Jesus can

Does God feel like me? Does He feel this wrenching feeling in His stomach at the thought of His children. I am missing moments with them - my kids in Bolivia. I am missing when they get mad, when any learn something new, when they go through problems. I’m not there to pray with them, to comfort them, to laugh or cry with them.

There is so much that I don’t know and so much yet to learn through life experience but I wish more than anything that I could experience it with my kids. I don’t necessarily want to be back in Bolivia, but I want to be with my kids. My heart is torn. I love hot showers, variety in food, a change in weather, a bug and mosquito free house and all the other millions of blessings that come from living in the states. But I miss the cry of “teeCher!” ringing from different houses, miss the wet kisses, I even miss the ache when one of the kids won’t talk to me because he or she is hurting and I hurt for them because I love them so much! 

God must feel these things that I feel but even deeper. He made me and every one of my kids. He knows every intricate detail of my and my kids lives, every secret sin, bad thought, silent joy, and a deep desire to please Him. He has seen us at our weakest and lowest points. He loves us deeper than we can imagine and I don’t know how to deal with the thought that while my heart aches when I think of my kids and I cry thinking about the guilt I feel in not being able to be there for them and love them for the rest of their lives, He loves them. He loves my kids more than I ever could. So I cling to the thought that when I can’t be there to physically hold my children and mend their brokenness, Jesus can.

Love never fails

It's over. I am back in the states, far from my kids and I'm home... or I'm away from home. I haven't quite figured out where home is now.
My family is where I am at in California but I left my kids and my heart in Bolivia. I don't want to talk about the goodbyes but I will say that leaving was the hardest thing I've had to do. God has used my kids, my experiences good and bad and my time at Familia Feliz to teach me so much. More than anything though, this past year He has taught me so much about loving others unconditionally.

There's a song that I basically played on repeat when things were hard, when I was spending quiet time with God or when I needed a reminder on why I had chosen to serve in Bolivia. Love never fails by Brandon Heath challenged me to love with everything in me and with all the love God could give me. It has helped comfort me now as I'm far from my kids to know that even though I can't be near to listen, encourage or love my kids, God will never fail them and will alway be with them. And so until I am blessed to be with my children again or until Jesus comes back, this song reminds me of the love that I have for my kids but also of how much Jesus loves each of us and each one of my kids.


                                                                 Love is not proud

Love does not boast 

Love after all matters the most

Love does not run

Love does not hide

Love does keep locked inside

Love is the river that flows through

Love never fails you

Love will sustain 

Love will provide 

Love will not cease at the end of time

Love will protect

Love always hopes

Love still believes when you don't

Love is the arms that are holding you

Love never fails you

When my heart won't make a sound

When I can't turn back around

When the sky is falling down

Nothing is great than this

Greater than this

Love is right here

Love is alive

Love is the way

The truth the life

Love is the river that flows through

Love is the arms that are holding you

Love is the place you will fly to

Love never fails you

Happy birthday, with love

Birthdays are something that I always get ridiculously excited about. This year was no exception. My birthday, May 4, finally arrived and landed on my day off so it was a twice as special day.

The week before my birthday though, I moved from la casa de frutas where I've been living for the past 8 months to la casa de cereales because the two sm's who were in that house returned home.
The switch happened rather quickly as I went to a house of 10 to a house of 9, from there being four volunteers being in the house to two and from living above the cafeteria that was extremely hot to the house that backed up to the jungle.
Because we can open our backdoor and take ten steps and be surrounded by jungle, that also means that we share our house with jungle life.

My birthday morning rolled around and as I was sitting in the living room with all my girls having personal worship time, one of my girls called my attention to the víbora that was making its way up the inside of our thatched roof to the main beam. It was above my room and since the divider walls don't go all the way to the ceiling, it was easy to see the white snake making its way to the highest beam. I think I'd disturbed his sleep by turning on the lights so early in the morning.
It was a pretty long white snake and Alejandro remarked that he hated to kill it once he'd been summoned to extract it. Maybe I don't appreciate God's snakes like I should but I didn't care what happened as long as that snake ended up dead. Alejandro shimmied up the wooden post, machete in hand and killed it but not before he successfully lodged it in between the thatched roof so we currently have a dead snake still in our roof. We'll see how long it takes to decompose.

Since it was my day off, I went to town and was able to connect with most of my family and wish my little brother a happy birthday as well since we're birthday twins but he's 4 years younger. The two other volunteers that I was with on my day off surprised me by buying me a brownie, tall glittery gold candles which they stuck in my brownie and lit as they sang cumpleaños feliz. In true Bolivian style, one of the candles broke as they were singing but it wasn't catching anything on fire so we let it be. It was really sweet of them to do those things to celebrate my birthday.

