Feliz Navidad

Think back to the craziness of Black Friday shopping. Everyone gets up ridiculously early in the morning, stands in line for hours, runs to the section of the store with the best deals, tries to cram as much stuff in their shopping cart as possible, and then repeats at four or five stores. Now picture Black Friday shopping, except instead of waiting in line to get into the store, everyone waits in a complete lack of a line to get a taxi to the market, then literally runs to beat out the other people waiting for the same cab. Instead of trying to maneuver your cart around the other carts, you have to carry everything that you are buying in large plastic bags while you cram your way through people in the narrow alleyways in between the shops. And instead of rushing to the section of the store where you know that TV with the ridiculous sale price is, you have no idea where anything is, and when you ask the shop owners who don’t know, they always just tell you, “Oh, that’s on the complete opposite side of the market.” Then you walk to the other side of the market just to get the same response to your question. Oh yeah, and instead of this being one day, you have to do this about eight times to buy Christmas presents for 130 girls, then organize everything that you bought and try to figure out what sizes the clothes that you bought are because clothes are sold from all over the world where sizing is different so there is no consistency.

Some of the Christmas presents for the older girls

This pretty much describes my entire month of December. Yes, I have obviously bought Christmas presents before and participated in Black Friday shopping, but never to an extent such as this. Honestly, Christmas this year (or at least the time leading up to Christmas) felt more like a deadline than a holiday. However, towards the end of my Christmas “deadline,” as I was seriously stressing out about Christmas presents among other things, I stopped and really reflected on the first Christmas. I’m not sure that Jesus thought about it as a deadline, but it seems to me that He didn’t really get to enjoy his first Christmas. In fact, it was probably a pretty unpleasant day for him, going from His beautiful home up in heaven to this imperfect world that we live in. Then, after the initial sacrifice of even coming down to Earth for us, we couldn’t even give him a proper place to be born, and the only people that recognized the great sacrifice that He made for all of humanity were a handful of poor shepherds and later, finally, some kings. So I had thought that this Christmas would teach me more about the true meaning of Christmas because of the fact that I was doing mostly buying with little to no receiving of gifts (although I finally got my Christmas package a couple of days ago!). However, in reality, I had shoved the true meaning of Christmas in the back of my mind behind all of the gifts that I was in charge of buying. However, by the time Christmas arrived, I realized that it wasn’t really about the gifts that I was getting the girls, rather all of the physical and emotional time and effort that it took to get all of the gifts. This eventually helped me experience the true meaning of Christmas in a way that I never had before. So even though it was really difficult to be away from my family and friends (and cold weather, fires, and Christmas cookies), it was a blessing to be able to spend my Christmas here sacrificing for the girls, in a manner more similar to the way Jesus spent his first Christmas.

After talking so much about it, I guess I should explain what we actually did on Christmas day and Christmas Eve. First let me say that I’m pretty sure that I’ve eaten more in the past month than I did the two months prior because we have had so many visitors lately that want to come and do something special for the girls during the holidays. Which is great except it would be nice if they could spread their visits out throughout the year when there is such a scarcity of food here or inform us that they were coming so that we could not eat two dinners in a row, which is what happened on Christmas Eve. First we had second lunch when one of the staff members brought us some delicious fish after a not-so-satisfying meal of chicken feet stew (two notes on this: 1. Chicken feet stew is actually very common here, but I’m not sure why because there is literally no meat on a chicken foot, just skin and 2. The fish we ate happened to be a cousin to the piranha, as evidenced by its sharp, human-like teeth that we could clearly make out considering it was a whole cooked fish!). Anyway, right before we were about to eat dinner we had an unexpected visitor that brought the girls dolls, as well as hot dogs, empenadas, and cake. Then we went straight to dinner, which was now a bit cold, but still delicious chorizo sausage and ground beef with rice. After going to mass at 10:30 we then came back and drank cider and had sweet bread and (actual) chicken soup at midnight as ridiculous amounts of fireworks were set off all around Montero (fireworks are popular here for Christmas Eve as well as New Year’s Eve here, or year-round when you want something exciting). After our midnight snack, we then had to sneak past a nasty street dog that had gotten spooked by the fireworks and wandered into the hogar so that we could get the girls’ candy bags that we put in their beds so they would have a present to wake up to on Christmas day.

The girls' candy bags ready to be given out!

We woke up early on Christmas day so that we could go buy salteñas for the girls for the Christmas breakfast (I think I’ve explained salteñas before, but they’re basically Bolivia’s form of empanadas, except they are baked and popular for breakfast). After breakfast, we all went to mass again, then came back for a nice lunch. After lunch, we brought the girls’ presents down out of the library so that Papa Noel, or Santa Claus, could give them out (it took a lot of trips to carry down 130 presents!). The younger girls then put on a nativity play, the older girls danced to and sang Christmas songs (which had won them first place in a Christmas choir competition the previous week!), and we volunteers even danced to Justin Beiber’s “Baby” with the “baby” being baby Jesus in our version. After all of these performances, our friend Connor who is volunteering about an hour away, arrived just in time to be Santa Claus and hand out the gifts to the girls. With the money that we raised, we were able to buy each girl a nice outfit, including undergarments, socks, and shoes. Then we got stuffed animals for the younger girls and nice tote bags for the older girls! The seven university girls received nice, professional-looking purses, a nice blouse, and their very own hair dryer! I was definitely relived when the last gift was given out, and we even got to relax a little bit on Christmas night and watch “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I had yet to see before. Overall, the whole Christmas season and Christmas itself was crazy and definitely had its ups and downs. It was a rewarding experience to be a part of, but now I’m just excited about getting back into a normal routine. Hasta luego!

The girls after winning their choir competition!

The younger girls enjoying their saltenas!

The youngest dorm of girls with their presents!