A narrow two-lane paved road, built a few years before with money from John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, ran the length of Peru’s coastal plain. It was called the Pan-American Highway, and in the barriadas to the south of the city it was the only paved road. It more or less bisected the expanse of dunes that had been become shantytowns, and it was the main street and shopping mall and industrial route for the whole place. If you drove south and turned toward the ocean you were in Mariano Melgar and Villa El Salvador; if you turned left toward the hills you were in another set of barriadas. In one of these, called San Gabriel, my dad had a small church going.

Any American in Peru in those days was involved, to some degree, in the culture of foreign aid that dominated Peruvian politics. The Kennedy administration, with its bright young economists and its mania for heading off communism, had raised hopes for a period of accelerated, state-led capitalist development that would leave Peru and its neighbors looking something like the post-Depression United States. In this scheme, Kennedy’s people had invited the assumption that the pump was to be primed with US investment, loans and grants. The part of that combination that touched the lives of ordinary people the most directly, by far, was the grants. There were warehouses around town packed with surplus soybeans, grain and powdered milk from the US, and armies of US Agency for International Development experts running around figuring out how to dispense it where people could get their hands on it.

Distribution was the weak link, which may explain why my Dad found he could routinely walk into these places and, after slapping some backs and talking some basketball, drive off with his Land-Rover filled to the ceiling with 50-pound bags of Indiana corn. In a barriada, he found, a big bag of powdered milk commanded far more attention than printed tracts or large megaphones bolted to the roof of the car. (Not that he gave up on those methods either. Anything that might work.)

I know that he worried about the effect his attention-getting technique had on the character of people’s interest in his message. I heard him talking about it with my mom and on occasion with fellow missionaries. It was impossible that there weren’t at least some people who cared nothing about the finer points of Luther’s theory of salvation exclusively by grace, but needed to supplement their children’s milk intake badly enough that they would listen patiently as long as they had to, nodding and smiling. A missionary in Asia years earlier, in a fit of ethnocentrism and callousness, had called such people “rice Christians.”

I guess my Dad decided that the risk was worth taking, because some of his church groups, such as the one in San Gabriel, began to revolve around food activities at least as much as the worship services. Before long, he and some of the local mothers had a regular breakfast program going, feeding a few dozen small children a bowl of hot oatmeal with milk every weekday morning, a few of the more outspoken mothers directing the labor. I have no idea how he drew the ratio of stomachs filled to souls won, worked his calculus of salvation, but I know that I never saw him enjoy his job more. There was a drive and a purpose about him that was different from when it was just about knocking on doors and talking about the Small Catechism.

This had been going on for a year or so when my dad decided that the church in Peru needed a central building somewhere. I think he also had noticed the incongruity of keeping his own family in a moderately privileged neighborhood far from the barriadas, and wanted to move closer to the action. He combined the two things by designing a three-story brick and concrete house with office space on the second floor and a residence on the third. He chose a location in the San Gabriel barriada, at the end of a steep street up against a low, rocky hill.