Spring is here...

September arrives and with it brings the sounds of thunder and the first rain of the season. It is a nice change, although they say half way through rainy season you are wishing for dry season again. It rained pretty hard and we discovered the leaks in our roof and the need to buy plastic for the windows. Jason learned that it is near impossible to teach class in a classroom with a tin roof. Even though the students were crowded around him they still were not able to hear each other shouting. Jason has also been working on our refrigerator which is a hole about 4 feet deep in the ground which is several degrees colder than the outside temperature. We are hoping to keep vegetables fresh for more than one day after we get back from town. Unfortunately his first attempt was with only dirt and with the heavy rain it all caved in. The second attempt was made with wooden sides and this time should work out well. We will see when we get our vegetables from town this time. We have been very short on food here at the school this past week, so we have tried to make a little more in our house. Unfortunately we do not have vegetables because they don’t last, but we were able to make banana bread and cornbread. We have to eat it all in one day or give it away so it does not mold. The cornbread was a little bit of an experiment because we have no baking pan and the ones from the kitchen were in use. So I attempted to make it in a frying pan and it worked out great! The tomato plants in the garden are starting to get little tomatoes! Jason made a neat bench for our porch this past week. Last Thursday we went to an evangelical campground about 45 minutes from the school for a fun day. We got to play fun Bolivian games with the kids and then some soccer and ultimate Frisbee. It was a lot of fun. The exciting part was when they got ready for make lunch and found that the ants had found the bread…but hey you can always bang the bread together and get most of the ants off. We went to town last Wednesday to sell granola and had a learning experience. We went with two boys, Limbert and Javier. We decided to split up to sell the food faster. Javier and Limbert went together and Jason and I, but we were planning on staying on the same street. A little miscommunication found us an hour and a half later with no idea where Limbert and Javier were. Jason was getting frustrated at this point. It was hot; we still had bread and granola to sell and we didn’t know where our “children” were. We decided to head to town and start buying the things we needed and maybe we would find the boys or else they knew what time to meet back to get the truck ride to the school. As we walked we carried the granola and bread in our hands. When we approached the corner of the market, to our relief we ran into Limbert and Javier. They were fine and had sold quite a bit. As we were talking to them a gentleman walked up and asked what we were selling and proceeded to buy some granola. This helped relieve a little bit of the frustration. We set the time to meet with Limbert and Javier and headed to the first store. We still had 1 kilo of granola and 3 loaves of bread to sell. As we checked out in the first store the lady checking us out asked what the granola was. I proceeded to explain it to her and she bought it right there on the spot. Praise God! The next store we went to as we checked out the lady asked what the bread was that was in my hand. I told her it was whole wheat bread and she said she was diabetic and she wanted it and requested we bring more for her next time. I said we have two more in the bag and she proceeded to buy it all. WOW! God knows our needs and helps us even when at times we don’t go straight to Him for the answer or for help. Nothing is impossible with God and even though with our attitudes we might not have deserved the blessing He gave us; we praise Him because He loves us as we are!
Now Jason is writing…Last week I had a conversation with a 4th year student named Max that was very interesting. He taught me how to read music a few weeks ago and I was playing my guitar on our porch and he walked up and asked me what I was playing. I soon found out his family is indigenous and lives quite a ways away on one of the main rivers here in Bolivia. One of the other fourth year students, Franz, had asked Carrie why she believed in Jesus and God and how can we be sure they exist. One of her reasons was the existence of demons and demon possessed people that are very prevalent in other countries. A man from our church in Athens, John Rema, has told us many stories about encounters with evil spirits when he lived in India and Carrie was telling Franz some of these stories. Max heard her talking about them and proceeded to tell me about his experiences with evil spirits. He said that in his tribe, when they heard a whistling noise overhead, that meant that the evil spirits were listening to them and they could ask for things from them, usually to heal someone sick. At one point his grandmother was “healed” by one of these demons. He said they are very large and wear white robes with a brilliant heart shining on the front of their robes. He told me one time there was a party in the tribe and three or four of the evil angels came and one picked up a flute that was laying on a shelf and started playing it and everyone started dancing to the music. So they appear quite often to the people and they are familiar with them. Max has tried to witness to his mom about Jesus but she believes in saints and their images and that they have power. He said a famous soccer player in the town they moved to kicked a soccer ball and their house door was open and it came inside and broke an image of a saint about 2 feet high. The man got sick and died three days later. He said many many things like this happen to make people believe these saints or images have power, so his mom has no interest in hearing about Jesus and that these images are only wood or stone. I asked him about his dad and he said his dad was killed by a witch when he was 8 years old. I asked him what he wanted to do when he finished school, and he said he wants to go as a missionary back to the tribe he is from. Spanish is not his first language. They speak another dialect there and he is fluent in it. He said he wants to go but is trying to decide if he should study medicine first because many people are sick and unhealthy there. He also wants to be a pilot because it takes many days to reach the tribes that he wants to witness to. Pray for him that God will help him make the best decision as to what to do after he graduates in November. It seems like all the kids here have a burden for their families. They all want to share Jesus with them but many are not receptive. During Wednesday night worship they have praise and prayer request time, and there are tons of kids with praises. In the United States, to me it seemed like very few praises and mostly prayer requests. Here it is the opposite. Even if a kid has a prayer request it starts with a praise and then the request is usually for their families. We all want our families to be in heaven with us! Our time here on earth is so short compared to eternity. Let us make sure that nothing keeps us from missing out on meeting Jesus face to face and spending eternity with our loved ones. Nothing in this world is worth missing that for.