The view from the back of the truck on the road to the school. Check out all the dust! Imagine the coating you get after a 30 minute ride!

Jason on the back of the truck on the way back from town.

The boat dock to go to Brazil.

Jason making a pretty entrance into our house.

Carrie and the garden which has grown a ton since this picture!

Esperanzo, the cat, found a nice bed in our clothes washing tub.

Enjoying a Mandarin on the porch!

The huge, fancy Adventist Church in Santa Cruz.

Another week...

Everything has gone about like normal this past week. Jason got two more English classes added to his schedule because the former English teacher went on vacation and has not come back…The garden is beginning to sprout up new plants and we have finally finished transplanting over 400 tomato plants that we have. We finished the week of prayer on Friday and had communion on Saturday. We learned that the goal of true education should be 1)redemptive, 2)teach the student to think and do, and 3)eternal. This has made me reevaluate every class that I teach to make sure I am pointing the students closer to God and not just teaching math and science. One thing that I noticed that was neat about communion here is that for a week before we participated in communion the religious leader here was telling the students you need to make things right with anyone you might have a problem with. They were encouraging the students that communion is like a mini-baptism, a recommitment to God and we need to make sure everything is in order in our life first. Previously communion has been an arrive at church and oh wow today is communion experience. I like how they take it very seriously here and want people to be ready. More than half of the students participated. For church we heard all about heaven and it was so exciting. You just wanted to leave this crummy earth and be there with Jesus so bad! Another thing I noticed in church was what the students pray about. When they ask for blessings for others or their families it is often related to food, like provide for the food that they need this week. Such simple needs compared to our often complex requests. The fourth year students are really a great group of kids. There are some great leaders in that class, especially spiritually. One student, Frans, gave a worship on Friday night that was very well thought out about the rich young ruler who followed the commandments but did not want to sell his things, give to the poor and follow Christ. The story is found in Mark 10:17-31. Frans asked the students to raise their hands if they knew or had ever known a rich person, very few raised their hands. Most of the villages are very poor without any “rich” people in them. They would probably think every American was rich. One interesting point Frans made about the story that I had never realized was that when Jesus answered his question, “what do I need to do to be saved” He told him to follow the commandments. The rich young ruler said he had and he named 6 of them, but if you notice they are the last 6 commandments of the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 all of which involve loving and respecting others, but the ones he was lacking were the first 4 about loving God. He was lacking the personal saving relationship with God. Another example of a really special 4th year student is Max who has been helping Jason learn to read music. The other day I was coming up from washing our clothes and I was carrying the little tub of clothes across the field to our house. Max saw me from a distance and dropped his things and ran over to me to help me carry the clothes the rest of the way to the house. Javier is another really neat kid who comes from a boy’s home. He is a 2nd year student who is very smart and very helpful. One night they were using the marker board from my classroom to do an illustration during worship and he realized that I had already prepared the board with homework and some warm-up problems for the next day. He was quick to go and make sure that the person presenting was not going to erase that and see if he should go get another board so as not to mess up my work. Not all the kids are like these that I have talked about; we learned this week that there is an issue with prejudice amongst the lowlanders and the highlanders. Hopefully with their time here they will learn to look past the exterior to the heart like God looks at us. We started family worships this week. We meet twice a week with our “family.” We have two “older children” who are single staff members and then the rest of our 9 kids are students. We meet at our house and sing songs, pray and study together. It will be a neat outreach for us to be able to lead. We have cooked some pasta and vegetable meals this week. It was so nice to have fresh vegetables for the two days that the vegetables lasted.  The pancakes we tried to make did not turn out so good. There are birds here but you do not really see them very much. We know there are birds though because you here them at night and in the morning. They are very loud and make very unusual sounds. One bird makes a high-pitched squeal that lasts for at least 30 seconds each time. It almost makes you want to cover your ears. Another bird sounds just like an alarm clock beeping….so much so that one morning I got up to turn my alarm clock off and get ready for the day when finally Jason asked me what I was doing and I realized my alarm clock was not supposed to go off for another 10 minutes. It was the silly bird that I thought was my alarm clock. On our way into and out of town we have to pass through immigration. It is a place where the vehicles have to stop and talk to the immigration and sometimes, depending on the person and there mood they will come on board and check whose on, which means they will quiz us for paperwork. We only have a copy of our short term visa and passport, which technically has expired now, but it is so hard to get a year visa here that it takes months. So the officials give us a hard time and we have to plead that we are working on our visas in Santa Cruz. There is one particular woman who works there who likes to give any American an especially hard time and has been known to pull people off the bus and not let them continue to the school until they can show more paperwork. We have interacted with this lady once, but luckily another staff member was with us and helped us get out of it. Well one day we were headed back just the two of us on the bus and as we stopped at immigration we realized that last time Jason was the only one who went to town and that my visa was not with us. We started praying immediately as I began to search in our bag for the paperwork. As we were searching we saw the immigration police getting on the bus. I found the paperwork that we thought was only Jason’s visa and it turned out to be mine as well! Praise God, because he asked to see our paperwork and after giving us a little bit of a hard time he just walked away. As we were driving away a few kilometers later we saw more police on the side of the road pulling people over. They will sometimes do this to do a drug check, but will always ask for our paperwork while they are on board. But as we passed by we realized they were occupied with another car and we were going to be able to pass by without any problems. It may have been an inconvenience for the driver of the other car but it saved us from having to try and prove once again that we were legal and hopefully not get pulled off the bus. What we learned from this experience is that our “problems” may be the answer to somebody else’s prayer like that car was for us. So don’t get upset when it seems God is not listening; He might just be answering somebody else’s prayer.

