Back in the US

With the exception of Sara and Laura who are staying in Bolivia for an extra two weeks, we are safely arrived back in the USA last night. I wouldn't say that we are all jumping with joy over our return. It was very difficult to leave behind our friends in Santa Cruz and the culture that we have grown to love. As I woke up this morning in Chicago and heard the noisy Chicago traffic out of my window as opposed to the rooster that has been waking me up every morning for the last 3 weeks I felt an incredible amount of sadness about the change back to the states. We are now all on the journey of making it through the reverse culture shock. Thanks for everyone's prayers while we have been away, pictures will soon be coming!

Sand Machines

It´s so hard to believe that we just have 3 full days left in Bolivia! On Monday and Tuesday we felt like machines destroying two very large piles of sand in two days. Despite the sand trucks failure to get the piles of sand in a reasonable distance from the place where we needed it, we shoveled and pushed wheelbarrows like champions and we even had fun in spite of the blisters and sore backs. Due to the threat of rain and the cold weather today our outdoor work is done. We spent the day helping out the staff at the daycare taking inventory and making crafts. Tomorrow we will be splitting up between this daycare (Samuelito) and another daycare in Santa Cruz. After that it is just two short days to visit the sites of Santa Cruz and spend time with our friends before we leave on Sunday morning.
Last night we got to know some more of the youth in the area. We were invited to the Principe de Paz pastor´s house with the youth from the church for a typical Bolivian BBQ. While I spent the evening with the girls last night I watched how everyone was interacting and realized the great memories we have made. A guy just out of high school from Ohio got here on Wednesday and is spending the summer in Santa Cruz. The girls overwhelmed him for quite a long time showing all the pictures from the past 2 weeks and telling a million stories and jokes that have developed while we are here. He made the comment, ¨Man, you guys have too much fun.¨ And I realized that yes, it´s true, there have been so many good times, and what is most fun for me to see is that most of the memories seemed to involve people from our new Bolivian family and friends (who by the way speak next to no English).
We´ll be seeing you all very soon!

Back in Santa Cruz

We are "home" again in Santa Cruz and back at work. This weekend got us out of the city for a short vacation. On Friday morning we packed up with with the family Yuneth, who is the Samuelito daycare director headed out on a 5-6 hour drive northeast to the little village of Concepcion which has the special feature of a gorgeous cathedral started by Jesuit Missions. We stayed at a hotel there and hung out for the weekend. Among other things we cooled off in the lake, I mean really cooled off. The water was quite cold in fact, and the only way to successfully submerge our bodies was to jump off the bridge. Many times. No worries, it was not THAT high of a bridge. Of course this experience was countered by the hot springs that we soaked in for a bit yesterday on the way home. Somehow the "4 km" of the beaten path to the hot springs turned into almost an hour drive on the sandiest, bumpiest roads (if you can call them that). Dispite such bumpiness the drive was quite lovely. As we got further from Santa Cruz we entered into a semi-mountainous region, saw many rolling hills covered in palm trees and large rocks and on Friday we even had to stop twice for cowboys to herd large packs of cattle down the road.
Today we have entered back into a rainy period. This morning we nearly had to call off work early due to the rain, but we gave it another go this afternoon and the sky actualy cleared out for us, which allowed us to move a large pile of sand to spread out infront of the daycare building.
It is the finaly week here which seems to have come fast. In the last few days some of the girls have started feel some ill effects from the food or something unpleasant, which is not all that unexpected.
Please keep us in your prayers as we continue through the last week and prepare to return to the USA.
I would love to share more pictures from the weekend but discovered that sticking anything into the USB ports at these internet cafes is a great way to spread computer viruses. So I will share them when I am home again.

Another Day, More Dirt

Today we finished our first ¨full¨week of work. We had a couple of short days due to a hold up in the building of the daycare center, but felt pretty good after a productive day today. We were able to lay bricks in a couple of rooms, haul more sand (our favorite activity) and prepare the front area for dirt to be built up and a veranda created. This week was a warm one, sunny and quite windy which stirs up ridiculous amounts of blowing sand, but we´ve grown quite acustomed to sheilding our food at just the right moment.
The schedule of our days has typically been something like this...We catch the bus or rides with host parents at various times of the morning but all gather for breakfast around 8:30 at the daycare. Mondays and Wednesdays we get milk rice and Tuesday and Thursdays we have delicious rolls or fried bread. Several of us discovered that without coffee we have no energy for the morning and have frequented the next door shop for individual packets of instant coffee which truly has saved our lives. We then work at the construction site from about 9:00-10:30 and take a break to eat some fresh mandarins or bananas and a portion of our daily dose of wafer cookies. We pick up work again until noon when we go back to the daycare to receive a large and delicious lunch of soup and a plate full of salad, rice or pasta, and a meat dish. It´s all so good!! We siesta for a little while before we head back to work until around 4:00 when we finish work for the day and eat a snack of bread and hop on our various buses to head home. Some evenings we see no one except our roommates at our host families house and other evenings we gather together with our Bolivian friends to play games and eat more wafer cookies :).
We are all experiencing improvements in our Spanish slowly but surely and enjoying being part of the Bolivian culture. Tomorrow morning we all leave early for a weekend trip to Chiquitania which is about a 5 hour drive to the northeastern part of Bolivia. Yuneth, the director of the daycare and her family will be driving us there and spend the time with us. We will relax out of the city for a few days before coming back to Santa Cruz for the final week here. It´s hard to believe that there is just over one week left!!

