Keep me as the apple of your eye

So my last post was the week before I left Okinawa. The transition from Okinawa to Yapacani had not been as spiritually or emotionally as rough as I thought it was going to be and I'll tell you why. I had a terrific last week in okinawa before I left, encountering alot of love and generosity from my closest bolivian friends. Their goodbyes to me really showed me that my life with them for the past 4 months really touched their hearts. As for the kids, well I will share one quick story that took place on my last day of my 5th grade english class. I asked the class why they thought I was here in their town for the past 4 months. They already knew the answer to my question because I told them why I was here during my first month there. Hands went up when I asked the question, and before I could pick someone ,one kid shouted in spanish, "you are here to teach Englishhh!", to which I replied in the same interrupting manner, "Nooo!", the class all laughed. I asked the question again while thinking that less hands were going to go up now since that was not a bad answer after all. "Why am I here in Bolivia?", surprisingly the same hands went up and I picked a random student and he said, "Because you want to share your faith with us!" to which I passionately exclaimed in english as if I had won the lottery, "YES! YES! YESSSS!!!!" The class laughed again. I know that the other kids who were raising their hands also were going to have the same answer. I was so glad he remembered. It was a nice reminder that even though my spanish was not great, the Holy Spirit was able to use the voice that I had to make a fruitful impression on some of their minds and hearts. The kids know how important my relationship to God is to me. I pray that when they are my age, they will have trustful relationships with God and really know, (the "conocer" relational type of knowing in spanish), that life is truly fulfilling with God.



A note from a little girl in my 5th grade english class. She expressed her gratitude for the one time I read a bible story with her after sunday mass, starting class with different prayers, and "for the faith I gave her and her classmates"...Not to me be the glory, but to God be the glory.

At this point I have been living for 3 weeks in Yapacani and I have been forming relationships quite easily. I have been welcomed and greeted by; the religious communities, the Bolivian staff of the canadian sponsorship program,and even the cockroaches that live in my shower drain.

I dont know how to explain this without confusing you but I am a volunteer in the San Carlos Mission. Yapacani is a city that is one mission area of the San Carlos Mission. The "headquarters of the mission" or really where the salesian priests live, is in a beautiful small town called San Carlos. That is where the seminary is too. I sleep there two times a week in order to get community time with the priests and seminarians. And to also hang out with the kids there in that town. I teach english to the 4 seminarians on mondays at 8:30am because they want to learn english, afterwards we all walk across the hexagon stone pattern street to receive free guitar lessons. When Im not in San Carlos, I am living at my mission site which is in the city of yapacani. Now for yapacani, well each thing that I do in yapacani deserves a blog post of its own so I will save the day in the life of Adam for later.

Church and seminary in San Carlos

I love living here in yapacani, everything is very unfamiliar to me and I don't have a passed volunteer here to transition me in. Its an adventure. In Genesis, when God placed Adam on this Earth, everything was new and unprecedented to Adam. He didn't learn the ropes from other past people, because there was no one before him to show him the way! He learned from God how to get around. His Heavenly Father watched out for him. He kept Adam, his beloved son, as the apple of His eye. Right now I can see God fathering me through Fr. Arturo, showing me the good places where I can eat and the streets I should stay away from. The Blessed Virgin is mothering me through the women secretaries I work with. The secretaries were the first to show me what my role would be in yapacani to the kids that I will be serving. It was a woman at the wedding of Cana, that showed the New Adam, what his first work would be. I love relating scripture to my life if you haven't been able to see this by now. God reminds me that I am being attentively watched and guided from the advantage point of Heaven, we all are. Encountering Heaven's Love through my old friends and now from my new friends gives me the assurance that I really am the apple of God's eye. If I can truly make the effort to believe in that Love each day,then I will be make it so much easier for the kids to believe in that Love too.

 

City of Yapacani