Just a little snake they found trapped in the water wheel. It is dead!

Jason in the hammock.

Our lovely bedroom

Outreach opportunities!

We have been learning about all different types of outreach this past week. Wednesday is community service day at the school. We came to town with Salim, another missionary, and Limbert, a 3rd year student to sell granola to the community in Guayara. We go knocking door to door and tell people we have a new product that we make at the school that is healthy and ready to eat as is. The people do not know what granola is so we have to bring a sample for them to try. We tell them all the health benefits and most people wanted some. We sold 10 kilos of granola and had people asking for more. Salim has colporteured before and taught us a lot about the skill of selling your product. We asked the people if they would be interested in other vegetarian/healthy food in the future and many were interested. We asked if they would be interested in a cooking class and many of the them were. We are hoping to spread a message of healthy living to the community and build relationships that will hopefully lead to Bible studies. Saturday we did outreach in the community of Yata. Jason and I have a group of 8 students who every other week go to town and visit 8 different families. The way the villages are set up here you can just walk up to people’s house and everything is so open you just yell good afternoon and people will show up. You are practically in their house but they don’t care and they just invite you in or bring seats for you to sit on. We pray with them, sing hymns and share something from the Bible. This week we talked about the story of creation and brought felts along to show what was created each day. We showed them how creation happened in a literal 7 days with the last day, Saturday, being set aside as a day to rest with our Creator. One house we went to was out along a long dirt path and when we got there we yelled good afternoon but no one responded. We had seen the daughter on the way out and she had said her parents were waiting on us so we knew they had to be there. We looked around and accidently found them bathing in the river. The man was just in his underwear. He said hold on a minute. So we waited and a few minutes later they passed by in only their towels to go change in the house. A few minutes later they came out and we shared with them our message and had a nice conversation with them. Another house that Jason went to the mom was sitting in the hammock with her child when the child began to cry. The lady leaned over and started to let the baby breast feed. Jason and Javier, another student, were getting ready to leave and shake her hand so she sat-up shook hands and then leaned back over to continue feeding her child. Each house is an experience! We have also been participating in outreach right here on campus as we help teach the Sabbath school class for the kids that know the least about the Bible and for the community members that come each week. The past weeks we have been studying Romans which is a little difficult to teach to people who don’t have a clue what justification, righteousness or sanctification are. We are still learning what they mean ourselves. This past week we were trying to teach them the difference between being slaves to sin under the law and freely serving God which results in keeping the law. We used a rope to tie up one student and blindfolded him and put sticky notes all over him with all our sinful actions that keep us under the law and slaves to our sinful nature, such as lying, saying unkind things, thinking things we shouldn’t, etc. We said this is what it is like to be under the law and living according to your sinful nature, you become a prisoner. But when we give our lives to God He frees us and helps us live according to His nature and then we will produce fruit for His kingdom. We proceeded to free the student and put sticky notes with good actions that come from a life filled with the Holy Spirit. We can only pray that examples such as these will leave a lasting impression on the students. Jason preached this past week as well sharing about how we have a special message to share with the world. We are to be like Daniel in Babylon and Joseph in Egypt prepared for the difficult times because we have been faithful in the little things. We should be able to interpret the signs of the times and give a solution like Joseph to survive the crisis. We have been working a lot in the garden lately, because Jason and I along with Tara are now in charge of the garden. We have been trying to plant lots of new things so that we can get more food from our garden, food that will be ready before November when everyone leaves. We have been working alongside the students to prepare the ground, the plants to