The walls at Luz de Vida

Last year St. Paul UMC raised $20,000 to buy the land for Luz de Vida's new church building. In Bolivia there are no laws against squatters so the first thing they begin to build are perimeter walls for the property. I was told that this is also an essential part of Spanish architecture.

Last year the group from St. Paul UMC began building this wall. I could tell they were pleased to see the finishing touches that had been made.
The week before we got there a group of eight women from La Porte built the frame of the wall that you see here. Amazing!

We began on the third wall. The group dug a 50 yard long ditch that was 3 feet deep and 2 feet wide using a pick axe and some shovels. We took turns picking and shoveling. It was a great workout!

Then we filled the bottom of the ditch with huge heavy rocks as we mixed the concrete by using 3 buckets of sand and 2 buckets of rocks...water to taste...poured it into wheel barrow and over the rocks. This is a picture of Ashley and I shoveling sand into the buckets and then picking the 40 lb. buckets up and carrying them to the mixer. Again...great workout! The team work was amazing and inspiring!

Here is a close up of the magic!

Ashley and Katy and our beloved buckets! Whew we were dusty!

More work at Luz de Vida

Hola amigos! My apologies for the lack of blog posting. We had great internet connection at the beginning of the week but Wednesday night it died. I found my way to an ethernet chord to give you all one more post before we embark on our 29 hr. trip back to Southeast Texas! I can't believe we have come to the end of our trip. I still have much more to tell and I will post the stories when I return to fast wifi! So please tune back in next week. I will be traveling until Saturday night and can't wait to see Trinitarians on Sunday!

For now I will leave you with this. Luz de Vida, the new church we worked on, has one staff member. Her name is Nancy and she lives in the house that they are using as a church. She has had an extremely hard life. The people at Emmanuel recognized her gifts and potential and put her in this evangelistic position at Luz de Vida. To say the least, the church has been a saving grace for Nancy. She constantly smiles from ear to ear! You would never know that she has experienced sorrow in her life because she is joy personified. After getting to know her and growing to love her, we had to say goodbye for now. Please remember that we speak to one another through a translater for the most part. She pulled out a notebook and I expected to simply write down my contact info for her, but first she wanted something else. She wanted me to write down the name of my church, she knew that I was not a part of St. Paul. She told me to write down the name of the church because she was going to pray for us. She was also going to pray that we could come to Bolivia. Then she asked me to pray for Luz de Vida. Of course I agreed, but only through my tears. This is the church my friends. This is what Paul was saying when he wrote to the church in Philipi saying:
" I thank my God every time I remember you, ⁴constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, ⁵because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. ⁶I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. ⁷It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel. ⁸For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. " Philipians 1:3-8

My friend, Nancy!

This is the garage if the house that they worshiped in, until the building material took over.

So we carried boards and rebar and more boards. We carried them three blocks over to a church member's house that is adjacent to the construction site.



Then we moved a HUGE pile of dirt and trash out of the backyard into a truck in the front. Ashley knows how to use the shovel!

I had to get a running start to charge up the ramp into the truck!

They did a beautiful job painting! It looks like a whole new space.



After the paint was finished we moved the big ovens into the new space. It is starting to look like a bakery!

Tune in next week to see the end results. Thank you for your prayers and support! It has been amazing and life changing!

Working at Luz De Vida

Monday we began work at Luz de Vida, which is a new church that was started by Emmanuel Iglesia Metodista. Luz de Vida is on the other side of Cochabamba in a less affluent area. They are worshiping in a house right now and building a church about three blocks away. They hope to have it built in two years. Their big worship area is a garage that was full of construction material at the moment so they are worshiping in a small living room. They have to lock up the supplies in a secure place so the back yard of the house was full of building materials as well. One of our jobs was moving the material to the job sight and a neighboring house owned by a church member. We added up the truck loads of earth that we moved from one place to another and came up with around 10 tons of earth. It was about 1/5 of a mile for one roundtrip. I will tell the story in pictures from here.

First we moved all the rocks you see here from the backyard, to the front of the house. Each rock weighed more than 5 lbs. All loads of dirt are just dropped off on the road and have to be moved where they are needed. This is a load of red clay, the rocks we moved from the backyard, and a load of pebbles. The piles look so small in this picture!! They were huge!

The rocks were very dense and some of the large ones took two to lift.

This was way more fun than passing a medicine ball in aerobics class!

This is the load after we loaded it. They say the truckload was 3,000 lbs.

