Medin Johnson - Short Term Missions Trip to Boliva

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Medin Johnson - Short Term Missions trip to Bolivia, Nov 20-Dec 6, 2008

Here are some photos from my trip. Click any of them for a closer look and use your browser's back button to return.

It was great to have Mom along for
the trip to El Jordán this year.

Several of the girls at El Jordán made this sign to welcome me back and hung it in the kitchen, where it stayed for my entire visit. What great friends!


I soon took over the kitchen and filled it with ingredients, dough, and the smell of baking cookies.	Mom was good help and great company in the kitchen for the week she was able to stay.

Mom helped out by holding and entertaining this little guy one evening while we waited with other kids and volunteers for the Moms to get out of their class.

I didn’t have to worry about being short handed after Mom left, Norman and Caleb were more than happy to step in and help out.

This was my 8th year of baking cookies at El Jordán, so the system is pretty well organized now. The baked cookies are stored in Ziploc bags and lined up one kind after another down the length of a table with more recent batches stacked behind those baked earlier. Then I can just walk down the line, putting some of each kind on the tray and then wrap it up using the box of plastic wrap on the far end. Then the wrapped trays go on another table, bows and thank you cards are added, and off they go to brighten somebody’s day!

Doesn’t that tray look good? I love doing a fun variety, but I stick with pretty easy cookies. I don’t have time for fancy decorative ones.

This year Tuesday was Banana day. El Jordán would buy a large quantity of bananas from someone who sells them to vendors and then sell them to El Jordán's students at cost. This gives the students something like a 70% or 80% discount and ensures that their kids are getting some healthy food. You may also notice a big blue bowl of mangos on the counter. That is just a few of those that we simply picked up off the ground on a trip out to a place in the country that abounded with fruit trees. I think the students each got to take some home for free.

I hadn’t seen the painting class at El Jordán before, but it was well attended
this year. Some students were painting pictures on canvas and others painted traced out designs on fabric. It looked like a lot of fun and some of them
showed pretty good talent.

I went upstairs after chapel on Thursday night and found the younger kids enjoying a snack under this make-shift tent. It looks like a lot of fun to me!

This was the scene in El Torno when Corina and I stopped for lunch on the way to visit some boy’s homes one Sunday. The road all the way through town was under construction and the shoulders had simply been cut away so that a wider road could be built at a lower level. There were no cones or barriers to discourage the two way traffic from inadvertently driving off the edge of the narrow, elevated strip of road. We made sure to finish our visiting and drive back through town before nightfall so we wouldn’t have to navigate it in the dark.

Here are some of the boys from Cristo Viene Niños, the younger boys’ home, that we visited. Corina passed out framed photos of the boys that had been taken by a visiting mission team on an earlier visit and we gave them a big tray of cookies. I wanted to take pictures at Hogar Nacer, the older boys’ home I visit every year, but my camera batteries died before we got there and I had left my extra batteries back at El Jordán.

This was taken on my last day at El Jordán. Nela, one of the students, asked me to have my picture taken with her and her kids. I’m glad I can be an encouragement to people like Nela. I know they have a much harder life than I do and I admire their effort to change.

I love spending time in the courtyard at about 6:00 when the kids come downstairs to wait for the last few minutes as their moms get out of class and then come to take them home. It’s a good time to get to know some of the people and to take fun pictures.

Corina, Jenny, Heidi, and Julie all served as hostesses and took very good care of me and Mom while we were in Bolivia. We had a lot of fun together and it was always relaxing to spend some of the evening chatting in English after a day of trying to communicate in Spanish. We helped, prayed for, and encouraged one another on a daily basis. (Marco was great too and also spent quite a bit of time with us, but he somehow managed to escape being in most of my pictures.)

Gift Plaque for 8 years of service My friends at El Jordán usually give me a thank you gift each year. This year it was this beautiful little plaque thanking me for my “dedication, help, and selfless labor”. I still think I should be the one thanking them for giving me the blessing of being there and joining in their ministry.