me.

Asking at church wasn’t easy either, and I want to say this without complaint but clearly: many churches simply didn’t know how to guide someone who answered «here I am, send me» when the sending was outward, beyond the local church.

I only managed to find one place with good information in Spanish. And they went further: when I contacted them, they took the time to listen to me and guide me — someone sat down to listen to a young man who didn’t even know what to ask, and gave me courage.

I should confess something else about those early years: it was hard for me to call myself a missionary. It felt somewhat shameful. In most people’s minds, and in mine too at the time, a missionary came from abroad, spoke another language, was tall, white, and arrived by plane. Could a Latino be one? Even one from the jungle? Today I know with full certainty that yes — but back then it wasn’t at all clear to me, especially being from Peru’s interior. Maybe that’s why the site started out talking about what I did, not about who I was.

What’s happened since then

Thirteen years later, the list of my experience serving with SIL is right here, entry by entry. Then Miriam came along, once I’d already stopped being afraid about my work; she arrived exactly when she should have, neither early nor late. She arrived with what my life and ministry were missing, and I trust I did the same for her. Then our children came, along with the work with the Nomatsiguenga people: literacy and writing in their own language. And our experiences together were added here too — the moves, the scares, the waiting, and also things that turned out better than we asked for.

None of that existed the day I registered that domain.

The bedtime devotional

This week my daughter and I were reading her children’s Bible. We were at the part where the people of Israel have already crossed the Red Sea and are walking through the desert: the cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, and the manna.

When I read this, the first thing that comes to mind is «how foolish». They’re looking and not seeing, as they say in Mexico. They still have the open sea fresh in their memory, they have breakfast served without having sown it — and they complain.

And yet I find myself complaining too. That «how foolish» fits everyone, and missionaries aren’t exempt — sometimes we’re among the first in line.

A website doesn’t fix that. But it serves the same purpose as the cloud and the pillar of fire: to leave a record. For me it’s memory; for our prayer and support partners, ongoing proof of the real work; for someone else, I hope it’s proof that it can be done — that if the Lord calls, He also guides, and He also sustains.

That’s why we redesigned our website

With that same reasoning, we took the time to redesign the site: not just so it would look nice, but so its sections would be easier to understand.

If this is your first time here, in the blog we keep field experiences, written as they’re lived; in news we publish the summarized version of what we also share, more privately, with our prayer team. And there are two sections that didn’t exist before: The field, about what we do with the Nomatsiguenga, and The network, about our work with other projects across the Americas.

And there’s a place to write to us: this page, along with other details we hope make your reading more enjoyable and encouraging.

So take a walk through the archive. Find an old letter and read it knowing how the story continued. It’s a good exercise — it’s hard for me to complain after reading an old post or update.

If you’re where I once was

And if you ended up here because you’re turning over the same questions I once did, write to us. We have ideas for how to serve that would surprise you.

With love in Christ,
Pepe and Miriam