Hey Guys!
Sorry I haven’t posted a blog in a while. Let me try to catch you up on what has been happening here in South America since my last update.
During the majority of December, we were in Baños, Ecuador. My team at the time, Braveheart, worked with a couple small churches in the area helping out with Vacation Bible Schools, cooking classes, teaching English, preforming dramas, and helping out with bible studies.
As some of you may have heard, I became very sick at the end of December to early January. I went to the hospital a total of 4 times between December 22nd and December 30th. The first three trips, I was misdiagnosed with just having the flu. It was after the third trip to the hospital that you may have received an urgent request for prayer from my mother, because I was in some pretty serious pain. Finally, on the fourth trip we went to a different hospital in a larger town a few hours away. Here they very quickly diagnosed me with Hepatitis A. They immediate took me off of the several medications I was on, which was actually making the problem worse, and I finally got the help I needed. Almost everywhere online says that it will take three or more months to fully recover from Hepatitis A, but through your prayer and the power of God, I made a full recovery in less than 2 weeks.
After Ecuador we headed back to Peru for our next all squad debrief in Cusco, Peru, where we also visited Machu Picchu!
During this debrief, we had some much-needed time of renewal to our commitments to the race and to each other as a squad, since it was just passed the half-way mark. While we were in Cusco, we teams were once again reshuffled…ushering in the era of Breaking Boarders of which I was the team leader.
On January 26th, team Breaking Boarders rushed off to our next destination, Cobija, Bolivia. If you have never heard of it before, count yourself as lucky, because most people probably never will. While we were in this small town I pretty much made up for any time I had ever missed church before, since we were in one every day and twice on Sundays. Preaching and playing soccer was our main ministry here.
We left Cobija after a few weeks and took a 48-hour long bus ride to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. After a day to recuperate, we visited beautiful Lake Titicaca and the Bolivian salt flats.
Then enjoyed much more travel to our next destination Santiago, Chile. From leaving Cobija to arriving in Santiago which took nine days; 110 hours of which, or about 4.5 days, were spent sitting in a but seat.
When we arrived in Santiago, the whole squad traveled south for another four hours to our next ministry location, while my buddy Patrick and I stayed in Santiago for a few days. I needed a new passport since we had to get so many visas and entry and exit stamps, my passport was almost all filled up. (This time I got the one with extra pages)
We meet back up with our teams in Concepción, Chile a town devastated by the recent wild fires. For a week we helped with rebuilding fences, so…so…very many fence polls, for some families, while living camp style for the first time on the race.
During the second week of March, all of the teams took a “short break” from their ministry hosts and traveled back up to Santiago for PVT, Parent Vision Trip. A week of the race that is given to allow the parents of the racers to come on the field and experience what their children are doing first hand. Personally it was a great week for me to have my parents here, not only because they brought my several comfort foods from home, but also because it was a great time to reconnect and begin mending old wounds.
After PVT ended, Breaking Boarders traveled back to south and help a few more families that were affected by the fires. We even helped our host church with a complete overall of their overly cluttered shed and backyard.
On March 27th, my team and I headed back up north passed Santiago to a city called San Andes where we are currently helping them prepare for Holy Week and a large Easter drama they put on every year. We will be with our current host until April 17th, when we travel by airplane (finally!) to our next debrief site, Puerto Natales in Patagonia.
