Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I know it's well past Christmas, and that we've all moved on into the New Year, but we wanted to share about our Christmas here in Bolivia. Admittedly, it was hard at times to be so far away from family, friends, and all things that are familiar about Christmas. But we did have some good times and made some great family memories. In Latin cultures, Christmas Eve night is the big time for celebration, not Christmas Day. It's customary to spend Christmas Eve with family, having a meal around 11, shooting off fireworks at 12 am, and then opening all your presents. We were invited to spend Christmas Eve with some Bolivian friends who are involved with one of the Bible studies. They invited us and our teammates, the Kienzles. My first reaction was let's just "stop by". I didn't want our kids up until all hours, nor did I really want to stay up that late just for a bunch of fireworks either. So, after going to a Christmas Eve service at the English speaking church (which was great - very familiar, ending with a candle lit singing of Silent Night) we headed over to our friend's house. As soon as we walked in, I knew Bubba was going to be thrilled with our decision to go. There was a smoked pig, a whole pig, splayed out on the table complete with apple in it's mouth! We still had planned on only staying until 10 at the latest, but right about 10 fireworks were brought out to shoot off, making me a complete wreck. Not to worry, Bubba and our teammate Paul were great examples for our kids, shooting off bottle rockets while holding them, while standing on them, etc.......After a while, when I calmed down enough, I really enjoyed this new tradition. After all, if it was going to be 95 degrees, and if we weren't going to be with family, we may as well do something completely different! By this time, our kids were all wide awake and so excited, there was no way we could leave. So we enjoyed a good meal at 11:00 at night (some enjoyed that more than others:), and enjoyed a great time of fellowship with our friends. We managed to make it home right at midnight, when the skies exploded with fireworks like nothing we'd ever seen! It was 10 times what the fourth of July is, with fireworks not going off in a "controlled" manner but with every Pablo, Juan, and Jose shooting them off in the street in front of their house. The kids loved it, and though it wasn't our plan to let them stay up until all hours, I'm so glad we all had this Bolivian Christmas experience. And the four hour naps on Christmas day made it even better!



As for our New Year celebration, Bubba and I enjoyed the same display of fireworks from the comfort of our living room with the kids upstairs sleeping then waking up to the grand explosion. Then on New Year's Day we were invited by some Bolivian neighbors out to the "campo" to a lake for a "churasco" (cookout) and to swim. It was a beautiful place out in the country, and again was another great time of hanging out with Bolivian friends. The only drawback was the sunburn we all suffered from having stayed out all day. I can't seem to remember that we are far closer to the equator here and that 30 SPF doesn't cut it for all day in the sun!

All in all, it was a good holiday time. We're excited for these new friendships and are now gearing up for ministry to start up once again. Thank you for your continued prayers. Oh, one prayer request is that it is Dengue season. Dengue is a mosquito born illness that makes you really really sick. There is an epidemic this year, so please pray for our protection if you think of it.

Life in the Third World

Living in the third world, or the more recently coined phrase, "Global South", we are confronted with extreme poverty every day. Just a few blocks from our house is a main road with a canal running down the median. Living in the canal in makeshift "homes" are homeless drug addicts. Stopping at a stoplight in this area, they will rush to your car window wanting to clean it with a rag, hoping for 1 Boliviano (about 14 cents). Because we see this everyday, at times it is easy to roll up the window, shake your finger "no", look the other way, and not see the person trapped in this lifestyle. Going downtown, as is the case in many big cities, we are confronted with beggars. Mothers are sitting on the sidewalk with one or more dirty faced children, while the children come up to you with an outstretched hand, sometimes following you, sometimes pulling on your shirt. As a Christian, it's hard to know how to best help. We don't want to hand money to the drug addict, nor do we want to see children go hungry. A long term missionary that I respect once told me how she was trying to encourage the indigenous women she works with to sell their handiwork (purses and bags) instead of begging on the streets. There is a lot of theology involved in this advice that I won't go into here, but I really agree with what she said and with how she treats beggars. She tells them that if they have something to sell, she would be more than happy to buy it to help support them. This is a little oversimplified, but I hope it makes sense.

So, last Sunday night, we decided to go downtown for ice cream and a stroll in the central plaza to look at Christmas lights (sweating and in shorts :). While at the ice cream place, an Ayore(indigenous tribe) mom and her three kids passed us. When the mom sent the little girl, probably 8 years old, to come to us for money, I told her that if she had something to sell, I would buy it from her. She ran off, and through the window I watched her tell her mom, and then they proceeded to dig through the trash and find an empty water bottle. I watched her run to the bathroom with it and come back with a full bottle of water, which she then tried to sell me. It broke my heart. Here were my three clean healthy children with huge ice cream sundaes. We told her we couldn't buy that water, but that we would share some ice cream with her. The injustice of poverty is so completely overwhelming.

