Calendin

Sandra Ramirez has been a missionary in South America since the 1980s. In 2007 she and her husband Edwar set out to plant a church in Pachacutec, a new suburb of Lima. Every day people arrive from the country to begin a new life in the city. The Pachacutec church is there to tell them good news about new life in Jesus.

The government encourages new arrivals to settle in designated areas, like Pachacutec, where they are provided with very basic housing. Families are established in simple, one room, wooden shacks which would make most of our garden sheds look grand. Electricity is available but there is no running water and no sewage system. People who work hard can make enough to improve their lot. Through time the area will become more prosperous and the housing provision will improve as families are able to build more permanent structures.

At present there are more than 50,000 people living in Pachacutec. As you can imagine there is a lot of poverty and there are all the social problems that go with it. What is more, there has been little or no Christian witness there.

Toward the end of 2007, Edwar and Sandra and a small team of people from the Jasmines Church in Lima, which is backing the project, purchased 120 square meters of land and erected a temporary building. Since the team held their first service in the new hall in November 2007 the number of local people attending the services and weekly Bible Studies has steadily increased.

Today the work in Pachacutec led by local believers under the supervision of the Jasmines church but in the summer of 2019 Sandra and Edward moved to take up a new role. They are based in the town of Calendin and are responsible for teaching in a number of rural churches, many of them in isolated locations.

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