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!