Success

Our Thanksgiving dinner last Saturday night was a great success. Everything went perfectly! On Friday, Laura and I spent the morning cooking with 2 Bolivian women helping us. It was such a different experience for me to be preparing our special Thanksgiving casseroles, sweating, and speaking Spanish. But it was a great morning, a special time of just being women, cooking together, irregardless of culture, language and even temperature. Bubba spent Saturday preparing and cooking 2 turkeys - his specialty. It was so beautiful and elegent in our living room turned dining room. I felt like we must really be grown-ups if we were hosting this kind of dinner! Everything here starts much later at night, and kids are included, something we are all getting used to. Our party started at 7, with the majority of folks arriving by 8. We sat down for dinner at 8:30, after Bubba shared about why we celebrate Thanksgiving and the fact that we were happy to be sharing this tradition with our new Bolivian friends. The kids played, iced turkey and pumpkin cookies, colored coloring sheets of pilgrims and indians, and the adults generally enjoyed being together and meeting new people. It was a great success, and feels like the beginning of new friendships here in Bolivia. Thank you to all of you who prayed for our time. Enjoy the pictures.

Thanksgiving Dinner

This coming Saturday night the 22nd, we along with our teammates the Kienzles are hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for some of our Bolivian friends. They do not celebrate Thanksgiving here, so we're hosting this as an opportunity to share some of our culture with them and also as a way to open our home in order to get to know them better. We're excited to do this, but also a little anxious over preparing Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people. We'll be renting tables, chairs, place settings, etc and clearing out our living room furniture to set up inside. We've planned our menu and will be serving the traditional stuff - turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn pudding, stuffing, broccoli salad, rolls, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie. So, as you are making your plans for celebrating with your family and friends, will you pray for our Thanksgiving banquet? You could pray for these things - that Laura and I will be able to plan and cook the food without too much stress (we're planning on having a Bolivian woman or 2 help us out), that Bubba and Paul can know how to support us, help us when needed, and get out of the way when needed :) for the words that Bubba will share (in Spanish) about why we celebrate Thanksgiving, and most of all, that our Bolivian friends will feel loved, welcomed, and that it will be an enjoyable time for all involved (our kids too).

Fua, an Ayoré Village

I (Bubba) made a trip this weekend to a village called Fua, about 6 hours from Santa Cruz by car. The distance is only 240 km or so (120 miles), but the entire road is unpaved so it takes a while (understatement) to get there. We drove through the night Friday night, worked all day Saturday, spent Saturday night, then worked Sunday until lunch, then we drove home. The building we are constructing in the pictures will be used as a church.

This was a hard trip (another understatement). Driving through the night on a dirt, rubble road was not easy. The air conditioning in my car was not working so I had to keep the windows rolled down and enjoy the constant inundation of dust. I also had a spare container of diesel in the back of my truck, which spilled when I ran over a bolder and threw the car about 2 feet in the air at 40 miles per hour. We stopped three times in the night to rest; the last time we woke up to the sound of a tiger rustling in the bush.

We arrived in San Jose de Chiquitos about 6am. San Jose is the nearest pueblo to Fua. We waited in San Jose for the mercado to open to buy nails. About 8am we left San Jose, drove another 40 kilometers east, spent an hour in a small town going door to door asking for chainsaw oil (we fly by the seat of our pants on these trips), then went off-road about 5 miles into the jungle. We ascended a small mountain in the jungle to reach Fua, a village of about 50 Ayoré. The wind blows hard up the mountain there, providing a little relief from the eastern Bolivian heat. The typical daily scene in an Ayoré village involves children skipping around smiling and playing, the adults sitting around huts of wood, passing Maté (a herbal drink) back and forth, the women weaving jewelry and handbags, pots of rice and beans always boiling over open fires.

There is no water source in Fua. A few years ago Toni and Placido Mercado (SAM Missionaries) bought a water tank to keep in the village. Every 10 days a local town authority brings water to fill the tank, but it is dirty water, most likely from a river. The Ayoré don't drink the water unless they boil it first. They use it to wash their pans, use it to bathe, to cook. Mostly they cook rice and beans, an occasional piece of meat, turtle. Yes, they enjoy the taste of turtle; they find turtle in the jungle, bring them alive to the fire and throw them over the flame. Once cooked, they pull off the meat and eat.

The Ayoré speak their own language, also Spanish. I enjoyed hearing the women beckoning their children in their native language. They sing their words when they call, they are musical utterances with long, extended accents on certain words. The Ayoré are a kind people, circumspect of the outside world, tempered by the slowness of the earth. They move to the rhythm of the wind and the blowing trees, the celestial bodies that mark their days, the light of morning and noon and the total darkness of the jungle nights.

The Ayoré asked us to come specifically to help build this shelter that they will call their church building. It will not be fancy—felled trees from the jungle will support a roof of corrugated metal. But it will be there place of gathering to sing and pray and commune with the same God whose presence fills magnificent cathedrals.

What does "Professional Class Ministry" look like

For those of you who are familiar with Young Life, what we're doing here reminds me in so many ways of "contact work". In Young Life, contact work is going to kids' games, hanging out at their school, spending time with them, sharing life together, so that ultimately you "win the right to be heard" -that kids will want to listen to you share about the Lord because you trust each other, because they know you truly care for them. What we're doing here is similar. We've gone to kids birthday parties, an adult birthday party, held pizza dinners, helped make boxes for a friend's daughter's birthday party. All with the purpose of building relationships so that we can ultimately share the most important relationship of all with our new Bolivian friends. It looks different every week (with the exception of the Monday night English class, and the every other week Tuesday/Thursday Bible Studies) and is very often last minute (not very good for the planner in me, but I'm learning to adapt- as long as I don't need a babysitter :) And it probably looks very similar to what many of you do in the states with your non-Christian friends - loving people who need Jesus.