Jay Doty's Summary

Bolivia Wrapup

It’s always good to look back and see how God worked on any mission trip. It always amazes me how God always finds new ways to provide, new lessons to teach, old lessons taught in new ways, and blessings all around. Nothing is better than waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘OK God, this day is ALL YOURS, what do YOU want to do’.

This was as different a trip as any I’ve ever been on and I’ve been on quite a few.

The Bolivian lowlands is a wonderful place. The people in the smaller pueblos as genuine and wonderful as any Christians I have met. Are they super-saints?, No. But they are precious all the same.

One major observation.

One thing you used to be able to bank on in Latin America is no longer the bastion it used to be. No matter what revolutions were occurring, no matter the devastation of the machismo attitude and impropriety of the South American male, no matter the undependable infrastructure, or the difficult living conditions, no matter the sad ineffectiveness of the Church, or just the ever present danger of banditos, terremotos, temblores or guerras, one thing you could always depend upon was the foundation of the family in Latin America. It was the anchor that held Latin America together. It is no longer that same bulwark that it once was. Families are starting to show the wear and tear in Latin America as they have in the US for many years.

The economy is taking its toll. With so little work, many couples are breaking up, sending one partner to work elsewhere, like as a domestic in Spain, just to make ends meet.

On a good side to this issue, women are no longer the doormats of their inconsiderate macho husbands. They are not standing for the old system of mistresses and out of control male libidos. Unfortunately, that is also leading to more divorce and separation.

Prior to this trip, I wondered what the need was for marriage seminars in Latin America, but it became quickly apparent that Carlos’ teaching through Song of Songs was extremely important for this culture at this time. All across Latin America I’ve heard countless stories of how ministries like Campus Crusade are now in high demand, not for sharing the 4-spiritual laws, but because the culture is crying out for a solution to the break down of values and principles. Families are the canary in the mineshaft. They are suffering and everyone knows it. Christ has the answer. The Bible offers the blueprint, the Way is again the way.

Not every family is broken. I loved the example set by Pastor Victor & Hermana Ela the young leadership of the Assembly of God church in San Borja. Their family is one I can appreciate. Two boys & 3 girls. All precious, all unique, sold out for Christ. They made me miss my own kids as I could see many similar traits in them. And the joy in their eyes was extremely contagious.

Hermana Ela was so concerned that their Bolivian food would be to our liking. That was NO concern whatsoever. We LOVED their wonderful dishes. Especially the ‘sonso’ a unique yucca and cheese dish, and the ‘api’ a wonderfuly hot fruity rice drink for breakfast. The only complaint that could be levied was that it was TOO MUCH! There IS such a thing as TOO much of a great thing. We were engorged at every meal.

Our days in San Borja were filled from morning til night. Carlos operates on near boundless energy, even at the age of 67? He had a busy schedule of family and health counseling during the day and teaching through the night, not to mention our late late night discussions that had us often averaging 4-5 hrs of sleep/night.

I was incredibly blessed by the church in St. Louis who donated 175 pairs of reading glasses to give away to our brothers & sisters in Bolivia. Also the children from Clayton Community Church made glass cases out of folded potholders that were very popular. My dear wife, Sandra, came up with the inspiration for this project, it is one of our life verses for our marriage,

PSALM 34:3 ‘Come MAGNIFY the LORD with me and we will exalt HIS name forever’.

I took the task of giving out glasses very seriously, not to the point of posing as an eye doctor, but making sure they understood that getting glasses that were stronger than they needed was not a good thing. It was fun to give people the time and care and to see the pleasure that comes when all of a sudden they can read again. I was lacking an official eye chart, so I was able to use the E3 Evangecube direction sheet with its variety of text sizes for a means to understand where people’s eyes current ability was, and to work from there. It also gave them something very edifying to read as they would recite the gospel back to me.

In San Borja, God provided us with the most ideal office/living quarters, just a block from the church, an air conditioned bedroom, a large waiting room, and two offices, one for Carlos’ counseling and one for distributing reading glasses - perfect.

Every evening, Carlos was involved teaching. I did my best to try and get video record of most of it, but It was something of a work in progress. A National Geographic documentary this was not. But hopefully we can some useful footage.

Of course, missions is much more than all work. I enjoyed one of the most unique busman’s holidays. After a late night of teaching, counseling and long discussions, I got up 4:30am to hop on the back of a 150cc Hanjin moto and ride off into the darkness enveloping ‘crocodile country’ with 5 brothers from the San Borja Assembly of God church to go fishing for Piranhas. Piranhas??? …what was I thinking.

