Pictures and Stuff

Wonderful welcome to the country!


The ice cream was awesome!!



The pigeons were huge!


Those orange fruits they look like oranges, smell like tangarenes, but they're lemons.

So much cement!


Taxi's and chickens all in one place.

The last day for the awesome ice cream.

This took a lot longer than I thought it would to get up and with only a couple of my pictures. I tried to pick some of the good ones. There are more pictures if I get them fixed up a little, the ones at night didn't turn out right, then I'll put some more up.

¡Mary! ¡En Vivo de Bolivia¡

¡Hola! ¡Hola! Mary here, reporting live from Bolivia. i´ve had another great trip here in Montero. We´ve been working with great gusto at the Cruz Roja (Red Cross) Clinic performing incredible feats of manual labor. You may have to see the pictures to believe what all has been accomplished in just a couple of weeks. Sand, bricks, cement, rebar, mountains -- you name it, we moved it.

As always, the food is fantastic. My favorite has been the fried piña.... mmmm.... so good!

It is also a joy to see old friends from the trips in the past. Esneida and Franklin are well and living in Santa Cruz. Esneida had another little boy, Jose, in December and he is muy guapo. and little Daniel is also good looking and loves to play paper, rock, scissors. His uncle Daniel is done with school and working at Villa Cochabamba full-time. He and Armando have been translators at the Clinic and have been a great help there. Olga came to our farewell dinner last night and says hello to Olivia.

The time here has flown by again for me, and we´ll be leaving tonight for Miami. Goodbye fried piña, motorcycle taxis, and buckets of sand!

Final Day

Hey people it´s the last day here in Montero. We leave sometime around 11 tonight. I am so glad that I can sleep on the plane. Doing some mental math I think if there aren´t a whole lot of delays then we should be back home around 9 or 9:30. But that´s without delays and on our way here the plane was delayed almost five hours so who knows whats going to happen this time.

I still have a lot of packing to do.Thankfully I can leave a lot of stuff here. Some shirts and snacks and some other stuff too. I really should have started all this stuff yesterday, but there was so much stuff going on that I got a tad bit lazy and didn´t start.

Now that the trip is almost over it doesn´t really feel like we´ve been here for two weeks. It feels shorter, but I suppose it´s like that with every trip.

No matter how much fun I´ve had on this trip I can´t wait to see home again. I miss home.

Breif Update

Back to work after a breif weekend. Mixing cement and hauling more sand. That´s about all we´ve been doing at the work cite.

Sunday was all about catching up on some sleep. That worked out quite well. I slept through breakfast, woke up to hear Eric preach then went back to sleep till sometime in the afternoon. In the afternoon some of us went to the orphanage. I made a new friend there, she is so sweet! I was able to hand out some of the candy and stuff that I brought with me.

It´s kind of amazing to think that there are only a couple of days left here. Just three more days and we´ll be headed home.

News from the Clinic

Team change for me. I ended up working with the medical team while I was a little bit sick and now I think I am going to switch for good. I love working at the Red Cross and working with the people on the building team but I also really like working with people here at the clinic. When I say here I literally mean here; I am trying to type this on one of the computers at the clinic. I haven't been doing anything to complicated here, just some eye tests and handing out eye drops and bibles and a little bit of candy.

The working team has been working on more painting, hauling, laying bricks, re barring, and building a roof. I do miss working with them. I liked working on the re bar even if I did get a couple of scratches from the wires. They may be coming to the clinic sometime this afternoon just to see. That ought to be interesting.

Looking forward to tomorrow; we're going to Santa Cruz to do a little shopping. I'll be looking for some souvenirs and some other stuff for other peoples. So to my friend that I told I would get her a postcard I shall look for one.

One more thing we, meaning all of us, went to an orphanage to play some basketball. I didn't actually play, because I can't play to save my life. I did take a lot of pictures though. With a little bit of editing the pictures should turn out pretty well. Going over there was a lot of fun. I was glad to see that the girl there enjoyed playing and some of the things we brought with us.