Ripples

I have a confession to make: some part of me thought mission life would be easy. When I pictured my life in Bolivia, I pictured myself coming down here, playing soccer, coloring pictures, or talking about Jesus with smiling children that were so happy to have me in their presence. And though I was warned during orientation that there were going to be difficult moments, I figured that I’d gotten through a double major in engineering at Vanderbilt, so how hard could it be? And yet, sometimes I find myself feeling like a failure in pretty much every aspect of life here: my job with the girls, my Spanish skills, my community life with the other volunteers, my spiritual life. I mean, I have already been here for three months, and I had pictured myself at this point having deep conversations with the girls all the time in my fluent Spanish, building the other volunteers up in their work, and magically (or maybe divinely?) having a better prayer life because of the fact that I was doing mission work. Now, maybe my expectations were unrealistic, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t have real relationships with a lot of the girls, I sometimes lose my patience with the other volunteers and tear them down instead of building them up, it still takes a lot of effort to set aside time every day to pray, and I sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) struggle to find the right words in Spanish. However, as I thought about these “failures,” I realized that I was measuring myself in a very American, or goal-driven, manner. This makes sense because pretty much all of my life has been centered around a goal-driven culture. You go to school to make good grades, you make good grades to get a job; you work hard, you generally see the rewards. And yet, Bolivia hasn’t been like that. I can’t always see the effects of my coming here and spending three months of my time with these girls. Honestly, sometimes they don’t like me when I don’t give them what they want, whether that’s new shoes or having the library open 24/7, so that, ironically, they can have somewhere to hang out and not do their homework. Children growing up in “normal” families have these issues, and because many of our girls come from broken homes, they have behavioral problems as a result. Talking to a priest about all of this during confession, he told me that even if I don’t see the change that I am making in these girls’ lives, that doesn’t mean it’s not there or that it won’t happen in the future. This reminds me of a Mother Theresa quote that says, 

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.” 

Ironically, as I got in the confession line, one of the more difficult girls that I work with got in line after me. I have no idea if she would have gone to confession even had I not gotten in line first, but I’d like to think that I may have had even a small influence in her getting in that line after me. After all, even though I have no way of “measuring” the direct results of my work here, I can still look for the ripples that I am making, however insignificant. Making one of the little girls laugh as I pick her up and twirl her around. Listening as one of the older girls spends an hour telling me about all of the typical food and legends in Bolivia in the different parts of the country. Translating letters from the girls’ madrinas so they can have an additional person to tell them they are loved. None of these things are all that significant, but I’m not going to change the world all at once, and if I don’t focus on the small ripples that I am making that God has the grace to show me, then I will continue to be discouraged.

                Thanksgiving was a great mini-retreat to help re-energize me and think about all of these things. To celebrate, all of the SLMs in Bolivia got together in Yapacani (about an hour away from Montero) and made as close to a normal Thanksgiving dinner as we could, given the circumstances. It was also just a great time to catch up with each other (most of whom we hadn’t seen since orientation), compare mission life stories, and go to mass and adoration. We were also able to attend two Bolivian parties: a birthday party for an 8-year-old girl who was the daughter of the family that ran the nursing home in Yapacani and a graduation party for a boarding school that the volunteers in Yapacani work with. Both involved lots of food and dancing, and I also learned that it is a typical Bolivian custom to shove the birthday girl’s (or boy’s) face in the cake during their party. I’m glad I was able to learn this then, because I definitely had it applied to me during my birthday the next week! Of course, this was after I came back from bringing a girl to the hospital to get stiches after she got hit in the head with a rock thrown by one of the other girls trying to collect coconuts. Never a dull moment in Bolivia!

The Bolivian SLMs sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner!

Me with the girls on my birthday!