They recently started a bakery out of the small kitchen in the house and it has been so successful that they have added a room to grow the ministry. The construction was completed on the room, they just needed paint and the big ovens to be moved in. This is the before picture.

Ashley was a master painter!


More to come! You won't believe the changes! Stay tuned.

Cristo de la Concordia

Our group

On Sunday afternoon after lunch, we took a trip to the Cristo. In response to our retreat the past weekend, we brought trash cans and gathered litter. There is a real litter problem at the Cristo so Pastor Juan publicly spoke on the matter to all the visitors at the Cristo and explained what we were there to do and why we were doing it. He explained our responsibility to take care of the earth God has given us. We left the large trash cans there with labels so that others would dispose of their trash. As we were gathering trash, small children would run up to our cans with handfuls of trash. It was nice to know that we were inspiring the next generation of Bolivians. When we finished picking up the trash, we took some photos and climbed up to the top of the Cristo. It was so amazing.

Bolivian girl helping with trash collection

Amazing youth and adults cleaning the Cristo
Pastor Juan talking to the people about caring for creation

Mountain top

Ashley and Tiffin going down the very narrow staircase inside the Cristo

Ashley and Katy

Iglesia Emmanuel Metodista

Sunday morning we worshiped at Emmanuel Methodist Church. It was a very short walk from where we are staying. Pastor Juan, who helped lead the youth retreat, is the pastor at Emmanuel. We also feasted at the Lord's Table. Pastor Juan invited Rev. Emily Chapman, Rev. Wilson Boots, and myself to participate in the worship service and help serve communion. What an amazing experience! The whole service was in Spanish and English. It was a moment in ministry I will never forget as we said, "The Body of Christ" or "el Cuerpo de Cristo" and "The blood of Christ" or "la sangre de Cristo." I will never forget hearing The Prayer of Thanksgiving in Spanish and praying the Lord's prayer together in both languages. It does not matter where we live on God's earth or what language we speak, we are all one in Christ Jesus. Just as we should every time we gather around the table or come to God's house in worship, we truly communed with God and one another.

Room and Board

I have been asked to share a bit about our accommodations and food in Bolivia. During the first leg of the trip we stayed outside Cochabamba at a retreat center called Fe y Alegria. The cabins were set up in a circle with a big courtyard in the middle. Each room had a bathroom and slept three people. There were five rooms per cabin with a living space in the middle.

We all ate in a common dining hall and found that Bolivian food is good. They eat pretty heavy foods here because it takes a lot of energy to live in this altitude. There is a lot of bread, meat and potatoes. Almost everything we have eaten has been familiar food but sometimes it is cooked a bit different or served in a different way. For example, one day our dessert was a boiled peach in a syrup made from corn starch. They have a lot of fresh fruit available as well. At both places our cooks have been amazing! There is always plenty to eat!

This is our bedroom, there is a bed you can't see!
This is the courtyard in the middle of the cabins

On Saturday Evening we moved over to stay at the Institute Americana which is set up more like a dorm. My room sleeps five but we have four in here. There is one bathroom for the girls and one for the guys. The showers are interesting because the water is heated by electric heaters. We don't have the problem of running out of hot water like you do with tanks, but we do have inconsistent electrical currents. It wouldn't be a mission trip without a few cold showers!

This is where the magic happens.
Delia is in the middle, she is the fabulous cook.

This is one of the dorm rooms.

This is where we are eating at the institute. It is very familial!

The hospitality here has been unreal! I have been on many mission trips and have never experienced this level of sincere hospitality. The most beautiful thing about it is that I can tell it doesn't have much to do with the fact that we are here on a "mission" but simply how they welcome the stranger. What a beautiful expression of Christ's welcome to all.

Encuentro

It is hard to believe that the youth retreat at Fe y Alegria is already over. We spent three amazing days encountering God and one another. Two cultures came together in the name of Christ to grow as disciples. Logistically, the retreat ran much like youth retreats in America. We worshiped together, had small group activities, we ate together and we played together. As I mentioned before, our theme was light. We talked about our role of being Christ's light in the world (Matthew 5:14). We talked about the darkness that we live in and that we create. One example of this darkness is our lack of care for creation. We painted reusable shopping bags that represented our time together and gave them to one another. As a response to God's call to be light in the darkness, we made communal and personal commitments to alleviate some of the darkness we identified. I was inspired by the discussion and commitments that were made to care for God's earth. This weekend we shared life, life in Christ. Although our encounter with one another was for a few days, the light that we carry forth from this experience will never be overcome by darkness. Praise God!
"En él estaba la vida y la vida era la luz de los hombres. La luz resplandece en las tinieblas y las tinieblas no prevalecerán contra ella." Juan 1:4-5

