Confession: I just started the World Race this week.
Yes, I left home on January 7th and I have been to Ecuador and Peru, but the first 2 months were pretty cushy and this past weekend was the first time I thought, “I’m officially on the World Race” because it was hard. My team left on Friday afternoon for the jungle. We had anticipated that day for 2 weeks with giddiness about trekking through the vines and banana trees. We spent all morning buying food and preparing our packs with supplies we needed and only one outfit of long sleeves, pants and socks. We loaded a taxi with our equipment and headed to the river. Twelve of us loaded the long wooden boat with other Bolivians and braced ourselves for a 3 hour journey. After a breath-taking ride, we finally arrived at the bank of the Torewa village at 6:30pm. We hiked through the dark, muddy jungle hoping to avoid snakes and spiders and more twisted ankles. [Side note: In our 9 person team, we had 1 with an upper respiratory infection, 1 with a pinched nerve in her shoulder, 1 with back pain and 1 with a twisted ankle.]
Our hike ended at a building with 20ish locals watching a Bruce Lee movie on an 11 inch television. The town official showed us a “room” attached to that community room [which also served as the village tienda/store] with a mud floor, rotted bananas on a shelf and a tin roof. We set up our kitchen which consisted of a gas burner and 2 mixing bowls for washing dishes. We ate dinner quickly and then hiked a bit more to our sleeping quarters which was a school with a dirt floor and a roof. Every night we retired to bed early to avoid mosquitos that I would imagine one of the plagues in Egypt to be like.
[All photos from Eva Cranford]
Day 1: We made a house visit to a family that had several sick children with a disease called puchichi which produces large boils that they get from eating unripened fruit with parasites. This family lived in a worse hut than our accommodations and invited us in to chat with them. We sat with them for a while, trying to get them to warm up to us. We used these cards to help start conversations and as they looked through them, you could almost see their walls coming down. This family was so beautiful and I made a friend, Vanessa who was eight.
After our time with them, we promised to go back and tend to their wounds. Our day plans changed when a torrential downpour started and we sat in our hut/kitchen most of the day. As a team, we had a Bible study and worshipped. We did go to a town meeting and all I did was explain who we were and why we were in their village. One of the town officials said, “Even just your presence is like having Jesus among us.” Wow. That’s humbling. On a day where we didn’t feel very productive, God still used us to just be an encouragement to them.
Day 2: We had 2 church services, one of which I “preached” for the first time. All of the in depth sermons I had prepared seemed inappropriate in Torewa to this humble tribe. The Lord brought Matthew 6 to me and basically told me to wing it. I spoke about not worrying about our needs because our Father in Heaven takes care of the animals and wants to take so much more care of us because we are made in his image. I shared about when I was growing up and we didn’t know where money for food would come from and God always provided. I love how even though I have little in common with people in the jungle, God ties our stories together and is the same God across the world.
After church, we went up into the jungle more to visit half of the community that moved more inland after a flood last year. Our “15 minute walk” turned into an hour and a half of climbing over fallen trees and chopping down limbs with a machete to cut a path for us to walk. I kept thinking “Why would someone live this deep in the jungle, away from everything?” We took a short boat ride to another bank and climbed up some mud steps to a secluded house. This hut was in a clearing surrounded by banana trees, clothes on the line, food on the fire and a family sitting inside making dinner from fresh yucca. We spoke english to our translator, she spoke Spanish to the father and he spoke a different tongue to his family. Half of our group left and we were out of conversation so we convinced the very shy children to play hide and seek with us. Just 4 rounds of this game broke down reservations they had to interact with us. Then we got them to make a picture of their house with sticks and leaves. It was beautiful to see their reaction to art and seeing themselves in our iPhone photos.
Day 3: We packed up and headed to another part of the jungle to a different village. After walking down several paths to decide which path led to the actual village, we finally made it to the field with 2 houses and a church. This village was slightly more developed than Torewa. We waited for people…and waited and waited. For 7 hours we waited. We set up camp, made lunch and sat in our tents to avoid the bugs. By 4pm, I was about ready to leave, except we had no transportation until the following morning. Our leader decided we were going to find people, so we trekked through so much mud and balanced on logs over rivers until we finally found one family. They told us that the whole village were believers. Our time with them was a time of encouragement until we had to leave. At 7pm, a family finally showed up for us to have a service with. We shared hot chocolate and cookies and sang hymns in english for them and shared a short message. They told us about the flood a year ago that took everything they had, but how God provided for them and kept them strong to rebuild their church and homes to keep their village alive.
After all day of sitting around and waiting for something to do and being sweaty and muddy in the same outfit for 4 days and being eaten alive by bugs, I was about at my wits end. Just then, our host JJ, could see that I was frustrated and said, “Karissa, sit down. Look at stars.” As I sat next to him on the log and looked up at the stars, the chorus to Oceans came on his phone speakers and the line, “Keep my eyes above the waves” hit me like a ton of bricks. What have I been thinking? In the midst of frustration and chaos, like Peter, I looked down and was starting to sink. I had let the waves that looked huge around me distract me from the fact that Jesus was literally in front of me the entire time. This song, which I sang for 8 months before the race with all my might, “Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander…where my trust is without borders…” and here I was, actually in the midst of it and miserable. Thankfully, I looked up at the stars and remembered why I was here: because God called me deeper and I’m going to go all in.