On another note, this past Sunday, we were able to host two orphans for the day. There are over 150 orphanages here in Santa Cruz alone. This one in particular wanted to give the kids a chance to spend time with a Christian family, while at the same time giving the staff a break. Georgia has a special place in her heart for orphans, praying for them almost nightly after hearing a talk at school from a woman who works in a girls' home. So on Sunday, we had two girls, one age 15, named Jenny and the other Christina, age 7. Jenny and her brother and sister live at the home and are true orphans. And Christina is the daughter of a prostitute from an indigenous tribe. We just shared our normal Sunday with them - church, out to lunch, home to play (which included painting nails, braiding hair, playing dolls and legos), watching a movie with popcorn, and making and icing sugar cookies. While not our ministry focus here in Santa Cruz, it was good to be able to reach out to two little girls who need to see the love of Christ in action.

Christmas Time

If we had to use one word to describe Christmas time in Bolivia, it would be "different". It's really hard for us to feel like it's time to celebrate when daily temperatures hover around 95. Then throw in missing different traditions like peppermint ice cream with chocolate syrup, Trinity's Lessons and Carols, bundling up to go look at Christmas lights, and the biggest, spending time with family and friends. All of this could get us down (and quite honestly, does at times), but we're trying hard to keep the traditions we can, while creating new traditions and memories. One particular Saturday morning, we were sitting in the living room by the Christmas tree, reading, coloring, listening to Christmas music (with the air on full blast) and the words to a particular Steven Curtis Chapman song pierced both my heart and Bubba's as we realized how true the words rang to us this year.

"Christmas is all in the heart, that's where the feeling starts
And like a fire inside, it touches every part
'Cause Christmas is all in the heart
And even if no white snow falls, that's all right because
The joy can still be found, wherever you are
Christmas is all, all in the heart."

So as we enjoy new experiences, like listening to our English class learn and sing Christmas Carols with their Spanish accents, we're praying that we will find the JOY that is found from celebrating Jesus's birth, even if we're sweating while opening presents.

This pic was taken using a backdrop from the school Christmas play. Obviously we're not dressed in our appropriate "Christmas attire", but it's a fun picture. I don't think I've ever been so tan in a Christmas picture before!

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.

Barrio Bolivar Early Childhood Stimulation Center

Below is a slideshow of pictures I took today in Barrio Bolivar, an Ayoré Indian "neighborhood" in Santa Cruz. The construction you see is of an early childhood stimulation center that we (South America Mission) are building in the neighborhood. This is an important project. It will create an opportunity for nourishing the good health of those most vulnerable to disease and sickness. It will also provide the setting for loving the children well and nourishing their spiritual needs. Two government organizations are helping provide equipment and food to stock the facility. SAM is raising the money to build the facility. The total cost is $35,000. So far about $14,000 has been raised.

Culture Shock

When one speaks of culture shock, usually it's with a negative connotation. To be sure, we've had our negative experiences of culture shock. But we've also had some positive ones, some really good expierences of culture shock. One was last week when I (Angela) went out for coffee and dessert with our teammate Laura and one of her Bolivian friends. I was really full from a large lunch and dinner due to mission activities, so only wanted a coffee. But I was also really hot. So I ordered a "cafe frio", or cold coffee. Imagine my surprise when they brought me a coffee milkshake topped with a mountain of whipped cream! Any other time, I would have been delighted, but I was so stuffed that I was dissappointed. But it tasted much like a Starbucks frappuccino, and only for $1.50. So next time I go out for coffee, I'm going to be sure to save room and order a cafe frio! My other pleasant experience with culture shock came today. Some of you know about all the bad haircuts I got in Costa Rica, so needless to say I was a little nervous about getting my haircut here. But I was really in need of one. I sought out a really really nice salon, got a good haircut, and paid top dollar - ELEVEN DOLLARS!

Pressing On For Now

Things are calm here for the time being, but we never know what might happen when. SO, we're pressing on, making plans, living day to day, and trusting the Lord that all is in His hands. The English class that our teammates have been hosting has switched to our house now, and Bubba has begun teaching it. The girl who was teaching is now back in the states, so....Bubba has taught twice now, the first time getting a standing ovation! He is really enjoying it. And I'm glad to host it at our house, as I can easily be a part of the group without having to get a babysitter. I really enjoying opening our home, preparing snacks, and making our home a welcoming place. We meet every Monday night at 7:30, and it's a great, very informal, relaxed setting for getting to know Bolivians. Anywhere from 5 - 12 people show up and it's a basic conversational class. Bubba has also gotten together with one of the guys who comes, and they are each practicing the other language (Bubba -Spanish, friend - English). I (Angela) am continuing tutoring twice a week with a Bolivian woman who teaches Spanish at the kids' school. I enjoy my time with her, and am continuing to improve with my language abilities. On Fridays I meet her at the school, and then stay afterwards to help out in Sam and Georgia's classes for a few hours. I really have enjoyed this. Last week I helped 4 Bolivian boys in Georgia's class, who are a littel farther behind, catch up on some reading and social studies. English is a second language for all of them, and the school is an all English speaking school, so I could empathize with them! But I'd whole lot rather learn a new language at their age than at mine!! Thanks for being interested in our lives. We miss you all terribly, but are confident that this is where the Lord has us. Thank you for your continued prayers.