Angela and I are back from our scouting trip to Iquitos. The trip was a success, in that we discovered this situation won’t work for us. Angela isn’t prepared to live in the more primitive conditions, and the school isn’t going to work for our kids. But the clear showstopper was simply network speed: the Internet wasn’t nearly fast enough for me to work remotely. As the largest city in the world without roadway access—you get there by air or boat—there is no natural path to lay phone wire or fiber optic cable. So all telecommunications are by satellite or microwave, meaning that there is a severe bandwidth constraint in the city. The mobile phone companies all had “4G LTE” plastered everywhere, but I could never get better than 3G on my phone. And the fastest wired Internet speed I tested was 700kbps, or about 15% of what I need to work remotely.
We loved the team at People of Peru Project, and support them wholeheartedly. We were all disappointed that we won’t be joining them for the year. But God has a plan for us, and I’m excited to see where He’s going to lead.