10 Years in Bolivia!

 Can you believe it?  This month we are celebrating 10 years since we moved to Bolivia as a family.  If you look back at our blog, woefully neglected of late, you'll see that it has been a decade of unexpected changes and LOTS of blessings.  We are thankful for all of you that have accompanied us on our journey of faith and ministry, through prayer, encouraging words, and finances.

As we look back over the years, I think the changes in our family are what make the passage of time most noticeable, so here are some of our favorite family photos along the way.

Farewell address at our home church, January 2011	Commissioning and send-off by the elders, January 2011
Tiny travelers!	Tiny travelers!
Our first family photo in Bolivia, outside of Cochabamba at 14,000 feet above sea level! July 2011.	At Corani Lake with our language helpers, Emerson and Suellen, January 2012.
At our second house in Cochabamba, November 2012.	Getting settled into a new life in Santa Cruz,  January 2014
First time at the Santa Cruz sand dunes, July 2014	Exploring Buena Vista, January 2015
Silly fun at our Misión Etnos year-end gala,  December 2016	Enjoying a quiet "winter" evening at Misión Etnos, July 2017
Exploring the Roboré area (and the Chochís tower),  April 2018	At home at Misión Etnos, February 2020

Etnos Student Testimony

The following video was created by Luis, one of our students at the Etnos missionary training center in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.  He speaks Spanish, of course, but we have subtitled it in English for your benefit.  We hope that it will give you good insight into life on our campus and what we do!  Most of the photos were taken by Nathan and you'll catch a glimpse or two of us as well. :)

 

So. . .what are you up to?

Furlough may well be the most misunderstood part of missionary life.  What are we doing?  How long are we here?  What is going on? Over the past two months that we have been "back home," we have noticed that a lot of people have similar questions about what this furlough thing is all about.  Although we have previously posted about the craziness of furlough, I thought we might be able to provide some clarity about what we're doing by responding to the following questions.

1. Are you glad to be home?

Yes, thanks for asking!

Well, I should say that's true for Kaylee and I.  If you ask one of our daughters that, they're liable to give you a funny look and hesitate.  They love Montana, but it's not home.  You'll get the same response if you ask, "How do you like it in Bolivia?" A better question would be, "Are you enjoying your time in Montana?"

We love the snow and cold!

2. How long are you here for?

Nine months!  And before you have to ask "Is that a full furlough?" or "Why not a whole year?" this amount of time allows us to come back a bit more often (every ~3 years) and miss less time at Etnos, too.  We're planning to be back in time for the second 2019 semester at the training center, which starts in August.


3.  Isn't furlough just a code word for missionary vacation?

Not exactly.  Although it is supposed to be a time of rest, we are not completely free from work.  It is partly for this reason that our organization has taken to calling this time "home assignment" instead of furlough and asks us to spend 75% of our time in ministry while home. We're still doing missionary stuff, but in a different place and a different way.


4. So what kind of missionary work can you do from here?

The most important responsibility we have is to inform our supporters and churches about how the past couple of years have gone on the field.  The families that give sacrificially to support our ministry in Bolivia deserve to get some feedback on how we are capitalizing on their investment.  While our newsletters help with this, they can't replace the importance of speaking face-to-face and answering specific questions.  This means spending a lot of time in homes, in Sunday School classes, and in churches talking about what God has done in the three years since we were here last.  To help maintain our sanity, we are going to limit our travel, but welcome anyone that wants to come visit us!

Talking about our ministry in a SS class at our home church on Sunday

5. Surely that can't take up ALL your time!  What else do you do?

Some of my ministry responsibilities from the field continue.  As one of the leaders of the Etnos training center, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the staff and students through WhatsApp messages and emails and give input whenever needed.

I also manage the Misión Etnos Facebook page, which has become an important tool for connecting with prospective students and getting churches involved in the ministry.  I am responsible for posting all of the content and responding to messages.  This past year I took over the Etnos website as well.    Unfortunately, it is outdated and a bit clunky and one of the main projects I want to do this month is give it a major overhaul.

Working on web design in my Bolivian office, which I am continuing remotely

This furlough, I hope to spend some time translating Milton Vincent's A Gospel Primer into Spanish, to use as a discipleship tool with our students.  It's a fantastic little book that made a big impact on Kaylee and me and its format fits well into our weekly 1-on-1 counseling time.  I started working on it a couple years ago, but haven't gotten very far due to other responsibilities.

All of that aside, most of my time in December was taken up with a different project.  Early in 2018, Kaylee suggested that we make an Etnos calendar with some of my photographs and sell it as a benefit for the students.  So I did some investigation, we picked out 13 of our favorite photos from Bolivia, and we made a calendar!  We have done fairly well with it and will be donating all of the profits to the students in the Etnos training to help them with their daily needs.