"In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." John 1:4-5

Nuevo Amigos

After arriving at the airport, we loaded a bus to go to Fay Alegria retreat center in Cochabamba. This is where we are participating in a youth retreat with youth from Emmanuel Methodist Church. It is a beautiful center with a courtyard in the middle. The palm trees in the courtyard are so huge they look like giant pineapples. The weather is cool in the evenings and warm during the days. It is truly springlike weather. Cochabamba has an altitude of 8,000 ft. so we are drinking a lot of water to adjust our systems. Thursday morning we went into town to be introduced to Bolivian culture by going to a p

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arade. Friday is their Independence Day so they have a weekend worth of parades. Each school marched in the parade including bands. It was such a festive celebration! The youth had exams during the day and joined us Thursday evening to begin the retreat. As soon as they got off the bus Pastor Gustavo from Emmanuel Methodist Church introduced us and we exchanged hugs and kisses with our Bolivian brothers and sisters. We spent the evening getting to know one another.


After dinner we gathered in the courtyard and exchanged songs. They would sing one in Spanish and then we would sing one in English. The songs with hand motions went over the best. If we had been competing the Bolivians definitely would have won! Then Pastor Gustavo had us line up and go into a dark room. We each received candles as we entered. As we were all coming in, you could tell that people were clinging to their close friends for comfort. It was very dark. When we all got in the room, they shut the door and Pastor Gustavo told us to link up with a person from Bolivia if we were from America, and an American if we were from Bolivia. We did this quickly. He explained that with darkness comes fear. When we are children we are scared of the dark. Darkness brings insecurity as we are unsure of our surroundings. The theme tonight was about light. They told the parable of the match and the candle. In this parable the candle does not want to be lit by the match because as soon as it is lit, it will begin to lose its shape and be all consumed. Its days will surely be number when it is lit. But the match explains that the candle is needed to share the light with the world, just as the match's job is to pass the light to the candle so that the light will carry on. At this understanding, the candle can’t wait to be lit and the match carries out its call to light the candle. Pastor Gustavo then talks about the light of Christ that lives in us. We all light our candles from the one Christ candle and the room is illumined with the light our candles collectively bring into the space. It was a beautiful, interactive encounter with God and one another.

The youth and adults are overcoming the language barrier and having a great time with one another. We had a bonfire last night and played several silly games that made us laugh so hard we couldn't breathe! It is a beautiful fellowship that we are experiencing through the Holy Spirit!
We have so much more to tell but we must get back to our amigos for now!

Blessings,
Katy

A Bolivian Welcome

Saludos! Ashley and I have arrived in South America and we are very excited about the days ahead of us. On August 3rd we traveled 29 hrs to Cochabamba. Starting in Houston we went to Miami, then to La Paz, Bolivia...then to Santa Cruz, Bolivia...and then finally to Cochabamba, Bolivia. We spent hours on planes and in airports and I am so thrilled to be on this trip with such a great group of youth and adults. They are very easy going and interesting individuals. The group from St. Paul UMC is international in itself, including people from Guyana, South America and Liberia, Africa. We used the travel time to get to know one another and all the paths that led us to this trip together.


I will never forget the welcome we received upon arrival at the Cochabamba airport. Here we were, totally exhausted from the travel and there was a group of Bolivians there with a sign that translated “Welcome youth from St. Paul’s” They sang a song and then the District Superintendent and other staff person from this district welcomed us in Spanish. I was moved to tears…I had to hold back from flat-out weeping. The DS said that he hoped that this would be a week of encounter for us. My soul resonated with this. I couldn’t ignore the tears that caught me off guard. For I did not know these people at all and yet they were welcoming me as a long loved relative. What a manifestation of the Body of Christ. I too pray that this will be a week of encounter, that we may encounter God in new ways. I pray that we may encounter one other, our Bolivian and American brothers and sisters through the Holy Spirit through which we are united. Eulalai, a staff person for the district, said that even though we may not understand each other’s words all the time, she hopes that we will connect throughout actions and signs. Tonight Rev. Emily did a devotional on the first chapter of John, the Word made flesh. She pointed out that on mission trips we are all so eager to give to others what God has gifted us, but that is only half of the encounter. We are eager to be the body of Christ expressed through our flesh, but we must also learn to receive from those we encounter. Today, before we had a chance to give to anyone, they gave to us. They welcomed us with extravagant hospitality and in that exchange, we encountered the living God.

Blessings,
Rev. Katy Ware