transplant and to sow new seeds. Jason has dug 300 post holes for the tomato plants. We have planted carrots, radishes, cucumbers, beans, zucchini and are transplanting eggplant and tomatoes that have already been growing in smaller bags. During this time we have the opportunity to talk with the students. One day this past week I was working with a student, Lizeth, and we were pruning the young tomato plants and all of a sudden in the midst of 100 tomato plants we saw one that did not seem to fit in. As we looked closer at it we realized it was not a tomato plant. Somehow it got mixed in with the tomato plants and no one realized. I don’t know what plant it was, but it made me think of a parable that I had just read. It is found in Matthew 22:1-14. It is a parable of a wedding feast that many are invited to, but when the servants of the king throwing the feast go out to get the people invited they do not want to come. So he finally sends out his servants to get anyone who is in the street who wants to come and they fill the banquet hall, but as the king walks among his guests he notices one guest who is not dressed appropriately. The rest of the guests were given a new robe, but this guest was not wearing the robe that was given and had no excuse for being different. He was thrown out. The parable is talking about the wedding feast in heaven and we must be clothed in His righteousness to be able to go. All we have to do is accept his free gift of righteousness. I was able to share this parable with Lizeth and this led to many other questions about Heaven, about what happens when you die and many others. I was able to explain to her what I have learned and others began to listen and ask questions as well. Praise God for opportunities to share our faith! Our whole lives should be an outreach to others; we should constantly be using opportunities to share our faith with others. School has been going pretty well. I enjoy teaching the math and science classes; although at times I wish I had a bigger vocabulary. The students have such a hard time thinking on their own. We are talking about the scientific method and I think they enjoy the students have several “study halls” when they really should be receiving history and health classes. Jason’s first English class went well. The students were able to answer questions in English and they are going to be learning how to pray in English. We received a stove this past week from some missionaries who are going to be gone until November, so we will be able to cook some food and supplement our diet with a few more vegetables and little less rice. God has provided money for the food for this week! But since we have been a little short on money, rice has been the main component of almost every meal. Rice three times a day is just a little too much. Jason has learned how to read music this week and is practicing with all the Spanish hymns. Max, a 4th year student, taught him. Another cold front came in this week and has brought cold weather at night, but luckily it still warms up during the day. We have lots of colds going around campus right now. The past week and a half we have had a week of prayer teaching us about the signs of the times and how we can prepare our faith to withstand trials that may come in the future. We have been so busy lately we have not had a lot of time to wash clothes. The girls love to ask you if they can wash your clothes. You give them 12 pairs of clothes and pay them 8 Bolivianos which is like $1.12. They get some money and you get clean clothes…it’s a nice trade when you are running low on clothes and running low on time. Well the solar panels are working good and we have had electricity all the time, although we do have to run the generator every now and then. Money has been given to develop the spring on campus so all the water that comes into the homes is from the spring. Right now you have to walk a quarter of a mile into the jungle to fill your 5 gallon container and haul it back to your house to have drinking water. Count your blessings for they are many!

jason sick..the mosquito net fits perfectly over our bed though. thanks mom!

this is the road we walk back and forth on to Yata where we do community outreach. its 8 miles round trip.

this is the whole school right after the parade

Paulina, a student from Las Amalias, Janet and Keila, two teachers before the parade
alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503456178556778754" />
carrie working in the garden planting watermelons

jason hanging clothes to dry that carrie washed in the river

this is right before we went to church. it was so cold when we first got to the school!

this is the plane steven wilson flew us 3 hours into the jungle in to get to the school.

carrie and i with ximena and eliazar, the couple we stayed with in santa cruz.