Cumpleaños, Cumpleaños everywhere!

Another two days of work and fun in Bolivia! Work the last two days has been similar to the first two...hauling dirt, packing dirt and laying a few bricks. We see visions of mixing and spreading cement in our future.
The exciting activity for our group in the past couple of days was yet another birthday celebration (it seems as though every day the girls report more birthday parties they attended with their families the night before), but this time we celebrated our own Hannah´s birthday in true Bolivian style. Yuneth, the fearless leader of the Samuelito Guardaria (daycare) who exudes endless energy filled us in on the tradition and helped us suprise Hannah at midnight last night. Hannah´s birthday is today and we got to wake her up with a beautiful serenade. Those of us from the states stumbled over the complicated Spanish while our Bolivian friends played guitars and sang. After we finally got her and Leah out of bed we ate more delcious Dulce de Leche torte and sang and danced for awhile before calling it a night! Fun times! We hope Hannah will remember her 16th Cumpleaños :)
It´s difficult to decide what pictures to include but here are a few more I´ve uploaded.


Yuneth (on the left) teaching Hannah (middle) and the other girls how to dance.


bad quality picture, but this is what Hannah woke up to


Courtney is quite enthusiastic about her brick laying

Children at the Samuelito Guardaria

mmmmmm, more chicken, rice, yucca and POP. Laura and Sara delight in the 3rd meal of this sort in one day on Saturday

the Saturday birthday celebration with 300 kids in Los Tajibos

I didn´t realize I uploaded this picture, but since it´s here, this was the view out of the window when we flew from La Paz to Santa Cruz

A Bolivian Weekend

It´s the weekend and we got to get out of the city! With the sun out the days are warmer but it still gets quite cold at night which seems to catch us off guard a lot. Yesterday, was definitely a full day of activities. We started out the action with lunch in the village of Cotoca just out of Santa Cruz. On the menu....more rice, more chicken, more Yucca. It was delicious as always. After lunch we drove further out of the city to a far more rural village, Los Tajibos. We were given the task of helping with the decoration for a Cumpleaños Fiesta! We were super proud of our balloon creation. We then witnessed the chaos of 300 children celebrating a mass amount of birthdays with clowns, games, prizes, food and 2 gigantic cakes which we cut and served as fast as we could. This was all put on by the IDI Project (Food for the Hungry - a Korean organization). The birthday celebrations were not over for the day. We then got to experience a fifteenth birthday party, which is a big deal to say the least. This was very close to Los Tajibos and was a large gathering of most all of the Mennonite and many other similar churches in the Santa Cruz area. It was very ceremonial and provided the opportunity for more rice and chicken and yucca (that would be 3 times in one day). It got super cold, we got a bit tired and finally convinced our new friends, Daniel and Pedro to take us home.
Today we´ve been with our various families going to church, eating, sleeping, eating and some of us will be going to church again tonight. Because we have been seperated for the day we´ll have to wait for an update on the specifics of everyone´s activities. As of yesterday everyone was still happy, healthy and in good spirits and I assume that can still be said today.
Thanks for keeping us all in your prayers!
Below are a few pictures from the first 3 days in Santa Cruz. I have not uploaded any from the weekend yet.


the whole group at Stansberry Children´s Home


afternoon break, more BREAD! Pan, yummmmm!



siesta...... the sun finally came out


they still look so excited to push wheel barrows


a little progress we have made...so much dirt, so many sore shoulders.


this is how the building looked on day 1

Leah with her baby. she might steal one.

So much in so little time!

After two days of feeling like bobcats...and by that I mean the tractor-like equipment, we are ready to rest our sore arms. Thursday morning we got busy with the building project that we are here to help with. We heard so much about how amazing last´s years youth venture team is for beginning this difficult manuel labor, and now one year later with the foundation laid and walls several feet high we are doing our best to bring a new set of enthusiasm. Our work has consisted of hauling wheelbarrows full of sand/dirt from a large pile up into the ¨building¨, spreading it out as evenly as possible and packing it down. To complete the packing we do dances, jumping exercises and our most useful technology, a poll with a large chunk of cement on the end. We aspire to lay a layer of brick over all of this on Monday and Tuesday next week. At the daycare we are fed breakfast, lunch and break....or rather, bread, rice and bread. It´s the most delicious food you can imagine really and more of it then you could ever consume. No atkins diets are allowed here!
Yesterday evening we got a pretty exciting opportunity to go to a Christian concert, Jesus Adrian Romero. While it may have caused me a small amount of stress to keep all girls in my line of sight, it ended up being a wonderful and beautiful event that meant a lot to us. There was a futbol (soccer) stadium packed out on this holiday, Corpus Cristi. So much excitement and people there to worship! We also had a great time with the new friends we have made in our short time here.
The following is a list I wrote down from the girls this afternoon when we reflected on the ways we have seen God in the last few days:
1) We saw the face of God in all the people at the concert. It was all about God and people sang along with so much passion.
2) We saw God on Thursday at work when so many people came to help build on the holiday, their day off from work.
3) God is in all the people here and their welcoming hospitality and enthusiasm.
4) God is at work in all the progress of the work around the area at Samuelito and Stansberry especially. Carina, who has spent some growing up years here has seen this progress happen.
5) We see God in the peoples openness and lack of judgement.
6) We see so much love in the sense of family and in the way all people are welcomed into the home and food is shared endlessly.