Of course Carlos upped the stakes, proclaiming that he certainly would enjoy some ‘cola del lagarto’ (alligator tail) so an antique .22 cal. rifle was brought along to make an attempt to hunt alligator too. We learned afterward that if you want to kill an alligator with a .22 your only chance comes in shooting an alligator right at the base of the skull as it swims away from you. We made some nice shots that did nothing more than make some alligators mad. There were about 8 gators within 50 yds of our little log & dirt bridge over the Rio Chota Wambo (love that name).

Fishing for piranha is a strange practice in reaction & timing. No rod, no reel, just a string, a hook on a wire and a hunk of meat. You throw it in the water and when the piranha attack, you jerk them out of the water up over your head onto the shore behind you. Then you have to jump to get the little guys under foot, because they will flip flop their way right back into the water. They are hyper, and tiny. I am not a good piranha fisherman. I wasn’t shutout, caught 3 or 4, but I definitely was suffering from old man reflexes. It’s not often you get to fish for a fish that would be just as happy to have you for lunch as we were to have it for lunch.

40 minutes into our fishing expedition, I saw this beautiful site. About 20 yards off shore a large 3M alligator arched its tail and head up in the air at the same time and let out this HUGE sound… AUNFFFH! AUNFFFH! AUNFFFH! How cool was that. Gators don’t have vocal chords, so how they make this huge noise is curious. I tried to look it up, I think it means they are hungry.

We went back to fishing and I tried a new spot over next to a precious brother, Hermano Hector. Hermano Hector reminded me very much of a younger version of my brother in law, a very sweet spirited young father of two. There was very little room for us to maneuver where we were. I was standing in a few inches of water. With no warning I heard another loud AUNFFFH! AUNFFFH! AUNFFFH!, except this time it was no farther away than 2M, but the brush next to me prevented me from seeing more than a couple of feet. I looked the other direction over to Hector and he just looked at me and shrugged. Carlos had given me explicit instructions, ‘It’s dangerous out there, do exactly what they tell you to.’ Here was Hector giving me a shrug wasn’t telling me anything. As we laughed about it later, we decided he probably thought ‘We’re OK, if its an alligator that attacks, he’ll get the gringo first and give the rest of us time to get away.’ Well he didn’t attack so the story doesn’t get anymore interesting, but it was a fun thing just to be hanging out with the guys and getting to know something besides the public face of the pueblo. God is so good.

Back in San Borja, Hermana Ela and the other ladies made a wonderful meal out of the 40-50 piranha we brought back with us. Some were deep fried, others were cooked up in a wonderful ‘sopa’ or ‘guisado pescado’.

My other experience with the food came while Carlos was busy spending an entire day providing the teaching for a full day celebration of the women’s prayer group, Circulo de Oracion. Since the ladies were involved in lectures all day, it only made sense to me that men should be helping with the kitchenwork that day.

The women all got a good laugh from seeing me trying to peel a bushel of yucca roots. My best little buddy, Lon, a pocket size logger, took pity on me and joined the cause, helping me to barely finish in time to have yucca on the table for lunch. Yucca seems to show up at nearly every meal, a great alternative to bread products and better for you.

After giving the pastors conference, a marriage seminar, a day of teaching the women’s celebration 5 days of counseling and dispersing 125 pairs of the 175 pairs of reading glasses, it was time to head on to Riberalta, a somewhat bigger town in northern Bolivia. A nice crowd showed up to see us off at the airport and watch while the Cessna bush pilot literally had a kinipshun fit over the weight of our luggage. He had honest doubts about our ability to get up off the dirt runway. I couldn’t blame him, we had what seemed like a ton of paper materials for the Inductive Bible Study workbook and the Marriage seminar books. In the end we sent a box of books on a later flight.

It was a precious sight to see all the brothers & sisters in Christ waving to us from the hangar as we took off. Our flight was pretty uneventful, once we got off the dirt runway and on back to Trinidad where we caught a flight on a much larger Aerocon 20 passenger Fairchild to Riberalta.

Riberalta was a significant difference. We could tell almost the moment we arrived that they really weren’t prepared to receive us, nor had they done the legwork to prepare the conferences that Carlos has worked so hard to prepare. As always, Carlos was completely classy about this intendancy. He could’ve easily become upset at the lack of prep, but instead he knew, as always, that God is in control. The little Hotel Lazo we stayed at was nothing fancy, but adequate for the two of us. Can’t complain for 50 Bolivianos/dia cada uno (~$7/day/person). It had a location near the center of town and the taxi ride to the Maranatha Church or Pastor Cesar’s house was not long. Taxi rides were 3.5bo/$.50 to anywhere in town on the back of a little motoscooter. Very convenient, except when you have a lot of luggage and are trying to get from the airport to the hotel or some such trip. In Trinidad is when we began to get reports about Yolanda’s health condition back in Maui. Carlos having been on many such mission trips knew that this could or could not be a Satanic attack to limit our ministry in Bolivia, specifically a large marriage seminar that had been added to our agenda in Santa Cruz. He needed to act decisively, but not in a knee jerk reaction.

