Visitors

This week brought many visitors to the school. Jeff and Fawna Sutton, who helped start the school, and their three children along with Marty and Kendra, a young couple who work in Santa Cruz on a construction site where they are building a new radio station, and Dr. Kim, his wife and their three boys, who are building a school/orphanage/sanitarium in Semipata, which is a beautiful town in Bolivia. Also, Cornelio and his daughter Abigail along with their parrot Priscilla, returned from the indigenous tribe in Las Amalias and will be staying with us for the next couple months waiting for Susie, Cornelio’s wife, to return from the United States.
The reason for the large meeting was that these leaders of the different projects in Bolivia are starting a college and they came to promote it to the students at our high school. The school is based on a school that Ellen White helped start in Tennessee called the Madison School. I have been doing a lot of research on the Madison School and education in general, this is Jason writing by the way, and am very excited about what they are starting. The school will be stationed in Semipata, where students will all go for one year to study evangelism and basic health/natural remedies. At the school they have a very large agricultural program where students will learn how to grow their own food and take care of a garden. They will go to school for half a day and work for the second half to pay for their education since it will be free to attend. Then after the first year, the students choose what they want to specialize in. They have a choice of mechanics, construction, teaching, nursing, or pilot. Then if a student chooses for example construction, they will be taught how to build churches, houses, etc. and will be placed with a mission team that builds these things in Bolivia, therefore receiving practical training and doing mission work the whole time they are studying. The idea is that when the students graduate, they will go out in teams with teachers, a health worker, construction worker, mechanic…all who are trained evangelists, who can go out and build schools and churches and start education programs and do medical mission work. It is very exciting and makes me want to start a program like this somewhere. We need more missionaries here and they need to be trained at a very low cost so they aren’t burdened with debt and thus can never leave home because they need to work to pay off their school bills, etc.
Carrie and I are doing very well. We have not gotten sick in a long time, Praise God! The boys decided it would be fun to throw all the male staff members in the river Saturday night. Jason put up a good fight, but still got thrown in with three other boys coming along. There was just too many of them. We have not had sufficient money for a while coming in from donations from the school and so some of the teachers have been spending personal donation money to buy food. We have been praying about it and this week we stretched the food until Wednesday and just yesterday enough money came in to buy food for this week and we have enough to have some left over for next week! God always provides for our needs when we ask Him. He knows our needs before we ask, we just need to learn to rely on Him.