We are excited to see where all we will see God and the relationships that will be build and progress made in the next 2 weeks.

Bolivia, our new home!!

Hola!
We made it to Santa Cruz after a long overnight flight and much sleep deprivation yesterday morning. We were immediately split into our five families with 2 girls in each family and taken home for some rest and food. Yesterday evening, we gathered together again for orientation and supper (which we would all agree that Bolivia food is fantastic!! lots of meat, rice and fresh fruit....give us a couple of days and we´ll tell you what our intestinal think about it). When we returned home for the evening everyone has reported that the evening activities consisted of anything from sleeping for 12 plus hours to watching tv in english or spanish to entertaining host children to stumbling through spanish conversations.
Today, we really had a great day. We spent the morning at the MCC center and then we ate at a Chinese restaurant. That´s right, Chinese in Bolivia, but Daniel, our host for the day, couldn´t be detered from wanting a Chinese meal. He insisted that we could get Bolivian food every other day here. It was delicious and way too much none the less. And because this is a group of 10 girls and bathrooms essential, we then ended up buying a couple of coffees at a cafe simply to access bathrooms. The afternoon was spent at the Stansberry orphanage where we satisfied Leah´s craving to hold a baby. She was pretty much in heaven for the next couple of hours.
Tomorrow we will begin building out muscles with some quality labor. Our work will be at the Samuelito daycare center where we will continue building a larger facility to house the daycare. We have heard so much about it today and how famous the youth venture group from last year is for starting this project, so we are excited to continue the building project.
As we compile more stories of the journey I´ll will post them as they come, but I can assure you that we are all having a great time at our varying levels of understanding what is actually happening and being said around us!

Together At Last!

After much anticipation we are finally all together in Chicago! Everyone arrived safely yesterday and we have spent the last day and a half bonding as a team and preparing for our time in Santa Cruz. Everything leads me to believe that this is an outstanding group of girls. There is a wide array of personalities but everyone meshes together well and seem to all be very down-to-earth and caring. This morning we went to church next door at the First Church of the Brethren and really enjoyed the small but energizing congregation. After spending more time discussing prep for the next few weeks we got out of the house and visited a beautiful conservatory and went downtown to the Millennium park. Tonight we're relaxing with a movie. Tomorrow's the big day of travel. We'll fly out of Chicago at 5:30 to Miami and then fly through the night down to Bolivia.
Here are a few pictures of our group!


Our lovely team, top (L-R): Hannah, Natalie, April, Emily, Carina, Leah; bottom: Sara, Laura, Courtney, Jill

Millennium Park

Marveling in the reflections of the Chicago big mirror bean

visiting the largest conservatory in the Western hemisphere

Getting Ready!

The start of this Youth Venture adventure in Bolivia is oh-so-close and I am feeling the pre-trip franticness pretty intensely. As I make each check off of the "To Do" list, I feel like 5 more are added as I prepare to lead a team of 9 young ladies. On Saturday morning, I will meet up with Carina Zehr and Leah Mueller at the Wichita airport to fly to Chicago where we will fill out our team with Sara Metzler, Laura Sullivan, April Zehr, Hannah Sauder, Courtney McCoach and Emily Mininger who will be flying and driving in from across the country.

The following is a bit of what our schedule will be like in the next three weeks:
Sat, June 6-Monday, June 8: Group bonding and orienting in Chicago
Mon, June 8: Fly to Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Tues, June 9: arrive in Santa Cruz, orientation and go to host families (there will be 2 of us at each home)
Wed, June 10: orientation and visits to the work in Santa Cruz
Thurs, June 11 & Fri, June 12: work at building the daycare center
Sat, June 13 & Sun, June 14: Cotoca and church visits
Mon, June 15-Thurs, June 18: work at building the daycare center
Fri, June 19-Sun, June 21: visit Chiquitania (www.chiquitania.com)
Mon, June 22-Thursday, June 25: work at building daycare center
Fri, June 26: visit Mariposario (www.biocentroguembe.com/eng_index.html)
Sat, June 27: last day to spend in Santa Cruz....
Sun, June 28: fly back to Chicago

I will do what I can to make frequent posts about how our experiences are playing out!

Many prayers would be appreciated for our work, safety, health and Spanish proficiency :)