Classes have started and campus is buzzing with students. Carrie has class on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. So far my classes have gone really well! Science has been fun because we have been learning about the scientific method and doing some experiments. One really neat experience I had happened on Sunday. I was talking about using the scientific method to show that the Bible is the inspired word of God and I was running out of time. We were looking up different prophecies and seeing how they were fulfilled even though they were written 250 years before they happened. I said well I had other examples but we are running out of time so I will skip to the end. But the students objected. They said we can go a little longer we want to hear the other prophecies! What kids do you know of that would ask to stay over in class to keep learning!! It was so cool. Some of the students are really low in math, while others are pretty bright, which will prove to be a challenge. The students are all really nice! One girl in my class’s name is Paulina. She is from the indigenous tribe in Las Amalias. She came here last year for the first time to study and had to learn Spanish because in her tribe they only speak Seha. She had to learn how to use a bathroom, use toilet paper, wash her clothes in a river, and overall good hygiene. She is super sweet. The other day I was washing clothes with her and she was talking to me and she asked me if I had ever met an indigenous person before her? So I asked her if she had ever met a “gringo” (white person) before us here. She said she had seen a little girl once but was scared of white people at first. In her village there is no high school and normally the kids get married after 8th grade and continue living in their village. Las Amalias, where she is from, is where they have started an outpost mission project. They just finished building a church and a house up there and one mission family from here has moved up there to live with them and teach about good health practices and most importantly about God. They say they have to repeat things a lot and it is like teaching little children. We had another cold front come in this week and Carrie got sick as a result of it. She has had a fever and has been a bit weak. Jason has been working with the accounting and found out that we need $400 a week to feed everyone on campus, which is only a dollar a day per person. This month we received $500 to live on for the whole month. So pray with us that God will provide for our needs throughout this month and that the kids will see how God provides. The garden here has been producing tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. We have another missionary couple that are going home and another that are stuck in Santa Cruz with visa problems so we are very low on teachers right now. Several classes just are not being taught and we don’t know who is going to oversee the garden. Jason has not yet had class, because on Friday we went to town to celebrate their independence day. We walked the 4 miles into town because the truck was not fixed yet. We hurried into town to wait. Someone had died in Yata so we had to wait till they were buried before we could begin the ceremony. We then marched into position before the heads of the town along with another local school. We listened to several national anthems and little speeches and then marched around in front of them. Luckily by the time we were done the truck was back and working so we could ride back in it. The truck part that was broken was fixed in town, but what Enrique, the driver, did not know was that the truck did not have any oil. Once while he was driving it, it just stopped working. He prayed and it started back up and made it all the way to Yata. Praise God that the motor did not burn up and they were able to add oil in Yata. Over break some of the students went to Las Amalias on a mission trip and we have been hearing all about their stories and some of them are really awesome. It was obviously a really neat experience for the students and made several want to go back and be missionaries. I have been getting to know the students better and talked to one boy this week who is a senior, his name is Jhunior. He was telling me that his parents did not want him to come to school here. He has been living with his grandfather. He does not know how many siblings he has because his dad has slept with so many different people. He decided to come anyway and says his first mission field was when he returned home to his grandfather’s house during summer vacation. His grandfather gave him a really hard time about his new faith. He stayed strong and returned the next year. Since then he has started a Bible study with his great grandmother in town and wants to be a missionary. He says if someone asks me why I am a Seventh-Day Adventist. He says it’s not because everyone at the school is but because he is a child of God and the Holy Spirit is working in his heart. What a testimony to the mission of this school! This past week my work day is Tuesday afternoon and I was working in the banana fields with the girls digging trenches which by the way is a ton of work! While we were working we reviewed the scientific method, solved math problems and memorized a Bible verse. There was probably seven girls total that were in hearing distance and participating. Jason worked in the soon to be rice fields. Right now it is just jungle and the kids go out there and just start whacking everything down with a machete, trees, plants, and weeds, whatever is in their path. Then later we will burn it all and plant rice there. We are trying to become self-sustaining agriculturally. This week we are starting two weeks of consecration for the teachers. We will have worship each night and the students will be there to hear and keep us accountable to what we hear. Pray with us that lives will be touched as a result of this time of worship and study.

