October is almost here and it is hot!!

Hola familia y amigos! Another week has gone by with a few highlights to share. This past Saturday evening the whole school loaded up in the back of the extra long truck to go to town for a music festival that was being held at the church in town. The kids were performing in the program. The voice choir, hand bell choir, and recorder choir all performed, as well as some special music’s by different students. The students did very well. We learned more about Bolivian culture while being there. First off we got there at 4:30 to prepare and the program was supposed to start at 5:30. At 5:30 they started singing as a group, while they waited to start the program at 6:00. Everybody is late in Bolivia. Finally at 6:00 the program began and they said it would last for two hours, but they had scheduled 30 different songs. We were just getting to the middle of the group at 7:30. At about 7:00, the bugs started coming out so thick you could hardly breathe, or maybe that was because there were so many people stuffed into the church with no ventilation. It was like an oven and literally bugs were falling out of the sky onto your head, face, body, everywhere. It made me think of the plagues that were sent on Egypt. It didn’t help that we had not eaten anything since lunch. The program did not end until 9:00pm. To top it off the performances were not very good. We did not end up getting home until 11:00pm, sweaty, dusty, and tired. The next day everything was delayed an hour, because when you are used to going to bed at 9:00pm and getting up at 4:30, going to bed at 11pm is really late! Another interesting experience we had this week was in Yata, the nearby town. The church is having an evangelistic series there and the students are helping put it together and the pastor from Guayara is preaching. The first night, the students got there and prepared everything and went out to invite people and had 19 people come. They were singing and waiting for the pastor to arrive and when it began to get late, they realized the pastor was not going to show up but the show must go on. So Keila, one of the other missionaries here, got up and let the Holy Spirit use her. She spoke about Elijah and at the end the people told her they wished she was going to share each night! We must always be open to be used by God and He will give us the words or strength or courage or whatever it is we need when we need it. The next night we went with the kids to town to help set-up the meeting. It is being held in the school there in town as we do not yet have a church building there. As we were preparing, the lights were not turning on. The energy for lights for the whole town comes from a generator and it was not on. We kept waiting and waiting and the lights never came on. We prayed that God would either turn the lights on or bring the people anyway. God decided to bring the people and even though we had not light 29 people came out. The students love to go out when we get there and invite people. They eagerly go door to door inviting the people to the meetings. Imagine that!! It is so neat to see them helping in God’s work like that. The pastor made it this night and gave a very nice, simple, but applicable sermon. It was very neat because as you looked up into the sky you could see thousands, millions of stars, even the Milky Way Galaxy and for me I would rather not have lights when I can look up and ponder God’s greatness right there. The meetings go for another 3 nights so we will see what other challenges Satan tries to throw at us that God will overcome! We have had at least one request to start Bible studies. Pray that God will work in the hearts of the people in Yata.

Lining up to play the squeeze the hand down the line game...a hard concept to teach the kids.

Games Bolivian Style

Some of the primary students and Abby, Cornelio´s daughter who is the missionary in Las Amalias.

Water balloon toss.

Jason celebrating ¨Student Day¨with the kids.

Bolivian version of a water balloon toss.

Jason relaxing with his friend, Priscilla.

