A Life Full of Ironies

Life in Bolvia has been full of ironies lately. For instance, we arrived here last Wednesday after having to spend an entire night and day in Miami because our flight from Philadelphia was delayed. One would have thought we would have been immensely bored out of our minds waiting for our plane to leave on Tuesday night at 11 PM since we arrived in Miami at 2 in the morning on Tuesday. However, we actually had ourselves a little mini-vacation day relaxing in our hotel room until they kicked us out at noon, getting checked in at the airport and then leaving by taxi for a day at Bayside (apparently one of the must-sees in Miami). We enjoyed a hearty meal at Hard Rock Café at nearly 3 in the afternoon, and afterwards took a “romantic” (if you can call it that) walk near the shore of the ocean and visited the mall right along the coast. So, our day in Miami turned out to be a blessing and not a curse.
On Sunday we all went to church with our host families. My family goes to church a couple blocks away and my host parents’ son is the pastor there. Guess what the first verse we studied was? Our team’s theme verse, I Peter 3:15! Then, we sang a bunch of songs in Spanish and guess what one of the songs was? “Take me into the holy of holies” one of our favorite songs from training at HDC! Later that night we returned for the actual sermon part of the service and guess what was one of the verses that the pastor read? One of only 2 that my Spanish class at HDC was required to memorize in Spanish! Do you think all of these things are just coincidence? I refuse to believe so!
Another complete irony is the fact that last night we celebrated American Thanksgiving with a bunch of Canadians in Bolivia. Go figure. The meal and fellowship was great….and the time in the pool at Chuck and Cindy’s (our outreach coordinators) house after the meal was pretty decent too, especially since it was like 100 degrees Fahrenheit all day. Speaking of Fahrenheit that is one thing that really ticks me off….we Americans are the only people in the entire world that use it! It’s very inconvenient, just like it’s inconvenient that we have to throw our used toilet paper in a trash can here instead of the toilet, I mean it’s called toilet paper for a reason, right? Anyhow, it’s time for me to sign off for the week. The tolls for the internet café are slowly adding up. Until next time, ciao!
In Him,Rachel, for the team
P.S. Sorry there's no pictures yet...haven't quite figured it out or had time to look into it yet since we rely on internet cafes.

Life at HDC before chaos

Greetings to all of our devoted readers!
This is our second attempt at creating our first post. We are currently in Harrisburg, PA, where we have been training for the past 2 months and have now entered into a short time of training specific to our team. This includes interaction with the wonderful, amazing, totally rockin' returning Bolivia YES team. This time has been much appreciated in our preparation for outreach.
As we are beginner bloggers, we welcome any comments/insights/suggestions you may have to offer concerning our blog site. We will try to keep this site updated once a week.
Blessings to you all and thank you for your prayers and support during this time. We hope you enjoy our posts and pictures. We love you all! :)