Laurier Advance team leaves hearts in Bolivia

Laurier team left Bolivia on Thursday Jan 25, 2007.
As was mentioned at our farewell dinner to our Bolivian hosts, "We may easily leave our hearts behind." There will be a few more blog entries over the next 10 days to complete some of the stories of our incredible experience.

(Profiles written about three young missionaries are the focus of this posting. See story below.)


A surprize at Santa Cruz Airport ... 2 taxis


Viviana takes the Laurier Team on a tour of the Santa Cruz Plaza

Young People put their Christian faith into Action!!

Missionary work can be performed regardless of age, as three young people encountered by the Laurier Heights advance team proved. At this stage in their lives all three are volunteers who want to put their Christian faith in action.

Two of the young people are Bolivian and one is a Canadian. All are in their early 20s. The advance team met Mabel Libni Benavidez Maranon (Benavidez) in the first week when she attended the team’s meeting with OBADES, the Bolivian Baptist Union equivalent of the Sharing Way (see previous story on this blog) and she also was at the children's fiesta at the Casa de La Amistad to act as an interpreter. (See the blog entry "A Big Party")

The team encountered Chris Mager, from Richmond B.C. Canada on their first Sunday at First Baptist Church (Calama) in Cochabamba. He accompanied the team on its visit to the Baptist Theological School, where he stays in the residence. Mager also helped us paint at the Casa one morning and attended our farewell dinner.

Viviana Claure Veizaga (Claure) appeared unexpectedly on the last day as the team was leaving Bolivia. She rescued us from 10 hours in a strange city with our limited ability to communicate in Spanish. The team’s first leg from Cochabamba back to Edmonton was a 45 minute hop to Santa Cruz. The schedule had us arriving about 1 p.m. and leaving just before midnight. We had to change airports and either sit there bored, or find lockers to store our baggage and then take taxis back downtown. Instead, to our delight and astonishment, an engaging young Bolivian woman approached us and asked us if we were Canadian....in English!. It turned out that after we were in the air Emigdio Veizaga, one of the two principal coordinators of our trip in Bolivia, had phoned his granddaughter who was on a vacation break in Santa Cruz and asked her to meet us. She did. Not only did she facilitate the change in airports, she arrived with two taxi's and took us to a church in central Santa Cruz to store our belongings securely. She then took us to a great place for lunch where we met her Aunt and another friend who lives in Santa Cruz. Lunch was followed by a grand walking tour of the city’s main plaza and the surrounding area. (See two photos above)

Volunteering in order to make a difference for kids

Mabel Libni Benavidez Maranon has lead a comfortable life, but says she volunteered with the Jireh program (one of Laurier’s two focal points) because she wanted to feel useful.

“My family has everything,” she says, “not that we are rich.” However, her life is still a big contrast to the children she works with as a volunteer. They live and earn their keep on the streets, primarily shining shoes.

It was her father who referred the Jireh program to her. When confronted with the suggestion that many fathers might consider working a project aimed an inner city street children too risky for their daughters, Benavidez reacted with surprise. “I’m never scared,” she says.

She has found that street children do not trust people easily, but she has earned their trust and many tell her their troubles. She takes their problems to Jireh director Tomas Gabriel Huiza and they act as a team in their attempts to find solutions.

She likes working with Gabriel calling him a “good man”. Further, she observes that, “Tomas is like a second father to them. He is very nice.”

Gabriel is taking public accounting in university at Cochabamba. Public accounting could lead to jobs with the civil service or with non-governmental agencies. She intends to keep volunteering to make a difference where she can.

Encountering the challenges of cross-cultural ministry

His Christian faith is providing Canadian Chris Mager with an opportunity to pursue his interest in different countries and cross-cultural encounters.

“There is nothing more rewarding that hearing God’s word and following it. If you are thinking about going to different countries and cross-cultural settings, it is really exciting and worthwhile,” Mager says.

Cochabamba is his second mission experience. In his first year out of high school he attended a short term mission in Guatamala where he learned “a bunch of Spanish” and fell in love with Latin America. The experience gave him a head start in his current one year placement in Cochabamba. He has over 10 months left before he returns to Canada.

Sometimes living in a different country can be challenging, Mager acknowledges, but he does not think courage is an issue. “I’ve never thought about it that way. Maybe I’m more ignorant than scared,” he reflects modestly.

Canadian missionary Terry Janke is Mager’s mentor in Bolivia and Mager appreciates the opportunity to shadow an experienced missionary. He says he is learning the language and seeing how the Gospel is delivered in a different culture.

“I’m growing closer to God in an amazing way,” he says.

Mager’s placement is part of his four year program in Intercultural Studies at the Columbia Bible College located at Abbotsford, B.C., the same institution attended by Laurier member, Alex Wiens. (The two don’t know each other.) The third year of the program is a field placement designed to give students experience in the field. In the long run Mager would like to be a long term missionary and he would like to train local leaders around the world.

If people want to share his experiences, Mager invites them to look at his blog at: www.xanga.com/cloudedjourney.

Scramble needed to meet need of kids in jail
The passion to serve has been passed down the generations. Viviana Claure Veizaga, granddaughter of Emigdio Veizaga, and fourth year Medical student in La Paz shares her grand father's concern for social justice. She related the following story over lunch in Santa Cruz with the Laurier team.

Just before Christmas in 2006, Viviana hoped to provide relief from jail for a few children living with their parents in a large crowded La Paz prison, but instead found herself in a mad scramble to meet an unexpected response.

Claure was aware of the Casa de La Amistad program in Cochabamba, one of the two focal projects for the Laurier Heights Baptist Church Bolivian partnership. She regretted there was no similar project for prisons in La Paz and so decided, of her own volition, to run something similar to a vacation Bible school for children living with their parents in a prison in La Paz. The children themselves are not accused nor convicted of any crime and in fact their parents might be still awaiting trial and not yet convicted either.

Claure delivered 70 invitations to a seemingly disinterested staff member at the prison and Claure expected she and two other volunteers would easily deal with a handful of children. Instead 170 turned up the first day putting Claure’s well intention plans into near chaos. She had to deal with a surprised bureaucracy inside the jail which stated she had not issued her invitations in a proper manner. Claure apologized and promised to do things right in the future.

On the first day there were moments of panic when a boy in a wheelchair kept yelling that his brother was lost, but eventually it was found the brother had simply gone on ahead.

Even though she recruited four more helpers, it was clear she could not cope with 170 children and so told them only girls could return one day and boys the next. She also went to the Canadian Baptist Institute in La Paz to borrow school space.

Word was out in the jail that presents would be given out on the final day and 230 children showed up. She was thankful that she and her friends had obtained 250 small toys just in case some extra kids might arrived.

The experience might overwhelm some volunteers, but not Claure. She scrambled to find the space, the extra volunteers and the food and drinks to make the children's time special and memorable. When she returns to La Paz she hopes to run a “happy hour” on Saturdays for the same children. Claure also hopes to work with children in her future career. When she completes her fourth year of medicine she wants to specialize in pediatrics.