School Starts Tomorrow!!

We are back in town...as Monday seems to be the day we will come. Coming to town is not terribly fun though, because you first have to walk a mile to the road from the school. Then you catch a bus that takes about half an hour to get to town. From there you take a motorcycle taxi to the market. You walk everywhere from there. The town is covered with street shops selling all sorts of clothes, shoes, produce, and household necessities. The streets are covered with motorcycles and it is hot and dusty. The people are all nice. We use the internet and get some fresh fruit and today I, Carrie, will be getting some school supplies and making photocopies of the textbooks since we only have one. When we finish with our errands we go and hang out at an airplane hangar until Ruan and Tara and the food for the school are ready to return. Then we ride on the back of a pick-up truck the 30 minutes back to town and when we get there our bottoms are sore and we are covered in dust!! Your ears, your hair, your nose, everything is full of dust. Then your cold shower feels wonderful! Tomorrow classes start. Students have been coming back for the last couple of days. I have two math and two science classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Jason has english class on Friday. Now will come the crash course on speaking the spanish language. Jason got sick again on Friday from who knows what, but is recovering and was up and about on Sunday. He is having a hard time getting used to the food here. Breakfast is the meal that is most different than we are used to, because it would be like a lunch for Americans. Today we had spaghetti and tomato and onion salad. Lunch always consists of rice and a bean mixture of some sort and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. Last night dinner was potato burritos. Each morning we have worship together as a school and each evening. They love to sing here before every worship and church we sing atleast 5 to 10 songs. We sing hymns and we sing every verse! The garden has been producing lots of cucumbers and we had a special treat of lettuce from the garden last week and were able to eat sandwiches. While working in the garden I try to ask the students math questions that relate to our gardening. That is the idea of the school that the teachers work with the students and continue their education while working...a great idea!! It is fun, but I began to realize more important than their math knowledge is their knowledge of God, so I have changed my priorities, first I think about a spiritual lesson we can learn from the garden, which there are many and then the math lessons. This last week we transplanted watermelons. We started off with a large area of hard ground covered in weeds, stumps, roots, etc. We first had to dig up the ground, by hand, no helpful machines. Then we prepared a circle plot for each plant. Then we planted them and watered them. In the future we will fertilize, prune as needed, pull weeds and hopefully recieve fruit. We do alot to help the plants, but I realized that the watermelon still begins as a seed and no matter how much tender loving care we give them they only grow because God makes them grow. I began to think about our commission to spread the gospel to the world. We can share our faith, we can invite people to church, we can pray with them and study the Bible, but it is only through the Holy Spirit working in their lives that they will come to have a personal relationship with Jesus. So we should not get discouraged when we do not see the fruit of our labor, because we might just be the ones preparing the ground or giving the fertilizer. One day hopefully they will produce fruit and follow Jesus. At noon everything around here shuts down for about two hours. This week they celebrate their independence day and on Friday we will be going to Yata to march in a parade. Thursday we might be going to a park to spend a fun day, but it will depend on if we get our truck fixed before then. An update from Daniella, the girl who I shared her story a couple weeks ago. She went home for a week and when I asked her how it went, she sad bad. I asked why she said her mom had just left and was not there the whole time, so she was left with her father. But Praise God when I asked her how that went, she said good. He did not abuse her and even though she was nervous she asked to go to church on Saturday and he said that was fine. She went with her grandmother. I have had the opportunity to talk with several of the girls which I enjoy, but I have been forewarned that they often do not tell the truth. Maybe once I build more of a relationship with them they will tell true stories. These kids are learning great things at this school, but they have a hard life to return to with many temptations, so keep them in your prayers.