April 14th in Camiaco Bolivia, and I can’t believe how few days we have left here. Makes me super sad. Jungle life is taxing and annoying in a hundred ways, but even more beautiful in a thousand.
This morning, like most mornings, we started with a devotional. I shared about our eternal inheritance in Christ, and how this brings us hope, faith, love, vision, and a pathway to meet Jesus (1 Peter 1:3-4, Colossians 1:4-5, John 14:1-4, John 25). Upon completion, we prayed for the day and I took out my guitar to sing a bit before breakfast. It broke out into a worship celebration, so several of us came late to breakfast because we were just too enthralled with shouting praises to stop.
Breakfast of eggs (!!!), bread, and coffee. We miss the powdered milk when it’s not there, and have never eaten more bread in our lives. After breakfast, we leave to do house visits. Due to a lot of rain as of late, we’ve put our machete-jungle work on hold in favor of doing visits and evangelism in the pueblo.
First house visit is with 2 women. One of the older women is incredibly chatty, and as is acceptable in Latino culture, interrupts every sentence we share. This makes the already-laborious process of sharing through translation even more difficult. We leave her house 2 hours later after sharing God’s intention with her: that he wants to be with her! We pray for them, encourage them, and take a step by the river to prepare before house number two. My brain is already full from slang accented Spanish, but there is another family we want to visit.
Family number two is incredibly open, which is a stark contrast from most of the visits we’ve had here. We meet a mom who gathers all of her family around to hear. I share this time, starting from Hebrews 11:1-2, and talking about the unseen world. She is a believer but is not going to church right now because she has a six-month-old baby. We talk for a while, share with her, and encourage her in her spiritual journey. When we ask for prayer requests, she shows us her hands. She can’t move her fingers but a half a centimeter because of the inflammation and pain from arthritis. As we pray for her, she says the pain starts decreasing. We pray again, and—A miracle!—She can now move all of her fingers and grasp things without pain! Praise the Lord. During this time, she serves us watermelon and a strange milk drink that tastes like a mix between cereal milk and burned goldfish. We accept with smiles and drink it down (ralph drinks some of mine….thanks ralph!).
At this point, we just sit there a while longer chatting. They are talking about the 10 lions and 4 tigers they’ve shot recently (FROM THE JUNGLE WE’RE LIVING IN) and then she walks over to a bag. She picks it up and pulls out 2 Skins of “jungle tigers” (look like leopards) to show us. It stinks, but not as bad as you’d expect. We bust up, amazed at our normal daily life. We hang out for half an hour more: feeding watermelon rind to the ducks, throwing a ball with her sons, and petting her numerous dogs.
It’s about 12:30 when we finally leave for home, and we’re decently hungry. We greet the neighbors as we pass the streets, and when I ask one man how he is, he responds (in Spanish), “We’re bad because you haven’t come to visit us and share from the Bible yet”. Ha! Half our group has already walked ahead, but Esther, Andrea, Lauren, and I enter their front porch and sit down.
They are friendly, funny, joking people and we laugh for a while as we talk about gringos, politics, and Camiaco. Finally, we start sharing the word. After learning that they, like many other people in this pueblo, don’t own a Bible, I feel strongly that we should share a very foundational message of the gospel. For this, I ask Andrea (the Chilean missionary working with us) to share to make sure it is incredibly clear. She does, and at the end, Esther and I add a few of our thoughts too.
The whole time, Pura & Angel are joking around with us, really enjoying having us as visitors. We are enjoying being there, too. I ask them what they think, and Pura says she wants to receive forgiveness and have Jesus as her Savior and life-leader. !!!! We’re excited and pray with our new sister. Andrea leads her in prayer, and I speak a blessing over her. After, we turn to Angel who simply won’t stop joking. He tells us he’s not that interested, even though he agrees with us—he’d rather have us come back another day. It’s a super weird thing. We talk to him more…his mind understands, but there’s something else going on with his spirit.
Finally, we stand up and pray together. I pray for us, and I accidentally refer to Angel as a woman in my prayer…problems with tired-spanish-brain. He sits down fake-mad when I do, and I apologize for two minutes, blaming quick speaking & the fact that I actually don’t know Spanish, and we keep on praying. I give Pura a paper with some basic ways to move forward in her Spiritual life. During this time, a stanky dog has sat by us twice, three girls with suckers have decided to listen in, a tractor, and 8 motorcycles have passed us. Just normal life in Camiaco.
We return at about 3 to our home. The sun is blazing hot, and we’re all tired from a long morning. We have a lunch of Charke (dried meat, kind of like Jerky). It’s insanely salty, but I’m thankful because it’s the first time eating more than 2 bites of meat in several days. We have rice, potatoes, and some grapefruit-juice.
I’ll go and bathe in the river and then we’ll go out again this afternoon to do some more evangelism. This evening, we’ll have a youth church meeting (like most nights), where we’ll use towels to whack the mosquitos off of us, and try to finish before the electricity shuts off after an hour and a half.
I love this place.