Meanwhile Carlos started into the Pastors conference in Riberalta. There were only 18-19 participants, but they all seemed to be fairly focused students of the Inductive Bible study and it was obvious that they took the classwork seriously. Carlos’ teaching was really powerful during these few days as he was able to work very closely with these students, throughout the entire day.

Our meals in Riberalta were a unique blessing. We ate at the house of Pastor Cesar Avicho and his wife Hermana Elizabeth, a lovely Swiss farm wife. Cesar and Elizabeth had no children of their own, but they took care of 15 kids who were attending school in Riberalta and lived in a dormitory they had constructed in the back of their little lot. It was a wonderful thing to see how she handled these kids. It was a little like being on the set of the movie ‘Sound of Music‘. Every meal she would have every child doing their chores, keeping the house running like a Swiss timepiece and then as they all sat down for the meal she would pull an aged classical guitar off the wall and ask the boys or the girls which worship song they wanted to sing. Her love for these kids was palpable. You could tell she expected much from them, but that they were blossoming under both her discipline and her love. It was really fun to watch. The littlest girls were a delight as they would talk a mile a minute and their innocence was quite refreshing in a culture where there seems little innocence left. Another amazing little bit of discipline was the way she had them each eat a clove of garlic for health purposes at each meal. A task that I find hard to imagine expecting from my own kids.

That was something else I was learning about is health on the mission field. People have to be much more proactive with their health where access to good healthcare is not always guaranteed. Actually, some of the best healthcare I’ve ever encountered has been on the mission field. We still fondly recall the pediatrician who cared for Nicole when we lived in Guatemala in 1989. But that is not always the case and it was evident to me that we as an American society have divorced ourselves from good health practices and removed ourselves from access to the food chain, other than the trips to the local grocery store. This is one of those things that I vowed to incorporate in my own work as a landscape architect on my return.

That is one thing that blessed me throughout this trip was chronicling the things God was doing in and around me in a notebook every day. Trying to keep up with all the things that I felt God was speaking to me as we went along. I had set a goal of having a servant’s heart toward Carlos and enabling him to be more effective in his ministry. He doesn’t really need my help, but that was one of my goals. Of course the hard thing to do is to just try and keep Carlos from turning the tables and him being the one serving you. He does it effortlessly. Speaking only for myself, we enjoyed one another’s company immensely.

One of the few devotionals I gave hinged on that idea from the Casting Crowns song, ‘The Altar and the Door’. That most dangerous distance in the life of the Christian, because so often we are certain we hear God speaking to us, and yet so often we flit through that most dangerous of distances and by the time we reach the door of the church we’ve lost the resolve that was so strong just moments earlier at the altar where we were so close to God.

Besides the connection to the food chain, I’ve vowed that I would start a Bible study based on the Inductive Study method that Carlos was teaching in Bolivia. I’ve committed to Friday nights starting April 30^th. If you are ever in St. Louis, you are more than welcome to come by and join my family and I in this study. I don’t know if it will ever include others than my captive family, but I covet your prayers that it would grow to be what God desires it to be. I would like to see St. Louisans become like the Bereans who searched the Scriptures daily to see how God’s message aligns with the gospel that we have heard.

As I saw how Carlos dealt with this stress of knowing that his wife was ill in Maui and the insistent call for ministry in Bolivia, the overwhelming thought that came to my mind was that there are times when I want to do nothing more than walk to heaven hand in hand with my wife, Sandra. Doesn’t matter if it takes a day or 50 more years. I couldn’t fathom the anguish I know was raging in Carlos’ heart. He and Yolanda are an inseparable couple. No matter what Carlos’ choice would be, none would be easy, none would be totally satisfying. By the last day of the pastors conference in Riberalta, Carlos had resolved to see what was possible for speedier return flights and I coincidentally came down with a strange fever & cough. That morning while I was resting, Carlos was able to get flights back to Santa Cruz moved up several days with no penalty (unheard of in Latin Am.). That afternoon I was feeling marginally better and we decided to take a moto ride across the river Beni on a ferry and back into the jungle areas so Carlos could see some of the needs in the area. I was very struck by the majesty of the communal Almond trees all around that are harvested by the members of each little pueblo. One young pastor we met was in extreme pain, suffering from a nerve disorder in his jaw and also having been struck on the back of the head by an almond cluster that fell from one of these trees well over 100’ up in the air. My joining in this trip was worth the effort, but it was not without its price.

