Bolivia - Peru 2006

CPC Bolivia Team Expands its Journey of Spiritual Transformation into Peru!
Don Wahlig

On June 29th, 11 CPC members and friends embarked on a 12-day journey of spiritual transformation to South America’s two poorest countries, Bolivia and Peru. The team included Scheller Hinkle, Hayley Morgan, John Taylor, Rachel Christensen, Elizabeth Burke, Michael Christensen, Lee Ryden, Carolyn Taylor, Don Wahlig, Julie Saksa and Julie Richards. After months of spiritual and logistical preparation, we began our trip with a moving communion service on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Lima, Peru. We then visited a micro-enterprise sewing project begun by PCUSA missionaries Ruth and Hunter Farrell amid the grinding poverty of a hill-side shanty town called Lomas de Caledonia outside Lima. (These exquisite craft items will be resold at a holiday gift market here at CPC this fall. Anyone interested in helping organizing the sale should contact Don or John Illian.)

Moving on to Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city, the team renewed CPC’s long-term relationship with the Amistad Mission. We stayed in the La Morada visitor center, sharing common meals and daily devotional services made richer by the vocal talents of our youth. At the Villa Amistad we played and worshipped with the 100 orphaned and abandoned children who live there. Michael Christensen was also able to spend some time with CPC member, Liz Bomgaars, on the first day of her year-long stay at the Villa.

One of several highlights of our trip was a 3-day visit to Amistad’s rural development project high in the Andes Mountains in the tiny Quechua village of Aramasi. Here, 2 hours by micro-bus from Cochabamba, we played with the children and spent a morning painting their day care center. In the adobe green house nearby, we were thrilled to see the results of our labor 2 summers ago: climbing vines, green sprouts and ripe melons were growing abundantly in the soil that our team dug out in July 2004! Now with a recently-hired full-time agronomist on the Amistad staff, there are plans to grow more vegetables to further improve the diets and health of the families in Aramasi.

To appreciate the vast difference that Amistad has made in the lives of these poor Quechua villagers, we walked 5 miles down a dry river bed to the neighboring village of Huaykampare where we saw the obvious signs of malnutrition in the children: physical and mental lethargy, dazed expressions, loose skin and blond highlights in hair that should be jet black. After entertaining the children with a new soccer ball and soap bubbles, we hiked home. Deeply affected by this experience, we made a contribution of $500 on behalf of a generous CPC donor to enable Amistad’s expansion and renovation of the cooking hut for the pre-school Huaykampare, a gift which Amistad’s Bolivian director, Paula Vargas, gratefully accepted.

We saw and participated in several other missions in Cochabamba, including an impressive aid organization called Mano a Mano, the Solomon Klein orphanage and a street-children’s ministry called Mosoj Yan. All of us were struck by the vast needs of Bolivia’s poor as we experienced their plight through the work of these various organizations. We invite you to pray with us as we discern our future involvement with them. Moving on to La Paz, we had the spectacular experience of seeing Lake Titicaca, a sacred spot for the Aymara people. We concluded our trip by worshipping with a Presbyterian congregation in La Paz to whom we presented a book written by Rebecca Laird and Michael Christensen, and a communion cloth embroidered by CPC’s Martha Anderson.

In reflecting on our experience in Bolivia and Peru, we felt keenly a growing sense of compassion, commonality and communion with our Bolivia and Peruvian friends. As we experienced God’s grace and the presence of Christ in the faces of some of the poorest folks on the face of this planet, we were, to a person, moved to recognize God’s gifts in our own lives, especially the powerfully transforming presence of Jesus’ love in our hearts. You can see pictures of this year’s trip online at http://boliviaperu2006.shutterfly.com. We invite you to join us for next year’s trip to Bolivia.