                Finally, all of us volunteers were sent to Cochabamba this past week to attend the final vows of two of the sisters in our order! In case you don’t know much about religious life, becoming a nun (cloistered) or sister (non-cloistered) is a long process that takes many years to complete. When you first enter the order, you take shorter vows to remain in the order for a 6 months or a year. Then, as you remain in the order and become more sure of your vocation there, you take longer vows for three years or so. Finally, the last vow you take is to remain in the order and practice chastity, poverty, and obedience for the rest of your life, which is what we witnessed with two of the sisters! Then, we went sightseeing with some of the sisters the next day, to the giant statue of the Cristo (which is actually bigger than the one in Rio), a couple of parks, the site of the Marian apparition of Urkupiña, and a mansion that was owned by the richest man in Bolivia during his life which has now become a sort of museum. If anyone is under the impression that religious sisters are always serious and never have any fun, spending a day sightseeing with them would definitely convince you otherwise! It seemed like we stopped every five minutes to take pictures, whether that was on the playground at the park, climbing trees, or putting our feet into the freezing cold water of a mountain stream. I could make a nuns having fun calendar just with the pictures that I took that day!

The perfect "Nuns having fun" photo!

All of us in front of the Cristo

                Coming back from Cochabamba, all of us volunteers have been busy with Christmas shopping for the girls! We are so fortunate to have now raised MORE than our initial goal, which we have already started putting to use by sneaking candy into the girls’ shoes on St. Nicholas day! I will definitely miss being home for Christmas, but I’m also excited about being able to make the girls’ Christmas special. And to everyone that I won’t see on Christmas, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! J  

Our St. Nicholas day boxes of candy!

Merry Christmas from Hogar Sagrado Corazon!

Expect the Unexpected

                Hello friends and family (and random blog readers if I happen to have any)! As I write this it is pouring outside, which, because the rain is typically accompanied by cooler weather, is always a wonderful treat as we get closer to summer here in the southern hemisphere. There have been a lot of interesting happenings since my last post, so in order to keep this one to a reasonable length, I’m just going to focus on these events and may not have any particularly deep thoughts. But they should at least give you more of a feel for the culture in Bolivia, and I’ll do my best to think of something really meaningful for my next post!

                So in my last post, we were getting ready for Halloween celebrations! Being the volunteer in charge of heading up all the preparations for Halloween, I have to admit I definitely got more stressed out about this than I should have. Halloween isn’t celebrated too much in Bolivia, but since there are always American volunteers here at the Hogar, the girls are used to having big Halloween celebrations. Because of a couple of years the majority of the girls literally ended up crying because they were so scared of whatever haunted house the volunteers put together, the religious sisters, or madres, here said we could do something for Halloween, but nothing too grand (which is obviously what the girls wanted). So we decided to have a costume contest and make apple pies for the winners in the categories of most scary, most pretty, and most funny costume (I have become an expert at baking apple pies!). We informed the girls a week ahead of time about this so that they would have time to get their costumes ready, but the only problem was we realized the day before or the day of Halloween that the girls didn’t really understand the concept of costumes. Apparently the volunteers had gone with more of the haunted house/ scary movie thing in the past and because Halloween in Bolivia is viewed by a lot of people as the devil’s holiday, a lot of the girls understood dressing up as something scary but didn’t understand the concept of funny or pretty costumes. They would come up to us and ask, “How do I dress up? Do I just wear black and look scary?” But luckily we had (sometimes only one) girl that dressed up in each category, so we were able to give away the prizes. (As for us volunteers, most of us dressed up as minions, which was a repeat costume for me, but I was okay with that J). We also had a scavenger hunt where all of us volunteers hid ourselves in the hogar with candy, and if the girls were able to find us, they got a piece of candy, since trick-or-treating with 100 girls and five people giving out candy would not have gone well. Basically the moral of the story on Halloween was that we still had a lot to learn about Bolivian culture and how to fit in!

