Eriberto walked for hours to meet with us. We don’t know how long it took him; time is not really a relevant detail to the highland Quechewa people. Neither is distance. What is important is community. And we got to see first-hand in Peru how the organization ATEK is helping communities to build and grow and become strong.
Standing in a field by the elementary school, Eriberto wears a Stetson-style black hat with a strip of brown leather stretched around the band. His blue checkered shirt is done up neatly underneath his bright red jacket. It’s fairly cool in the morning at 11,000 feet. We’re higher than Machu Picchu right now, surrounded on all sides by green mountains.
Eriberto was a leader in his church, and helped minister to another nine churches in other communities. The church leaders got together about five or six years ago, acknowledging that they needed proper training to help lead their congregations. None of the leaders of these churches had ever had formal training, and financially they could simply not afford to go to school. It was “impossible,” Eriberto shares.
That’s when Eriberto heard about ATEK, a Quechewa-run ministry that works with Quechewa communities to train leaders. Leaders who can teach, who can preach, who can minister to husbands and wives and children. Training that is simply not accessible to these remote communities otherwise.
ATEK came in to Corribumba and helped Eriberto’s community. In the last five years, Eriberto has seen enormous change in his community of Corribumba and in the other nine churches in his network.
In his town of Corribumba, ATEK-trained teachers are now leading marriage counseling, literacy training and alcohol education as well as pastoral teaching. He has seen his church strengthened where before it seemed ready to die. It grew the faith of the Christians in his community, and he says they are now aware of their responsibilities as Christians.
But more than that, Eriberto has seen change in his own life. He and his wife took ATEK’s marriage counselling. The sessions opened his eyes to what a marriage could be, such as praying together and making decisions as a couple, something they never did before. Even though he was a minister and was teaching and was baptizing, he never fully understood what marriage was about. Now it makes it more meaningful when he helps to counsel other couples, as he now does in various communities including the village of Perrca, where we were staying when he made his trek to share with us what God is doing.
Summing it up, Eriberto says this about the training he and his community received through ATEK.
“It’s a blessing from God. ATEK is like a medicine for the problems in our villages.”
