Generation Peace Academy Walks In True Parents' Footsteps in Peru

The first ten days of our Generation Peace Academy trip to Peru we spent in Lima and its surroundings. Our service work has been rebuilding or building homes in the slums and painting interior walls of the national church headquarters. Throughout the week, we broke into two groups and took turns going outside of Lima, working to remodel a community center used for witnessing purposes by WFWP or staying at the church center to paint. The projects we supported in the slums were all for different organizations such as soup kitchens, witnessing centers, and education centers. We went to church at the Lima center on Sunday. We gave them two offering songs and spent time with the community playing sports, singing, and dancing. The last thing we did in Lima was raising funds with fruit. We went to a busy fruit market and went around asking for donations to give to poor families. We then went to the slums in Collique. We visited a cafeteria there and donated the fruit to them. We played with the kids there. We then visited the Lopezes, a church family with forty family members. We went with the mentality of giving hope to the second-generation members there.

In Puno, the first thing we did was visit the holy ground there with the rest of the community to offer prayers. Over the course of our time in Puno, we spent two days helping with the construction of a new church center and repainting a community wall in that city. We also visited a senior citizen’s home that is in the same organizational lineage as Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. We gave them musical offerings and clothes donations. The pastor in Puno worked hard to get GPA television interviews and radio interviews. We did five television interviews and a radio interview. Pastor Ceasar witnessed about our Unification movement on television. We went to the church in Puno and gave them an offering song and dance along with a big donation to help them further their church construction. Later we played sports

with the whole community at a park.

Our last week in Peru, we stayed in Cusco at the new home of a church member, Jesús Quispe. We had a remarkable and rare opportunity to visit Machu Picchu and tour around. Years ago, True Parents prayed around a rock there so we decided to offer a song and prayer around it.

True Parents’ visit to Peru

Rev. Sanchez described a visit to Machu Picchu by True Parents. Jose Rafael Sanchez was president of the Unification Church in Peru. He and his wife, Maria, participated in the 2075 Couples’ Blessing in 1982.

The following day, True Parents visited Cuzco as planned. From there they rented a helicopter to Machu Picchu, a sacred Inca city located in the jungle of Cuzco. True Parents walked around the area for about two hours. Father mentioned that this city was built in a very special location, because of the beautiful surroundings, and was used as a place of worship. On top of the ruins, where a solar watch is located, he made a special prayer for the ancestors of the country.

He also testified directly to our guide. First, he told him to learn Divine Principle at the local church; later, he invited the guide to come to United States to take part in a tourism project that Father is planning. This man had mentioned earlier that he had been a tour guide for eighteen years, but that this occasion, to be near such people as True Parents, was the most meaningful of his entire life.

After Machu Picchu, True Parents visited just a few more historical places in Cuzco before returning to Lima, as they had to attend the banquet, which was the main event that evening.

A second testimony

It was good that Father visited there. In the center of the temple, Father and Mother led all of us in prayer. We made a circle and Father had a deep prayer there. In his prayer, he blessed all the ancestral spirits from that particular community at the time of the Incan civilization.

Father said, “You may come down now and work through your descendants, because I visited here and this place is now blessed. Someday Unification Church members will visit here and remember what I prayed.”