Once I got back to the mission, I dropped my backpack off at the nearest house and braced myself as I saw eight of my boys running towards me yelling, "es el cumpleaños de la teacher Kaylie!". I tried my best to fight as they grabbed my arms and legs and started making their way towards the river but we all knew it was useless to fight. Still, it made it more fun that way and I almost escaped twice from their grasp. Once we got to the ledge that dropped into the creek, I gave up struggling and instead latched onto a victim to bring with me into the creek. That poor victim was Kevin who wasn't fast enough to get out of the way and over the edge and into the murky water we went followed by my daughter Eva who had promised that she would go in the creek with me when my birthday came.
We all emerged from the water dripping and laughing.

That whole evening I was surprised with cards, hugs, kisses and "te quiero"s or "I love you!"s from the kids.
I felt so loved and it reminded me of the verse I had just committed to that morning in my personal worship - Hebrews 6:10 "Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true."
I read that verse and it reminded me again why I am here at Familia Feliz and what my purpose is here in this world; to love others unconditionally. Though sometimes my attempt to love others has been rejected, thrown back in my face and taken advantage of, I always know that those who live in love live in God and God lives in them for God is love. (1 John 4:16)
So as I turned 24 (I know, I still can't believe it.), I purposed that I want to love with everything that I have and with all the love God can give me. I want to experience God's love on a deeper level and show others how much God loves them and how much He wants a personal relationship with each person.
It's so simple.
God is love.

Who's the Fool?

April fools day is always something looked forward to at my house. My brother and I make secret plans to fool each other and our parents and we have come up with some great pranks in years past.
As April approached this year, I determined that this year should be no different than years past. I would find a victim - someone who was just asking to be pranked. That someone happened to be Kevin.
Kevin is my 9th grade student. He's pretty smart and always joking around and laughing at me. The only problem is that April fools isn't celebrated here and no one knows what it is. With careful planning, I casually told him about April fools a month in advanced then warned him that any prank was possible on that day to anyone. He squinted his eyes at me and told me he would be ready. I reminded him about it the day before April just in case he had forgotten but to my satisfaction, he had not and was looking forward to it. Good.
April 1st was on Sabbath and as it happened, it was my houses sabbath to be in the kitchen. Each house has a rotation where we have to make the food for that Sabbath. Everything is already precooked  the day before like the rice, beans and tortillas but the breakfast food, Mosley (which is like oatmeal mixed with soy milk and bits of fruit - it's what we have every sabbath) just needs to be mixed together and cooked. I guess we follow more closely the Israelite tradition of not cooking on the Sabbath but that's because it's a lot of work starting the fire and cooking everything.
Anyways,the volunteers in my house and I decided to pull a prank and dye the Mosley pink. However, it didn't really work out because everyone just thought we used leche de frutilla (strawberry milk) to flavor the Mosley so almost no one got the joke.
Although that joke was a bust, I had been scheming for a month on what joke I should pull on Kevin and had finally arrived at a simple solution: toothpaste in Oreos. The only mistake that I made was that I should not have removed all the cream inside but added the toothpaste on top of the cream. I didn't however and so the cookie was a little more squishy than normal. Kevin picked up on it right away when I offered him and Oreo and said he was going to split his Oreo with Jesús.
That's when I knew my joke was foiled and when he broke the cookie, he could clearly tell that there was toothpaste instead of cream inside. Bummer.
With that he rubbed the Oreo and toothpaste in my face then ran off laughing. By the time I came back after washing my face off, Jesús had given his broken part of the cookie to one of the girls and had convinced her to eat it which she did then quickly spit it out. So one person got pranked at least.
At that moment,one of the other boys came over, Jahel, and asked what the noise was so I offered him a cookie. He was suspicious too, looked inside, saw that it had toothpaste and began to happily eat it. Turns out, he's one of those kids who likes to eat toothpaste. Two of my girls will eat toothpaste so we have to keep it for them and only let them use a little each time they want to brush their teeth. So April fools had an interesting turn of events and while no prank was actually successful, it was still a fun day.

. . . . .

I haven't hit the "oh my word! I'm going to leave soon! I don't want to! Going away will be the worst!" Stage yet but I am starting to stay awake longer thinking about what I can do for these kids in the last 39 days that I have here.

Spring break, Semana Santa, was last week and I had half the week off with a group of people then the last part of the week, the other half of the volunteers had off. Almost everyone who had their time off the first part of the week went to La Paz but I stayed here and was content with going to town every so often to talk to my family. I arrived back on campus after being gone the whole day and was met by all my girls who didn't go home for spring break, running out to meet me and giving me hugs. It was like I had returned from a long vacation instead of just seven hours in town. I am starting to realize that I just might miss a little bit of everything when I leave.

It's been a while since I posted, I know. So many things have happened and taken place but through the ups and downs, the trails and the victories I can still say that God is faithful and constant. He loves us with a love beyond what we are able to imagine! And this adventure that God has brought me on in Bolivia has revealed to me more of His unfathomable love.

Figuring it Out

"Turn off the light when you leave a room."
"Did you wash your hands with soap?"
"Speak slower so that I can understand you, please."