The next day we had two very hard flights to get back to Santa Cruz. I was wondering if I had malaria, but what was really affecting me were a bacterial and viral infection. An ear infection that almost drove me to insanity in the one flight where the pilot did a clumsy job of managing the cabin pressure.

At the national airport in Santa Cruz we learned two things, that Carlos’ flight back home was happening right away, and that mine connections were very iffy. I would have to wait to see if and when I could get out of town. Carlos had to fly to get to the international airport and do the important thing, get back to his better half that needed him home. We rushed to the El Paraiso Assembly of God church to pick up the few things he had left behind. Carlos did a hasty exit and I settled in for what would be some of the worst hours of illness in my life, in the back bedroom of this church in downtown Santa Cruz. It was horrible. I was quite alone and absolutely miserable. Things were serious enough that it was not hard to realize that some kind of system failure could be an option. Prior to this trip, as I’ve learned to do prior to most mission trips, I had done some business with God. He knows that these times are entirely His. He is welcome to do as He pleases in me, to me or through me. Often on this trip it seemed as if emotionally He was performing open heart surgery without an anesthetic. He also had full rights to take me home if that was His choice. This was not any kind of suicide wish, just a resolve that I only want God’s will to be done here on earth in my life. For me, all that is important is to learn to be surrendered to whatever His will is. So I wasn’t afraid, just wondering. Several hours into this really bad torment of a fever, there was a knock on the door and the caretaker of the church peeked in and offered me a pitcher of lemonade. I was like a man on death row that had been offered a reprieve. It was as if God was saying, ‘OK, you’ll be alright now’.

It took me two more days in Santa Cruz to get a flight to Miami and then two more days in Miami because I was arriving just as everyone was flying home from spring break. Over the next few days I would get fevers unlike any I had ever experienced. I would have sweats that left my clothes and sheets sopping wet. They really weren’t all that horrible, because they would be so fierce that they would utterly knock me out and I wouldn’t wake up until they were past. They usually hit at night time, conveniently. The cough was pretty raspy, but manageable. It was a grace that I didn’t have to deal with all these flights all at once. Having the three flight days spread over 5 days allowed my body time to rest in between and minimize the impact on my ear infection. It was really a ‘grace’ that I didn’t have to rush home, just to become an added concern for my busy home schooling wife. Sure I would’ve liked to have been home sooner. I cherish my wife and begged that God would get me home sooner, but she was there all along. My kids were all just fine and I actually got to get home, and recover before needing to return to work. It was truly an expression of God’s Grace in how the timing all worked out for me.

Although I didn’t have contact with any medical help on the way home, I was able to talk to my wife, and I also consulted Pastor Chip Birch of SW Community Church in Miami. He gave me some good counsel and comfort, enough to get me home, and then on arrival home I was able to get to the doctor within a few hours (remember I still didn’t know if this was or wasn’t malaria). This was another God thing. I have no regular doctor in St. Louis and needed to find someone. Sandra called an old friend of our family but he was no longer taking new patients. I decided to try one of his associates, who was the perfect doctor for me right at that time. Dr. Michael Cannon. He knew enough to look for the obvious and not be too distracted by my self diagnosis. He spotted the ear infection and gave me an option for easing into treatments and see what my body would do to heal itself. He gave me some antibiotics that I needed and charged me a ridiculously small amount for the visit. (remember I don’t carry health insurance) He was so gracious and was just the absolute perfect provision at that moment in time. I felt SO blessed. I haven’t had a chance to thank him, but hope I do soon.

God is SO Good.

I could write pages and pages more about all that I got out of this trip.

This is a lot right here.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some kind of medal.

But for me, it is always good to remind ourselves of what God chooses to do in different situations. There is no such thing as a typical mission trip. There is no such thing as ‘This is how God always deals with this situation’. He is too creative for that. Like a very attentive father, he treats every child differently in exactly the right way. He will do things equally amazing and more so in your life, but only if you give Him the room to do so. He is after all more than a gentleman. He’s the King.

Or as better spoken by Mr. Beaver from the Chronicles of Narnia when asked if Aslan was a safe lion:

"'Safe?' said Mr. Beaver...'Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. but he's good. He's the King, I tell you.'"

He’s the King, I tell you.

God Bless You All.

Jay Doty