Living Life as a Mission

These past couple weeks have been full of gardening, parenting, and rain. They’ve also been full of laughter and so much joy of living. I am trying to soak up every moment here knowing that I do not have very much time left, and that once I leave, I will never get this exact experience back again. God has been teaching me a lot recently, and I’ve been learning a lot about what it means to be a missionary and to do mission work. I want to share some of my findings in this blog.

As I was thinking about writing this blog, it was difficult at first to figure out what to say. I have just been doing a lot of average things, in an less-than-average place.

Last Friday night worship, we had worship in the houses instead of as a group on the center of campus. We had a lot of laughs as Kelsey and I and a visiting friend acted out Bible charades for the girls to guess and sang songs with my guitar including their new favorite song “Awesome God” in English.

I have been spending a lot of time in the Flores house watching them, especially while Kelsey’s family got the opportunity to visit her this last week. The childcare has included making cards together, sitting and laughing, putting toothpaste on toothbrushes, reading countless storybooks, chasing a HUGE frog out of the bedroom, stepping on bullet ants to kill them so they won’t bite the girls in the showers, doing laundry by hand with the girls, helping them pick out their clothes for the day, and waking them up in the mornings.

One evening while I was watching the girls, they were having lots of fun climbing the huge tree outside. As I watched them, they said “Teacher please climb the tree too!!” It was a pretty high tree and I honestly was not sure if the skinny branch could hold me, but the girls assured me that heavier people than me had climbed it before and it hadn’t broken. So, after many demonstrations and lessons from the girls on how to climb up and down this tree, I managed to make it up and down safely. The girls were thrilled. Tici climbed down to grab my phone and video this momentous moment while I was sitting in the tree, and both her and Dianara were grinning ear to ear. It was a lot of fun.

Sabbath school is continuing to go well and we are starting to teach Bible studies in the afternoons on Sabbath. I am teaching baptismal Bible studies for a few children, one of them being Tici. I was scrubbing her laundry with her one day, and I mentioned that I had heard that she wanted to be baptized. Her whole face lit up with her beautiful smile and she said “yes!”. I asked her if she knew who she was going to study with and she didn’t. It turns out that she is going to start studies with me and I couldn’t be more honored. Please pray for me as I am teaching Sabbath school and these studies, especially as both are in Spanish and I need extra preparation and wisdom to communicate well.

Because of the Vocational Education program that is being implemented, I have girls in the garden for 6 hours every day. I have the big girls in the morning and the little girls in the afternoon and am continuing to learn more about motivating them to work and trying to peak their interest in gardening.

Last week, the older girls cleared off a space to transplant pineapple pups that I had collected from another school about two hours away from us. We had a wonderful time planting 40+ new pineapples plants together and it was fun to teach them about how they grow.

Another morning with the older girls, Hope and I trekked down the road with them to the sugar cane/bamboo type plants. Some call them bamboo, others sugar cane, and others another name so I have never been fully confident as to what the plant actually is.

However, we traipsed down the road with machetes in hand, ready to chop down the plants to make trellises back at the garden. It was such a cool experience to be in the dense jungle, the sound of machetes echoing all around, chopping down very tall sugar cane to transport back to the orphanage. I also had the unfortunate adventure of finding out that the big reddish ants have quite the painful bite. Somehow I brushed up against a place that had them and got bit all over. Thankfully, we made it out safely and proceeded to drag lots of trellis material back down the road. As we were working, I was thankful anew for the unique experience I get to have as a missionary here. I get an experience with the kids and people here, yes, and I also get to experience and understand the nature, climate, and plants of Bolivia closer than most student missionaries ever do. I am so so grateful for that opportunity.

One afternoon last week, we decided to transplant papaya trees with the little girls. So we took them to clear off spaces for the young trees. Then they each got to pick out a plant from a bunch of volunteer papaya starts. They transplanted those and watered them and each very proudly took pictures with their trees. However, I soon noticed that not too long after being transplanted, the trees were very wilty. The next day, Hope told me they looked like they were dying. I don’t think we did anything wrong with them, they just had a bit of transplant shock I guess. But I was praying they would live because it is not very encouraging for the girls to have their trees all die, especially when we have trouble getting them interested in agriculture in the first place! Thankfully, all of the trees pulled through and were starting to thrive when some well-intending boy cut them down with the weed-eater. Thankfully he left at least one tree standing in every girl’s section, so they still each have 1-2 of their 3 original trees surviving. But I have learned my lesson to make it very obvious where we transplant trees to so that they won’t get cut down. Those papayas have been through a lot already, but I’m thankful that God is protecting most of them and cares about the little things, even if it’s just little girls’ papaya trees.

During these two weeks, we have been doing weeding, planting, building trellises, amending the soil, covering the soil with mulch, and harvesting in the garden. Nearly every afternoon, it has been pouring rain and often at night too. Our garden trenches/walkways are flooded with water and our unfortunate carrot bed has probably had all of its seeds washed away by now. But I am thankful we have water even if it is too much. And l am so thankful for our drainage ditches.

Right outside the garden we have started another project: trees. The moringa trees that I started, are ready to be transplanted. I was working with the girls on that yesterday. The holes are very deep and due to the rain recently, the girls keep having to empty them of the rain water. They have a lot of fun practically swimming in it while taking the water out of it with buckets. We were all tired by the end of the work period yesterday after planting one of the trees. We decided to use the Ellen White method of tree planting, and it sure takes a lot of effort. It will be interesting to see the results.

At the end of the tree planting, one girl asked me “teacher, do you get bored of working in the garden?” And I looked at her and said that I don’t really get bored. Every now and then I do, yes. But for the most part I really love it. She looked at me highly amazed. But I explained that I didn’t used to love it, and that I didn’t like weeding when I was little. She smiled knowingly, and I thought about what a blessing it was for me to be exposed to gardening early on.  Even though I didn’t love it at first, I wouldn’t be here starting a farm if I hadn’t had that exposure when I was young. And it gave me hope for the girls who do not seem interested in it at all, remembering that even if they do not like it now, they may be thankful for their knowledge of it later, and one day may even use it to teach more young people about agriculture. I hope that they will also remember their teacher who loved them, and somehow, shockingly, loved working in the garden all the time too.

Last night we had a birthday party Quinceañera for one of our girls. I dropped by the Flores house to see if they needed help getting the girls ready to go. The house was a bustle of activity as girls were running around showering, putting on dresses, and getting their hair done. I showered and dressed and helped fix hair and then Luz, the oldest girl in the house, braided my hair. That evening we all enjoyed yummy food, cake (Bolivia cake is soo much better than any I’ve ever had in the states), and fellowship. That evening I watched Santi during the party, put the Flores to bed afterwards, then comforted another SM who was crying and having a hard time, and then headed to my house where I cleaned out the cat boxes, fed the cats, brushed my teeth, and headed to bed.

As I had been sitting in the hustle and bustle of the Flores house while Luz was doing my hair, I couldn’t help but think about how normal mission life is. I began to realize that I have often imagined that being a missionary meant doing some great feat of climbing some mountain to a remote village and nearly getting killed before you can translate the Bible into their previously unknown language. And it is true that some mission experiences consist of things like that. However, more often than not, they consist of simply living your life with other people for the purpose of sharing Jesus with them: making your life a mission. For me, my mission sometimes consists of doing little girls’ hair, putting bandaids on scrapes, saying prayers at bedtime, and reading them stories. Other times it consists of comforting someone who is crying, teaching a Sabbath school class, or doing laundry with someone. And other times, it consists of teaching a bunch of girls how to grow pineapples, chopping down sugar cane, transplanting trees, harvesting peppers, or propagating sweet potato plants.

On my last day off, I was thinking about and reaching out to some friends back in the states. As I talked to some of them on the phone, I had a realization that came as a bit of a shock to me: there is a huge mission field, very similar to the one here, just at Southern where I got to university. I know this should have been obvious, and I of course knew there was a mission field there. But I was struck by the similarities between them. There are hurting people in need of Jesus, everywhere. It is easy to me to think that I will be leaving the mission field when I go home. When in reality, I am just stepping into a different mission field.

I am not denying that there are differences between the foreign mission field and the one in the states. In the states, my mission has never included getting huge frogs out of bedrooms, washing laundry by hand, getting Dengue, dealing with skin diseases, living with rats, cleaning up parasitic worms off the floor from a cat, combing lice out of hair, or learning a completely new language while parenting four children that I am not the mother of. This was certainly a harsher mission field than I had been used to when I came. But I am realizing that I find the same people in need of Jesus here as I find in the states. And doing mission work here still consists of the same general type of outreach, encouragement, and relationship building that doing mission work in the states does. I am realizing that instead of always being some grand, dangerous feat, mission work very often solely consists of doing life with people and building relationships for the kingdom.  Whether God has called you to the foreign mission field or to evangelize your next-door-neighbor, I hope you will choose to live your life as a mission. To choose to live your mission wherever you go. Build relationships with people and share Jesus wherever you go. I am so grateful for this experience of doing life with these kids here. And when I go home, I look forward to doing life with the students at Southern and seeking to be a missionary there too. After all, we are all people in need of friendship, discipleship, and Jesus’s love and Grace, whether in Bolivia or Tennessee. My mission and calling here, is not more important than your mission and calling in the states, or wherever you are. It’s just different. But I’m beginning to realize that the differences are much less stark than I initially thought. Please enjoy the series of photos of my mission life below.