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!