When I chose my route almost a year ago, I was excited about all the warm countries I’d be going to….somehow I forgot about the deal with the equator and the flip-flopped seasons. So it’s the dead of winter in South America right now.
I don’t deal well with being cold. I really don’t hate it here(I spend all day hanging out with teenage girls and I have a bed! What more could I ask for?) but the weather is so depressing it makes me feel like I do.
We don’t have to go to ministry until 10am every day, which is perfect for anti-morning people like myself. We spend every morning at the girls’ house doing whatever cleaning they need done while the girls do their homework. Every day this week we’ve been cleaning out this big room full of clothes that people have donated. We do a good job of making it fun because my team is the best, but I don’t think I ever want to work at Goodwill.
We eat lunch there, go back to our house for a break for an hour or so, then we get to hang out with the girls until dinner. There are ten of them, from the ages of 14 to 27. We don’t know any of their stories yet; we’re not sure how many of them are there because of drug addictions, or which ones were just pulled out of homes where drugs were a problem.
It’s frustrating not being able to talk to them much, but they love us just the same. They’ve had fun teaching us words.
Yesterday one of the girls was graduating to the next step of the program(we weren’t totally sure how that works, because again everything is in Spanish), so her family got to come visit for lunch and we had a little ceremony for her. Even though we couldn’t understand the words, it was really special to see all the girls stand up and tell Monica how much they loved her and see how excited her family was.
Then we got locked in the house because the staff had gone to the boys’ house for a meeting, so we spent the whole afternoon talking to the girls and watching How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days with Spanish subtitles.
We have Saturdays and Sundays off, so today we went down into La Paz and we’re at a coffee shop now because there’s no wifi in El Alto. Traffic here is like New England on steroids. People drive on the wrong side of the road a lot, and that isn’t my ethnocentric way of saying they drive on the left side of the road; I mean they’re technically supposed to use the right side, but they just kind of do what they want. It’s hilarious. My mom would hate it here…
Pray that we’ll keep building deeper relationships with the girls here, and that God will give me patience with the weather. I don’t want to wish away this month just because I’m sick of freezing.