Holidays

Bolivia has many holidays and will use any excuse to cancel classes and celebrate something. This week we had “student day.” In this day the students are celebrated…not quite sure why. Here at the school it was made a special day without classes. It began with two hours of work and then activities. Jason and I went with about 25 other kids to the field to work. In the field with machetes in hand we mowed down a ton of jungle. You just pick a spot start whacking away and walking forward. Later they will come and burn it and continue working to completely clear it and later plant rice or something else. After work we had a Bible scavenger hunt all over campus and then some other little group games before they were given free time. In the afternoon each class prepared a special meal to eat with their class. The fourth year students made food for the teachers. It was good; they made a version of nachos and it ended with a celebration of their accomplishments and growth throughout their time here. Worships have been interesting this week, the third and fourth year students have been learning to defend their faith. Each student has a topic and role plays with a staff member defending/explaining from the Bible why they believe what they believe. It has been good and makes you really think, are you prepared to give a defense from the Bible for the faith that you have? As 1st Peter 3:15 says, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”
This past two weeks I have been in a constant state of pain…not super bad, but not fun! First it began with pruning tomatoes, I pruned tomatoes for two hours straight and the plants are little so it involved bending over. Then I went to wash clothes which is also bending over and pulled a muscle in my back that put me completely out of commission. When I finally started getting over that, I started getting this excruciating pain in one of my toes. It was very strange…at first I wondered if it was an in grown toe nail. It would just throb. It was hard to sleep and finally one night, Jason got up and did “surgery” on my toe and got something out that was causing the problem. From that point forward it began to get better just as my next ailment came. I ate a mango in town and did not remember or realize that I have an allergy to the juices in the skin. It causes my lips to bubble and ooze and swell. It is very painful. The first day they swelled a little, but the second day they were huge. It hurt to talk, to eat, to smile, laugh, etc. Even today, a week later they are still not completely better. I am hoping after this ailment I will be all better. Jason has remained in good health and is now one year old!! Praise God!

And the rains came...

This past Saturday we went to Yata, the nearby town to do our biweekly visitations. As we were preparing to leave we heard thunder in the distance. The truck has been broken so we were going to be walking the 4 miles one-way to Yata. Thunder could have been a good excuse not to go…what if it rains on us and we have to walk all that way in the mud? That thought never even crossed the minds of the students here. We headed out and as we got close to the town, the winds started blowing dust storms all around us. We were coated in dust and you could not look back or you would be blinded by dust. It made me think of the Great Dust Storm in the Midwest. When we got to the first house it began to rain. We huddled in the small room with no light as it thundered and lightning all around us and rain poured down. We gave the worship and hurried to the next house. When we left this house we were swimming to get to the next house. There is no grass in their “yards” or around there houses so it is a muddy mess and very quickly becomes pools and rivers of water. It rained the whole time we visited houses and a little on the walk back. Everyone was home and was very appreciative of our visits. Working for God does not always mean the sky is sunny and the way is easy, but God still calls us to go!
I had another neat experience this week when I went to wash our clothes. I went while the students were working or else there is no room to wash. Another student, Ruth, was down there because she was sick and did not go to work that day. As we were washing she began to tell me her story. Each student here has a story and not one is alike but all are more difficult than anything I have had to experience. She said she wanted to go to the elementary school that is related to this school when she was in 8th grade, but her parents and her father in particular did not want her to go. Long story short she ended up sneaking out of her house to apply and her parents were very unhappy with her. Since going to the school she has learned about God and given her life to Him. She is no longer welcome in her house and when she visits they say mean things to her and blame the family problems on her. She goes to visit because she wants to share the hope she has found with them. At one point she wanted to kill herself and has gone through depression many times. This day that she was talking to me she said was one of those days she was feeling especially down. She said she felt like I was sent to wash clothes at that time. All I did was listen to her, offer encouragement and pray with her and she felt like I was sent by God to help her. WOW! How God uses us poor, pathetic human beings to be a light to others is amazing! Keep a smile on your face because you never know when God might be using you to be a light to others. Bugs are coming out more lately…from giant scorpions to very different looking moths, cockroaches, gnats, mosquitoes, bees, bats, spiders you name it and it is probably here, bigger and grosser than you have seen before and quite possibly in your bed. Classes have been going well and we have been working in the fields and garden with the kids. Jason was able to talk about spiritual lessons from working in the field with the students. Tomorrow they are burning the fields and then it will be time to saw down the rest of the trees and get ready to plant rice. Life continues in the routine and God continues teaching us lots of lessons!

Jason in the tomato garden.


Parade Day

Motorcycle taxis in Guayara.

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.

Jason with his refrigerator.
Carrie making banana bread.

Visiting houses in Yata to do outreach. We sing songs, pray and have a short devotional thought with them.

Jason playing soccer.

Students getting the ants off of the bread for lunch.

Teeter Totters at the campground.


carrie and some of the kids at a fun day playing a game

Carrie cooking in the kitchen.

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.