Early thoughts from Hotel Davina, La Paz

Wow, my first blog post. I wrote the following at 5:30 this morning after sending my parents off to the airport with Willy, our persistent taxi driver. I've caught a vicious cold and I'm sure it has affected the tone of this post.

This Blog exists because of my friends who have missed me when I disappeared and expressed interest in reading about what I am up to in Bolivia.

The purpose of this blog is to reveal the glory of God in Christ Jesus.

In holy fear I will record only the honest truth.

I am relieved to give-up self-promotion and self-inflation as the accepted way of finding employment, moving ahead, being a respectable adult. I am terrified of the unflattering details that will appear on these pages, but they will all show how God is at work in the world despite and through our weaknesses.

My heart is sick from trying to talk how I am supposed to talk, write what I am supposed to write and live up to false expectations of someone who I am not.

I am fortunate to have this opportunity to break away from these oppressors and I thank the board of Mission Amistad and the people of Aramasí for bringing me back to Bolivia and my parents, of course, for their support.

I have not even met José, the agronomist, yet. I have seen pictures and heard that he is a jolly man with a sense of humor and a fierce handshake, even with women. He brews his own fertilizer from scratch, I don’t know if he chews coca, but I am very excited to live and work with him and most of all learn about how to grow plants on the rugged rocky slopes of Tapakari.

Aramasí is a town in Tapacarí, which is the poorest and most inhospitable region of Cochabamba, the central most department of Bolivia. There are virtually no paved roads and the vast majority of the people speak only Quechua, a language older than the Inca. You should look it up, it's pretty interesting stuff.

I am going to Aramasí because of a Catholic hermit-monk Father William Wilson, or Padre Willy, who traveled to the little village to be alone and pray amongst the poor. Kind of a contradiction as he soon discovered. The village people percieved him to be a 'padre' or someone assigned by the Catholic Church to help them. They brought him their sick and wounded, domestic issues, demon-possessed, etc. This did not give him much time to pray, so he convinced some people in the states to donate money for a health clinic and went about setting it up so he could get back to praying. In the process, he saw the government orphanages in Cochabamba and generally became intimate with the plight of the poor and marginalized in the this area. He was given some land from a Catholic orphanage to build his own for children not eligible for adoption, met and married a nun, moved back to the states and started Mission Amistad. This story is a cursory version of the original, but you can look that up too, if you want at
http://www.amistadmission.org/html/our_history.html
I guess hypertext is not automatic. Nope, got it.

I've gotta get up and check out of the hotel. Here we go, the downward spiral from 3 star hotel to the streets of La Paz, 8 hour night bus ride to Father Willy's apartment in Cocha, to cleaned out storage room in Aramasí...

Here're some pics from our recent visit with the NPPC team: