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