And So Ends December

Christmas time has come and gone so here's a "quick" catch up on what happened leading up to the new year.

With 8 days to go till Christmas, we decided to have our Sabbath vespers at the Amazon river. It's quickly becoming my favorite place to be at dusk because as the sun slides over the mountains, pinks, purples and oranges from the sun reflect off of the river and make the view breathtaking. As we packed the twenty of us into the back of the truck and set off on our twenty minute ride to the town/river, Pablo, Kevin and Jonathan pulled out their ukuleles and began to strum You Are Holy, All In All and a couple other songs. I sang along in English since I don't know many of the words in Spanish yet, Angelica sang in Spanish and Audrey followed along in French. We couldn't hear each others voices very well over the noise of the truck but it was still pretty amazing to be praising God in three different languages together.

In other news I almost blended a cockroach into everyone's peanut butter when it was my day to make food. I put the toasted peanuts, sugar and water into the blender and turned it on but nothing happened. Then I realized that I needed to make sure the lid was securely on before the motor would start so as I tightened it, I absentmindedly looked inside the blender and was startled to see a cockroach trying to crawl it's way to the top of the toasted peanuts. The cockroach was quickly scooped out of the blender and squashed by my flip flop then I started the blender and made what I think was the best tasting batch of peanut butter I've made so far. As far as I know, no one saw me remove the insect so no one knows that they almost had crunchy peanut butter for breakfast that day.

Speaking of food, Miguel really wanted cookies this past week and so he splurged and bought ingredients to make three different types of cookies. There were oatmeal cookies, peanut butter cookies and sugar cookies. That was fun because we always make sugar cookies each year at my house so I still got to bring a tad bit of my family's Christmas tradition to Bolivia. Usually we decorate the sugar cookies on Christmas Eve at my home and I leave the best decorated one out for Santa to eat (aka: my dad) but we don't have frosting here so I was content with just making the batch of sugar cookies. Turns out, I'm actually pretty good at making cookies which is a relief because when I'm in the kitchen I either burn the rice, spoil the cereal or make lumpy pancakes. Yay! Kaylie can successfully make cookies! Anyways, Sabbath morning we had sugar cookies for breakfast, oatmeal cookies for lunch and the peanut butter cookies for supper. Cookies for breakfast. Mmmm! Seems like the holidays to me.

This was my 4th Christmas's away from home and it hasn't gotten any easier for me to be away from my family. However, Christmas Eve was Sabbath and our director, Miguel gave a sermon that really changed the way I see spending Christmas away from home. The heart of his message said that when we're away from our families, when things are at their toughest and it feels like no one cares and when it feels like we're all alone, we're not because God is with us - Emmanuel. It's so simple. It's just one of the many names that God has but it helped my homesickness and comforted me. God is with us - Emmanuel

Christmas Day all of us went to the hospital in town to sing to the patience and hand out Christmas cards. Rurrenabaque is a small town and it turns out that hardly anyone wanted to be in the hospital for Christmas so we went to the two rooms that had patience and sang to the four people there. Once we were done we made an hour stop at an Internet cafe/ restaurant to connect to wifi and talk to our families. It didn't feel like I got to talk to my family long enough but I was just praising God that the Internet was good enough for me to actually hear and see the faces of my parents and siblings. The rest of the day was spent at the mission preparing supper. Since I didn't feel like putting out a fire, I opted to wash dishes instead of cook a dish for our Christmas dinner. We were running on true Bolivian time and ate at 7:15 instead of our planned 6pm. However the food was delicious and Kevin even made peach cobbler from precious peaches Miguel had bought in town. (I realize I am writing a lot about food but eating anything aside from the regular beans and rice is exciting.)

Moving on, last Thursday Josh taught me how to drive the tractor. It's been on my list of things to learn here and I finally learned! I'd usually settle for one accomplishment but I had another opportunity to do something later that night. I was just about to have evening worship with my girls when Kevin called me downstairs to kill a snake that was in the room of one of the girls who's visiting for a bit, Ashanna. Kevin's going to be a zoologist and doesn't like to kill anything so I decided to be brave and kill it. I grabbed a machete but all courage failed me when I saw the black snake with brown rings frozen in place against the wall in the bedroom. It wasn't large but it wasn't small and it definitely was poisonous. I put on some rubber boots just to be safe and Kevin left the room claiming he couldn't watch me kill it while Ashanna watched the action from the safety of her bed. I aimed my machete above the snakes head and naturally missed it when I swung. The snake was startled and so was I so I began to frantically hack at it, the snake was withering, Ashanna was screaming and blood was squirting. Before I could hack it to 1,000 pieces though, Kevin scooped it up and threw it out into the jungle. It was definitely deader than dead though. I learned to drive a tractor and I killed my first snake. Not a bad day.