I have said these phrases and other similar ones more times than I can count within the last month since school started back. I'm starting to sound like a parent and since there are nine girls ages 7-15 in my house, I think I've started acting like a parent too even though at times I slip back to my "resisting adulthood" self by playing in the rain and having water fights.
It's been a long lesson to learn but I am figuring out that being in charge of a family means finding the balance between just loving and loving but still disciplining.
I don't like disciplining. I don't like giving punishments when my girls don't listen or look at me in defiance and challenge my instructions. But when they tell me no when I ask them to do their chores or choose to do exactly what I told them not to do, I have to correct them because I love them and want them to learn to obey in order to give them a better life down the road.

I use to always dislike verses in the Bible like, "The Lord loves those He corrects and "Spare the rod and spoil the child" but I now completely agree with them. It's because I care so much about them that I try to correct their behavior.
I don't like how adult-like this post is sounding or how my blogs are more serious and less stories but being a student missionary has changed me. I'm still figuring out what those changes are and trying to sift through what changes that I want to keep that are positive and which changes I want to throw out. And although I am changing and being stretched beyond what is comfortable I am growing. I just pray that I am growing more towards the person God wants me to be and that this experience as a student missionary will only help me grow closer to God and my relationship with Him.

Something that I have noticed in the last two weeks is that I've finally reached the point where I have won the confidence of some of my students and the girls that I live with. It took a long time, excruciatingly long to the point that I wondered if everything I was doing for them was going unnoticed but I've formed deep relationships with them and only within the last few weeks have I started to see the results. They confide in me their fears, boy problems, what they're scared about and will walk with me to class and tell me about how they are feeling. I feel so privileged to have just gotten to this point with them and although it's taken seven months to reach this point, I think it's been worth the wait.

Short and blistered

Sunday mornings are now our service days. We go cut other people's grass, we pick up trash along the road (did that in the pouring rain a couple sundays ago but it made some pretty good memories) and most recently, my older girls went out to machete the banana grove. We tried to machete it every so often last semester but when vacation came, we let it grow and worked on cutting the grass around the mission. Because of that, the grass was taller than my head! My four girls that I had brought with me didn't seem daunted by the task in front of them but began to hack their way into everything, machetes swinging, grass flying and blisters forming. Well, I was the only one who got blisters since i hadn't macheted for a month and my hands had turned soft again but I discovered something, i'm not a terrible machetier any more. I'm actually cutting things when I swing instead of hacking at the same patch of grass over and over again. My girls said I had improved a lot and the only thing I could do to improve would be to keep my body still and just swing my arm as I worked. Yay for trying new things, practicing for months and finally succeeding! Next thing to accomplish, learning to swing an ax successfully.

One, Two, Three - Time to Read

My schedule is a little bit of everything since I teach 6th grade every Monday, teach three different English classes and two 5th grade classes.
There were only three rambunctious boys in my fifth grade classes until last week when one of my girls was moved from 7th to 5th grade. She's older than the boys in her class but she can't read or write. Because of this she will probably not pass her classes although she can copy everything written on the board but not understand what she's writing. Besides my Social Studies class that I have with 5th grade I also have a reinforcement class also known as an hour to study and do homework or study for quizzes or tests. Come last Monday, during the study hour I had Zulma pull up a chair and sit next to me as we went through the alphabet. I have zero experience with teaching someone how to read but I decided that my trying to help her was better than doing nothing at all.
Last year in college I took a class on how to help struggling readers who had fallen behind but the kids always knew the basics and I didn't have to start from scratch like I'm doing with Zulma. Luckily, it's Spanish that I am trying to teach so I don't have to worry about teaching the letter names and the sound or having her memorize site words.
We went over the alphabet sounds and she knew almost all of them so that was encouraging.
Next time together she learned her vowel sounds and what a vowel sound then we started to blend two letter words together. Turns out, I don't know a lot of two letter Spanish words but it's ok.

I'm excited for her to learn and although right now her motivation for learning to read is because she does not want to be embarrassed in her classes, I hope she'll eventually find a passion for reading and spend every minute that she has expanding her mind, exploring new worlds and imagining and creating different images when she picks up a book.

.......

Not to be dramatic or anything but I had it in my mind to pack up and go home after one of the girls from Wiemar told me that they'd seen a flying snake in the jungle while the group heading to the zip line tour. I've seen those nature videos about those snakes that can glide from tree to tree but when I learned that they are literally living within twenty minutes of me I had to calm myself down and ask twenty or so children if they'd ever seen a flying snake and after 19 no's and 1 yes, I felt more at peace. Still, there seems to have been an uprising in snakes recently. After 5 months I'd only seen one dead snake but within these last two months I've killed a snake, seen a baby boa and there's been two bigger ones in Miguel's house that have been found hiding out. The day I find a snake living in my upper story house is the day where I will really weigh my necessity to be here against my fear of snakes.