Morton graduate pursuing mission work in Peru




Brad Roth said that when his 6-year-old son, Mateo, thinks of Peru, he thinks of “good food and family and his little cousins he wants to play with.”

But little Mateo will soon see a different side of Peru.

Brad — a 1995 Morton High School graduate — will soon travel with his son; his wife, Lici; and his other son Elijah, 3, to Cuzco, Peru, to spend a year on a mission assignment for Eastern Mennonite Missions.

“Lici is from Lima, Peru, so we had toyed with the idea of doing some work in Peru,” he said. “We started looking around and connected with Eastern Mennonite Missions.”

The Roths — who called Warden, Wash., home for the past five years — are currently staying with Brad’s parents in Pekin. Their year-long journey will begin Sept. 10 when they will head to Harrisburg, Penn., to attend training for a week and then travel on to Cuzco.

Brad visited friends who were participating with a mission program in Peru in 2009.

“I saw what was going on and thought, ‘Maybe there would be a role we could play and support this work and be involved with this.’ As my term was coming to an end with the church, we felt that calling to explore some other options.”

While in Warden, Brad served as pastor at Warden Mennonite Church. Lici worked as a health promoter with the Hispanic population at the Moses Lake Community Health Center.

In Cuzco, the couple will find themselves in similar roles.

“They have a clinic they work with and a health promoter program that they wanted to expand, so Lici can just plug right into that,” Brad said. “I’m going to be doing pastoral and theological and biblical training with the pastors and the church leaders. I’ll also be working with the school — the mission has a school there — and I’ll be almost doing like chaplaincy work with the kids in the school.”

The couple will also be working with the indigenous Quechua-speaking population. Most of their work will be done in Spanish, but Brad will also study Quechua.

Brad’s college career at Rock Island’s Augustana College led him to meet his wife.

“I did my junior year there in Arequipa, Peru, and I met her when she and some friends came down for a conference on economics,” Brad said.

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