Bolivia is amazing! We all got to Apolo safely after a long but spectacular 14 hour bus journey. We currently have Kate (a vet in training) and Claire (a Latin Link strider) staying with us which has been great and we all fit together to make one big family!
Apolo is very different to the UK. It's all dirt roads and mud brick houses. Life is very simple here which has taken some getting use to but we're all coping and having lots of fun. We have a gas cannister with two rings to cook for 12 people and a fridge but that's about it. We eat bread and honey/jam for breakfast, lunch cooked by a lovely Bolivian lady from the local Church and whatever people on domestic duty can think of for dinner (so far we've had chicken pasta and omelettes). We have two buckets with sponges in between them as a system to purify our tap water and one inside toilet between 12 of us (which is currently blocked!) although there is an outside one too if you don't mind manually pouring water down to flush!
The family out here looking after us - the Lugtigheids - are amazing! They do so much for the local community and Church and have been so welcoming to us. Linda's parents are also out here and have been keeping an eye on us, it's nice to have a few other English speakers to talk to too! We've just about been coping buying food and water etc with basic Spanish and much gesturing!
We've been taken swimming by one of the youth of the Church - Yorka - in a local river. It's a nice break from the building work which is hot, dusty, tiring work! we're digging huge trenches at the moment to set concrete pillars in but it's hard graft. We dump all the rubble in the road to fill in pot holes - it's amazing how economic everything is here. We reuse as much as possible becasue they barely have anything in Apolo. Even when knocking down the mudbrick Sunday School building, we took the bricks (dobes) out one by one to stack and reuse! We've also pulled up the concrete floor and pulled down a tree and built a wall in only two full days of building so we're making some good progress.
The youth programmes don't start properly till next week so at the moment the building site is the priority. But we're all looking forward to the chance to get involved with youth of different ages; run Sunday school; teach English and music and run sports afternoons etc.
There are loads of cockroaches here, they're massive - about as long as our fingers! But we're already used to them. We also had to remove some snakes from the building site and kill them, they were only little though. we also saw a massive toad and a poisonous centipede.
Food here is quite cheap but there is limited choice. We're learning to cope with only powdered milk and not much veg. But so far we have been able to find carrot, cabbage, beans and peppers. Apparently there's cauliflower occasionally too. The fruit is delicious though and we have papaya tress in our garden which we pick the fruit off and eat. We're staring to get a few mosquito bites so it would be great if we could pray that these wouldn't bother us too much or get infected.
Prayer requests: So far no one is ill but please could you pray that this would continue. Also, we're starting to ache a bit from building so if we could pray for renewed strength and energy that would be wonderful. We're trying to get a tractor down to help but it's very difficult. There are only a few drivers, one is in Brazil and the other is trying to decide if it's worth bringing his JCB to Apolo rather than straight back to La Paz so please pray that he'll have compassion and allow us to use it! Can we also pray for everyone who has been so welcoming to us so far and that we may in turn welcome then and spread God's love throughout Apolo.
God bless from team Bolivia (aka the Oxford chicken chasers!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment