Central Presbyterian Church Mission Funds and Partners

Extending Christ's Love to the World!

Mission to Bolivia
July 17-28, 2004
Don Wahlig

CPC Bolivia Mission Team 2004
Click on picture for a trip slide show

What a fabulous trip. The first 8-9 days was spent co-leading our Church mission trip to the Amistad Mission and its children’s village in the city of Cochabamba, with a two-day trip up into the mountains to visit a small indigenous village called Aramasi. The children of the Amistad Mission, most of whom were abandoned or orphaned, are, without exception, wonderfully open and warm. They crave attention and call all of us, generically, “Amigos” - friends! Spending time with them, playing, eating, worshipping, and celebrating special occasions like the group birthday celebration was one of the real highlights of our trip. Without familial support in a system in which your family (especially your father) determines the opportunities open to you, these children are at best marginal to Bolivian society. While they appreciated our attention and our gifts, it was, I think, we who came away the more changed - I will not look at my own children the same way again, I can assure you. cows, pigs and chickens everywhere... Stars such as I have never seen in the night sky, including the Southern Cross low on the horizon and the Milky Way stretching like a road of tiny lights from one horizon to the other as shooting stars streak by every few minutes.

The same was true of the villagers in the remote Quechua Indian community of Aramasi, situated at 10,000 ft. high up in the Andes in a remote and stunningly beautiful mountain valley. After a two-hour bus ride, we hiked the last 45 minutes down a dirt road to the village just as the sun was setting across the valley.

Upon entering the village, you’d be excused for thinking you had traveled back in time 200 years: oxen drawing wood plows ahead of a barefoot Quechua farmer prodding his animal on with a stick... Dung fires smoldering outside mud huts with thatched roofs which are home to the deadly Vinchuga (aka “assassin”) bugs. Endemic in this part of Bolivia, the bug’s bite is slowly and inexorably fatal to the villagers, perhaps 50 - 75% of whom are now infected... Terraced fields (a pre-Incan innovation dating back 3,000 years) of potatoes, corn, and wheat dotting the dry mountain slopes all around, herds of goats, cows, pigs and chickens everywhere... Stars such as I have never seen in the night sky, including the Southern Cross low on the horizon and the Milky Way stretching like a road of tiny lights from one horizon to the other as shooting stars streak by every few minutes.

Our goal in Aramasi was to help the villagers till soil for a community vegetable and fruit garden. Their diet is primarily starch and the villagers need desperately to augment it, of course, so we worked alongside the villagers to remove eight inches of rocky hard-packed top soil for 5-6 hours under a sun which, at this altitude is, well, fierce. The result was much appreciated and worth the sweat.

As with the Amistad orphanage, it was the children of Aramasi who stole our hearts. Amistad has done a wonderful job of creating trust between the villagers there and outsiders like us who come to help and be transformed in the process. The children sang to us, hugged and kissed us as we picked them up, and let us look in on their classrooms. In the most basic human ways, we are more alike than I ever thought, and yet, in the sense of our privilege, we are so utterly different. I will no longer take for granted these things: running water I can drink without getting life-threatening diarrhea, routine and competent health care that can eliminate the risk of sickness and death, a solid education, the ability to make a living and feed my family, indoor heating, political stability, responsive (if only moderately) government . . . and the list goes on. There is an opportunity for us to continue our connection with Amistad and the people of Aramasi, perhaps working with them to build a medical clinic in a neighboring village next summer. We shall see!

The last two weeks I stayed on and traveled solo around the country. I got a broader sense for the cultures and religious beliefs of the various indigenous peoples who make up 60+% of the population. There are many similarities to our Native Americans, especially in the Southwestern US. The land itself is dramatic in the extreme: everything from high mountains (21,000 ft.) and dry plains (Altiplano) down to the Amazonian rain forest. There were a few adventures here, for sure! I mountain-biked down the world’s most dangerous road, starting at 15,000 ft. in the freezing cold beneath snow-covered mountain peaks and down through cloud forest on a rocky dirt road hugging a cliff on one side and a 2,000 ft. drop on the other to the jungle. I also went down into the mine that bankrolled the Spanish Empire with silver for 300 years (at the cost of 8 million native lives, mind you). I watched incredulously as miners a few feet in front of me lit 10 sticks of dynamite. We scurried 50 yards down the mine shaft and huddled in an alcove as they exploded, shaking the ground like an earthquake. Thought I was going to die, for sure! I will never again complain about working at a desk - as long as I don’t have to do that for a living, I think I’m doing OK.

Another Mission Trip to Bolivia is planned for summer, 2006.