6. Enough about you. What is Kaylee doing?

Kaylee's ministry as wife and mom doesn't change at all, of course, so she's usually busier than I am.  She still handles the cooking, cleaning, laundry, family bookkeeping, newsletter writing, and general household management. :D She also continues to homeschool the girls, which tends to be more difficult in a time of transition like this.  Maintaining the routine of study takes more discipline and energy when there are so many other exciting things to do and see!

Kaylee is also volunteering in our church library one night a week, so it can be open while the kids are at AWANA and youth group.  If you get a chance, stop in for a chat (or a good book!).

Who doesn't love a beautiful librarian? :D

Kaylee has struggled to form deep friendships on the mission field, for various reasons, and is jumping at every opportunity she has to spend time with her friends here.

7. Wait, but what about rest?

It's true, we really do need rest.  Ministry is a stressful business anywhere, but even more so in a foreign environment.  Think about all of the usual issues that come up with your coworkers, your neighbors, and your church, then add the complication of communicating with them in a different language and culture.  We also live in the middle of our campus, which means that those ministry relationships are inescapable, without even the privacy of going home at the end of the day.

Because of that, most of our rest comes just from being here in Montana.  It's great to spend time with family, catch up with old friends, and relax back into our first language.  Being away from the rigid structure of the Etnos training program also gives us freedom to get away and do fun things in a way that we don't in Bolivia.  

We have thoroughly enjoyed our first two months of home assignment and are looking forward to the next seven.  We hope to see many of you!  If you have any other questions about furlough, put them in the comments below!

Thankful for Transitions

I was going to call this post "Transitions" and leave it at that, but as I looked back at my last post and realized how smoothly God has orchestrated each step of this process since then, I have to praise Him for His goodness.  Transition is always difficult and stressful, but as we settle into a new routine and "home," I again see how blessed we truly are.

My Grammar Analysis class went very well. I taught it as a module this year -- we spent 5 weeks doing 12 class hours per week instead of spreading it out over the course of an entire semester.  This gave us much more consistency with the material, which helped the students stay on track as we built one concept upon another.  It was a much higher workload for me during that time, but I also had a couple of "free" weeks beforehand to front-load most of the prep work.

With 11 students, there was no way I was going to be able to help each one grasp the difficult concepts of grammar and solve the "puzzle" of analysis.  I am so thankful for Judy and Margarita, two of our coworkers who helped me with the practical work.  We were able to split the class into three smaller groups to do the practical exercises.

Applying the principles of analysis to real language

Margarita checks on Julieta's process

Judy guides a group through an exercise

When I finished my classes on October 12, I only had ONE week to prepare for our home assignment!  I am thankful for all of the work that Kaylee and the girls had already been doing to prep and pack.  Because we were leaving for nine months, we once again packed up anything that could be affected by mold or dust and stored it in our air conditioned classroom.  Each time we do this, we have to go through a process of evaluating what we have and choose to take, store, or give away each thing.

Packing suitcases to take and totes to store

On October 19, we flew out of Santa Cruz and went to Canada!  One of the couples that attended the big international forum that Etnos hosted in July was the director of our mission's training center in Ontario.  They invited us to visit and give a report to their students about the work we are doing in Bolivia.  So we flew from Santa Cruz to Toronto and spent four days there.  I don't know if we encouraged the students at all, but they were a tremendous encouragement to us!

We were given two opportunities to speak in their daily chapel.  The first day, I gave an overview of the work that Misión Etnos is doing in Bolivia and our current personnel needs.  The second day Kaylee joined me to help share our personal story of how God has changed our plans and worked in us over the past eight years.

We also appreciated the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful fall colors and explore their campus!

Finally, on October 24, we made our way to MONTANA!  Over the past two and a half weeks, we have been working to get our feet on the ground and settle in.  We have unpacked most of our storage shed, purchased things that we lacked (like winter clothes for the girls!), gotten me a new driver's license, and are trying to catch up on sleep.  We are slowly trying to transition back into the lives of our friends and family here as well.

A week ago, Kaylee got back to school with the girls after a 3-week break for travel/transition.  Sometimes getting back into a routine is the best way to feel settled and I think it is working.

Back to school after a short break

Of course, when the got our first good snow fall on Wednesday, we had to take advantage of our first opportunity to go sledding in almost three years!  We're thankful for how quickly we adjust back to cold weather!

Busy, Busy, Busy!

The past 4 months have been crazy busy.  Big surprise, right?

Immediately after the little getaway we wrote about in our last post, we began the process of moving into a new house. We had been fighting a termite invasion for a couple of years and our house needed some significant work, so when one of the other staff families moved off campus in February to focus on another area of our ministry here, it was decided that we should move into their house.

Kaylee was ecstatic.  The house we lived in for over 4 years was too big (almost 2200 sq ft!), two levels, and not a very nice layout, to be honest.  The house we are in now is a more appropriate size for us (not quite 1500 sq ft), single level, and a much nicer layout with a lovely open-concept living/dining/kitchen area.  The girls ended up with a bigger bedroom than they had and I got a little shop off the back porch. Naturally, we lost a few benefits (like the fireplace!), but all in all, it was a good decision.

We had spent a couple of months working on plaster, paint, electrical, and a bathroom remodel and it was finally ready at the beginning of May.  This is now our 20th long-term (more than 1 month) home in 13.5 years of marriage!  At a distance of only 52 ft door to door, it also set a record for our shortest move ever (previous record: 7 blocks). :D

New house at left, old house at right!

The girls are now expert paint scrapers

Kaylee enjoying her new kitchen

The old house is now being gutted and re-purposed as Etnos offices (lower level) and a guest apartment (upper level) as the campus works through some growing pains and changing needs.

Also during May, we had the pleasure of hosting my nephew Zach, who came from Montana for 2 weeks.  He split his time between relaxing (after just finishing a busy school year), interacting with the Etnos students, playing with the girls, being sick, and doing projects.

Dinner with Etnos students Victor & Eunice, Carlos, and Julieta

One of Zach's projects was to build a bike rack for the girls' bicycles

The month of June was overwhelmingly overwhelming as we once again did an English practice time for our students.  Halfway through their training, each group of students spends 3 weeks studying the gringos to get some practice in applying the tools that I am teaching them in the Culture and Language Acquisition class.  As usual, we needed some more native speakers, so we invited my parents and another couple from our home church to join us.  It was a blessing to have them here, not only as a help to the program, but the encouragement of spending time with folks from home.

The fun part about CLA-English is that we get to do "regular life" things while the students accompany us and attempt to learn our language and customs.  We also get to be unapologetically American, which is fun. ;)

My dad built a closet for the girls, often accompanied by a few of the guys

Several students joined Kaylee and the girls to see what homeschool is all about

We taught them an American sport, too :)

At the end, we hosted a big shebang for the whole campus to celebrate my birthday with hamburgers and root beer floats made with root beer I made a few days earlier.

Serving up the goodness

In July, after the students left on their 4-week winter break, we barely had a couple days to breathe before we started the preparations for our next big event, a 5-day international forum.  Every couple of years, leaders of our mission agency from different countries get together with the global ministries board to report current status, encourage each other, talk about issues, and basically stay on the same page.  This forum was focused on Latin America, although with the global team 13 countries and 3 principal languages were represented.  All of the ~85 attendees stayed here with us on campus, so it was a ton of work!

My main job was to coordinate airport pickups for our international guests, which came to about 30 trips to the airport in 14 days' time, many at terrible hours of the night.  Thankfully, I had two other men helping with the driving and it all went quite smoothly for the most part.  During the forum itself, I focused on photographing the proceedings, although I did make one presentation, a report on our current training program.

Reporting on our training program for the global leadership of the mission

Kaylee was once again designated as head of refreshments, so she spent a couple of weeks buying and baking before the forum as well as preparing and serving throughout it.

As usual, all the extra work was well worth the opportunity that we had to meet and spend time with like-minded coworkers from around Latin America and other parts of the globe.  It is always such an encouragement to swap stories and share experiences and talk about God and His work together.

At the beginning of August, the Etnos students all came back from their break and we started up the second semester of 2018.  A week later, Kaylee started a new school year with the girls, who are now in 6th, 4th, and 3rd grades.

August has been a very different sort of month for me.  I  have been teaching only one hour of class per week, which I am enjoying immensely.  The course is one that we typically do each semester, called Analytical Reading, which has the purpose of improving the students' reading ability (generally poor).  I chose to read Charles Swindoll's The Grace Awakening this semester and I love the conversations we are having in class.

Updating our Etnos website and Facebok

I have been using the rest of my time to do more necessary improvements to the new house, manage our Etnos website and Facebook page (a role which continues to expand), and prepare myself for my upcoming Grammar Analysis class, which starts this Thursday, Sept 6.  It is a very intense course and will be much more so this year.  Instead of teaching it two hours each week spread over the whole semester, we are doing it as a modular course in which I will teach 4 hours each Tues-Thurs for five weeks.  I am thankful that I can count on the help of two missionary ladies, one of whom has taught the course several times, for help with the classwork.

In light of this class, we would appreciate prayer for the next two months specifically.  Not only will I be teaching WAY more class hours each week than normal, we will be preparing for a home assignment ("furlough") that we have planned for the end of October.