                Speaking of interesting facts about Bolivian culture, one thing that I have had to get used to here is being ready to leave on a random excursion at any time without any advance notice. I can give you many examples of this just over the past couple of weeks, but I’m going to focus on two. First of all, one day a couple of weeks ago, I was opening the library like a normal afternoon when the madre in charge told all of us volunteers that we were leaving to go on a trip right then. The main purpose of the trip ended up being to look at a water tank because we are potentially having a new one constructed, and apparently the best way to get in touch with water tank architects is to go find a water tank being constructed and then go talk to the people constructing it! But after that, we also went to visit a smaller orphanage outside of Montero in the Bolivian countryside. We were on our way there when we saw two cowboys (or the Bolivian equivalent of cowboys) riding their horses on a ranch next to us. Upon seeing this, madre asked us if we wanted horses. I really like horses, so of course I said, “I would love a horse!” thinking she was joking. Following my reply, she promptly told the driver to stop the car, got out, and shouted out to the random horseback riders, asking if we could ride their horses. So we took turns riding one of the horses, which was a lot of fun. The hogar that we were visiting was really cool as well because it is also a mini-zoo with different types of monkeys, turtles, goats, chickens, bunnies, and weird ostrich-like birds that really reminded me of Kevin from the movie Up, especially because there were little baby ones following us around. I unfortunately don't have any pictures from this excursion because I didn't know to bring my camera, but I do have some pictures from another excursion to Santa Cruz where the girls sang at madre's brother's fifteen year ordination celebration mass!

                My second example of typical Bolivian culture was from last Monday. We have lunch at the convent once a week and one of the sisters was talking to one of us about some pretty waterfalls around here, and said she would take us one day. We ended up mentioning this to madre during our water tank excursion, and she said that maybe we could go the next week. So that Sunday at 9:30 pm, the madre working at the hogar tells us that we are leaving to go to the waterfalls at 5:30 am the next morning, and that we needed to bring plates and cups. We get up and meet at the convent, and the sister there asks us if one of the older girls is with us, because apparently she was supposed to be coming too (which she also did not know until we woke her up to get her). Then because it was raining, madre told us that we might move our trip to go hiking in a different, colder area, and to go back and bring warmer clothes as well. Naturally, we thought it was just going to be us and the madres because we were not told otherwise, but we get on a bus, and there are about 50 people on this trip! It turns out that it was an already-scheduled trip for a young adult church group and volunteers and teachers at the kindergarden. We also assumed the waterfalls were relatively close, but when we asked someone on the bus, we were told that it was about four hours away!

                About an hour away from our destination, we get to a sign for the waterfalls and start heading into what looks like a construction site with a creek in the middle. We were all fairly disappointed, expecting a bit of a better view, but it turns out, we weren’t heading to the creek to stop, but we drove the buses right through it! Then the dirt road continued for another hour, during which point the bus in front of us got stuck three times, and everyone had to get out to dig it out of the mud and add leaves before about fifteen guys would push it forward. But finally we made it to the waterfall, and it ended up being beautiful and definitely worth the trouble, like the majority of our unexpected excursions!

Pushing the bus out of the mud

Amazonian waterfall!

Me and Madre Clara!

PS.  I have one last bit of exciting news. One of our girls and her baby brother got adopted! This doesn’t happen very often here, especially when the girls are older, partially because there are very stringent adoption rules about which countries can adopt from Bolivia (the US is not one of those countries). Of course I was excited for them, but sad to see them go as well. I’ll miss them! Luckily I got some pictures with her before she left J. 

Living in the Present

I have now been in Bolivia for almost two months, and things are definitely starting to get busy! In addition to my responsibilities with the madrina program and in the library, for the past couple of weeks I have also been acting as the videographer for plays in the kindergarten run by the sisters here. The performances were spread out over six nights, with two plays each night performed by different kindergarten classes. I was in charge of filming each of the plays, and then editing them and putting together a DVD to sell to the parents of the aspiring actors and actresses. The plays have covered a wide range of genres, from horror to Disney classics (The Little Mermaid and Cinderella) to fairytales (The Piper of Hamelin and The Wolf and the Goats, which is apparently a popular one in Germany even though I had never heard of it) to religious (The Nativity and The Prodigal Son). It has been fun watching all of the plays, but it also made life really busy, especially because the school year is ending here and girls still need homework help when I get back. We are also getting Halloween plans together and have already started Christmas fundraising!

A lot of the girls (and one boy) from the Hogar were in the Cinderella play

The Duke

One of our girls was even Cinderella!

Cinderella getting into her modernized carriage!

        I have made time for reading even with all this craziness and have been reading a book called A Priest’s Pilgrimage. It is written by Father Steve Ryan, one of the Salesian priests that I met during retreat, and contains his reflections while walking El Camino de Santiago. The Camino is a pilgrimage across Spain that ends at Santiago de Compostela at the cathedral of St. James. Father Steve went on sabbatical for a month to be able to walk the Camino before transferring to a new position in Tampa, Florida, where he is currently working. As I was reading today, he was reflecting on how he would be able to be most successful in his new job. He said that five things would be required:

         1. Presence and joy
         2. Living in the present moment
         3. Keeping people first before doing things
         4. Staying prayerful and being reflective
         5. Hard work and overcoming the temptation of laziness and quitting

I was reflecting on these five lessons, and decided not only that they were good lessons to live by in general, but that they all especially applied to me and my current mission in Bolivia. I think most Americans, myself included, would tend to focus on number five as they try to gain success and maybe forget about the other four. But I think, especially for me on mission, that the other four are just as if not more important. In fact, when I thought about it, I had already written a blog post about staying prayerful (Varicella and Visas) and had talked about the importance of keeping people first before doing things in my last blog post. So in this blog post I’m going to talk about number 2: living in the present moment (and place).   

I was really bad about living in the present moment in the first half of college. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted my life to look like for the next five or so years, and I couldn’t wait to get to the future so I could live out that life. It took a really bad breakup for me to realize that I really have no control over my life, and if I give my life to God, He would do something better than I could plan out anyway. And surrendering my life to God afterwards is what ultimately led me here to Bolivia on mission! Although I am generally much better at this aspect of my life than I used to be, there certainly are still times when I have trouble trusting in God and focus on the future, the what-ifs, or the places that I could be. About a month after I got here, there was a week when I was really homesick and instead of focusing on the girls, I was focusing on how much I missed American food, air conditioning, watching sports, and, of course, my friends and family from back home. Because I deferred my grad school acceptance and was technically accepted for this year, I am still getting emails and facebook notifications from this year’s class, and seeing this made me think how different my life could be if I had gone straight to grad school, especially when things got difficult here. But that wasn’t doing me or the girls any good. Although I still miss people and American comforts (I think air conditioning might be replacing American food for the number one spot as we head into summer), I am happy where I am because I know it’s where God wants me to be.

Because we wanted to celebrate fall even during the 90-100 degree heat, us volunteers made an apple pie last weekend!

PS. Shameless plug: remember how I was talking about how I have started Christmas fundraising? Well…if you enjoy my blog and want to help all the adorable girls that you have seen in the pictures have a great Christmas, please consider donating at http://www.gofundme.com/g590pg Any amount helps! Thanks in advance! J

Un Dia en La Vida

Well I have officially been living in Montero for over a month now, which is crazy! And now that I have been back from La Paz for a couple of weeks, I have settled into a (sort of) regular routine, which I will do my best to describe in a minute. But first, I am going to present to you the next episode of “The Weird Medical Happenings of Cara in Bolivia!” So as I was going to bed one night, I realized that my face looked darker than normal and felt kind of weird. I asked one of the other volunteers about it, and she said it looked okay and that it was probably just tan or a little sunburnt. Well I wake up at 5 am and realize that my face is itching like crazy, so I look in the mirror, and my whole face (and part of my neck) is red, hot, and swollen. The one dermatologist in Montero (who apparently isn’t actually a dermatologist, but the brother of dermatologist) prescribed me a bunch of pills, which I supplemented with Benadryl. Over the course of that day, Madre Paulita came first to bring me ice to put on my face, then covered my whole face with cucumbers, and then after that some sort of white milky substance. By some combination of all of these forms of treatments (or the allergic reaction to whatever it was wearing off), my face and neck gradually returned to normal over the next couple of days, and I was able to resume my normal routine.

Medical anomaly numero 2, Hitch-style

                For anyone wondering the specifics of my “normal” routine, here they are as best as I can give them. During the weekdays, I wake up at 6:30 am just in time to make it to 6:45 am breakfast with the girls. I lead prayer before breakfast, and then help serve the girls. Each of us five volunteers are in charge of a table of 10 girls for meals, so we distribute food for our table (this is more of an actual job during lunch, which is the biggest meal of the day, than during breakfast or dinner, which usually consists of 1-2 pieces of bread and some type of drink). After breakfast, my mornings are pretty free, and this is when I take care of any responsibilities for the madrina, or godmother, program. This is a program that was started by one of the first SLMs at the hogar that gives each girl here a madrina to support them. The madrinas pay annual dues to cover birthday gifts for each girl, in addition to medicines and supplies used by all of the girls. They also correspond with their ahijadas, or godchildren, by sending them letters or packages, and can send them money through an American account for any specific needs of the girl. So my responsibilities involve going to the post office once a week to pick up any letters or packages for the girls, translating these from English to Spanish so that the girls can read them, keeping track of the finances of the program as a whole and each individual girl, putting together birthday packages for the girls, and making sure that the girls correspond at least a couple times a year with their madrinas. I also use the mornings to do my laundry, which is about an hour-long process for a couple of days’ worth of clothes.

                I eat lunch, which is the biggest meal of the day, at 1 pm with my table of girls, and then in the afternoon I open the library from 3-6 pm for the girls. Depending on the day, I open up the library for various activities including games, puzzles, and coloring books, in addition to the obvious activity of reading. Then we eat dinner between 6:30 and 7 pm. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the girls have music and dance lessons during the afternoons and evenings, but on other days soccer is a popular nighttime activity in the concha, or blacktop, of the hogar. I usually go to bed around 10:30 pm during the weekdays (anyone who knows my typical sleep schedule knows this is ridiculously early for me, but you gotta do what you gotta do). Then on Friday nights we go to mass with the girls, and Saturday is our free day for the week! The five of us volunteers usually go out into the town for a meal (my favorite is salteñas, which are pieces of fried dough filled with all kinds of deliciousness like meat, egg, onion, potatoes, etc). They also make delicious fruit juices with milk here, which taste kind of like a milkshake, but lighter. Sundays are also pretty relaxed after mass in the morning.

                So that’s basically my life here in a nutshell. But even though I have these responsibilities, such as those in the library and with the madrina program, this is not why I came to the hogar. I came here to be with the girls and share Christ with them, and so my main “job description” is just to be present with them. There have been times when I forget this and find myself stressing out about the finances of the madrina program or the organization of the library. However, when I remember my true purpose for being here, I am happiest because I know that as cheesy as it sounds, I can make a difference one conversation at a time.      

Coconut-peeling party!

Does this skirt make me look fat?

Using my mad climbing skillz to retrieve my clothing

Visas and Varicela

During orientation, they told us over and over again to expect to be sick a significant portion of the time while on mission. They warned us about stomach problems resulting from the food and the water, we were told about malaria and Dengue fever, as well as weird Bolivian bugs that lay eggs under your skin (I know, disgusting, right?!?). One sickness I was not warned about during orientation is the one I am pretty sure I now have, aka chicken pox. Luckily I am vaccinated against chicken pox, so it’s pretty mild. However, because most of the girls here do not have the vaccine, I was quarantined to my room for a few days. Aside from being stuck in my room instead of being able to be out with the girls, the internet also went out a day before my quarantine begun, which left me with myself and my thoughts, God, some books, and a few movies for company.

                During my quarantine, I had a lot of time to think and pray, and a lot of these thoughts revolved around suffering and prayer. Although I would not call what I am going through right now great suffering by any extent, why would God want me stuck in my room instead of serving the girls that I came here to serve? For that matter, why did one of the other SLM’s that just arrived need surgery for acute appendicitis her second full day in Bolivia? (More on that later). Why does God allow so much pain in the lives of these girls at the Hogar, who come from dysfunctional if not abusive homes? I’m not going to pretend to have the magical answer to these questions. However, I do know that God has brought good out of every suffering that I have been through, minor as it has been, as most of the time this suffering brings me closer to Him.

                Take, for example, the current situation I am in. One reason that I decided to do a year of Catholic mission work was to grow closer to God and strengthen my faith through my everyday prayer life while doing service. And coming from my busy life as a double major engineer at Vanderbilt to mission life in South America, I thought praying would be so much easier here. I wouldn’t have any obstacles like homework, studying, extracurricular involvement, etc. that I used to have. Well I’m sorry to say that my prayer life hasn’t magically improved upon moving to another country, and I haven’t been working as hard as I should at my prayer life over the past couple of weeks as I have been adjusting to the change of culture, food, and atmosphere, not to mention trying to memorize 120 girls’ names! So maybe this was God’s way of telling me His desire for me to remember to spiritually serve the girls by praying for them as well as physically serving them. This is something that I need to remember in the future as well, the power of prayer even when I am physically able to serve the girls too.

Ingrid, one of the girls at the hogar, wrote me a get-well message on the inside of her shirt and hung it on my window!

                Luckily (or maybe unluckily, depending on how you look at it) my quarantine was cut short by the necessity to get my visa to stay in Bolivia for a year. The visa situation is slightly complicated because I had a month-long visa, but we were waiting for all of the volunteers for the year to get here to apply for our visas to stay for the year. Because I arrived first and had the shortest temporary visa (the Germans working here get to have three month temporary visas because German-Bolivian foreign relations are much more amiable than American-Bolivian relations), I only had about a week after the other American volunteers got here to get my year-long visa. Luckily the sisters that I am staying with had some Vatican connections so I could get my visa through them in an expedited process instead of having to go through the normal route, which can take up to six months! However, to get the visa this way, we all had to travel to La Paz, a city in the mountains on the other side of Bolivia.

At almost 14,000 ft, the airport in La Paz is the highest international airport in the world. Luckily I didn’t have too many problems with altitude sickness, although the 24-hour bus ride was by no means a fun experience, going from the sweltering heat of Montero to the freezing cold of La Paz with no climate control along the way. One of the other volunteers in my program had some stomach pains on the bus that she thought was altitude sickness, but it turned out to be acute appendicitis! So she had to get surgery our first day there and stay there about a week to recover. The rest of us got our visas done fairly quickly, and then we had a little time to sightsee before getting on a return bus the next evening. We took a teleférico (a type of sky tram) up over the city and into the mountain, and we went to La Valle de La Luna, or Valley of the Moon, so named because of the rock formations that look like craters on the moon. It was really pretty, and I wouldn’t have minded staying there longer if it wasn’t so cold (luckily we literally had five heavy blankets on our beds where we stayed the night!).

La Paz: A city in the mountains

Typical garb for a woman in La Paz (plus a lot of them had cool hats, or gorros!)

There was a lot of llama and alpaca clothing for sale. I bought a sweater for $12! 

La Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon)

Madre Paulita was the one who took us sightseeing!

Four of the five volunteers for the hogar the year (we miss you Gabbi!)

Now I am back at the hogar and hopefully can start getting into a routine. Our jobs have officially been decided, and I am going to be the librarian and in charge of the sponsorship program, where the girls have padrinas, or “godparents,” mostly from the US, who write to them, send them birthday presents, etc. I’m excited about my job position, and will have more updates on this in my next post. Until then, chao!   

Welcome Home

              Well I have safely arrived in Bolivia, and it has already been a week full of new experiences! I was picked up from the airport by one of the religious sisters and two of the girls. I definitely knew that I was not in America anymore when we got to the truck that they had arrived in, and after loading my luggage in the cab, Sister Anna asked the girls if they wanted to ride in the cab with my luggage or in the backseat of the truck for the hour-long ride to Montero from Santa Cruz. That situation has been fairly representative of my time here thus far. Life at the hogar (which means “home” in Spanish) is crazy – over a hundred girls coming and going to school at different times, as well as four dogs, a handful of cats, three kittens, a parrot, some parakeets, rabbits, chickens and roosters, and, oh, did I mention the ostrich?!? Even outside the hogar, the most common form of transportation here in Montero is mototaxi, which is just what it sounds like, a motorcycle taxi. My first time on a mototaxi, I went with Natalie, the volunteer that has been here for a year and is leaving in a couple of weeks and has been showing me around. So there were three of us including the driver on a small motorcycle, which I thought was a lot. But I was informed by the girls’ music teacher that he had seen SIX people on one mototaxi before! Also, the day after I came here was the day of the anniversary of Montero, so additional craziness was added by elaborately-costumed dancers in the street and a full-sized brass band playing in the central plaza.

                Even with all of the transition and cultural adjustment, the girls have already brought so much joy and laughter to my life here and welcomed me like family. When I first arrived at the hogar from the airport, Sister Anna pulled the truck into the complex and said, “Welcome Home,” as multiple girls ran up to give me a hug and excitedly help me carry my ridiculously heavy luggage. And as I thought about this statement, I realized that I have been lucky to have multiple homes throughout my life. Obviously, there is St. Louis, where I grew up and where my family is from. But there is also Nashville, where I lived and went to school for the last four years, and only realized my senior year how much I was going to miss the city and the people. I would even consider Sydney a home because even though I only lived there for less than five months, the people I met there and the way they helped me to see Christ through them made it a home for me. And now I have a new home: Montero, Bolivia. Yes, it is completely different from all of the other places that I have lived, but I can already tell that I will be a home for me. Because of the girls that follow me around, begging me to sing “Let It Go” for them, always just ONE more time! Because of one little girl falling asleep on me as another one reads me a story. Because hearing their laughter as we dance to Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock definitely shows me Christ in them, as does one of the girls reminding me to say my prayers before I go to bed!

                The fact that this hogar will be my home for the next year also doesn’t mean that my previous homes are any less of a home for me (don’t worry mom and dad!). But I am happy to make Hogar Sagrado Corazón my home for the next year because unlike me, these girls aren’t fortunate enough to have multiple places to call home. There is just the hogar for them. And I know that just as I am doing my best to help make the hogar a loving home for the girls, they are doing just as much to make sure that I have a loving home here for the next year. So here’s to a new place to call home because of the experiences and place, but most of all the people. I have taken a LOT of pictures thus far, and I couldn’t decide which ones to put up, so here are a lot of pictures of adorable Bolivian girls (Warning: multiple of the pictures have both baby bunnies and adorable children in them, so their cuteness factor might overwhelm you). Enjoy!    

New Beginnings

When people hear the word "borders," they may think of the struggles that many Latinos experience at the southern border of the United States and the accompanying controversy. Or maybe the ever-shrinking Bolivian border that no longer includes a coastline after losing it to Chile in 1904. And while these physical borders may be what first comes to mind, there are also many other types of borders not so concrete. For example, the borders between the Ferguson community and its police officers are strong enough to cause protesting and even rioting in the area. These borders are caused by a larger set of borders that have historically been placed between those of different skin color that many people still have a hard time breaking down.

The title of this blog, "Without Borders" can refer to all of these different types of borders, but my inspiration for this title came from the song "Oceans," by Hillsong United (Click here to see the song and lyrics). The bridge of this song goes like this:

"Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders
Let me walk upon the waters
Wherever you would call me.
Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander
And my faith will be made stronger
In the presence of my Savior."

This song has been an inspiration for me throughout this past year, when for the first time in my life, I had no idea what my next step would be. I looked into grad schools, jobs, and volunteer and missionary programs because I wasn't sure where God was calling me. All of this uncertainty about the future definitely taught me that my trust is NOT without borders, and I have a really difficult time trusting God with my life. This is one way that I hope to grow in this next year as I head to Bolivia to work at an orphanage as a Salesian Lay Missioner (SLM). True, there will be many physical borders in place for me. The country borders that dictate that I will reside in Bolivia for a year, not the United States where I have lived most of my life. The language borders that will separate me as a native English speaker. The borders of cultural differences between Americans and Bolivians. The borders of the parts of my life that I will trust in the Lord and those other parts that I hold on to.

However, part of my mission this next year is to break down these borders. My training to do this started during SLM orientation, when during the first few days, all of us SLMs broke down all of our borders with each other by opening up and sharing our testimonies and accepting each one of us where we were. Because these borders had been broken down, the twenty of us were able to become so close within just a three week time span. Close enough that we were able to get through and even laugh and sing during our week of service with sixteen hour days that started at 5:30 am. Close enough even to do ridiculous things like perform Don Bosco Style (to the tune of Gangham Style) for an audience of priests and brothers (apparently I'm not technologically savvy enough to figure out how to get a good quality video on here, so if you want to see the song/dance, I will refer you to Father Mike's blog). I'm excited to see how each and every one of them is going to break down the borders where they are serving, whether it be Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, South Sudan, or here in the U.S. of A. in Florida. I know that none of us will be able to do it on our own and that we will all make mistakes during the next year, but with God's help, anything is possible.

This year's class of SLMs after our commissioning mass