Oops

Well, I would like to start this blog by saying that I accidently left my last blog in draft form and didn't actually publish it - sorry about that, just in case some of you thought that I had been eaten alive by some kind of monster unique to Bolivia. On that note, this week I saw my first snake in El Alfarero! It was a green one, so it wasn't poisonous, but it was cool! It was slithering across a bush. On another interesting cultural note, I have eaten two new things: sopa de pata de pollo (chicken foot soup) and sopa de nervios (nerves soup). The figure is... the soup that comes with the chickens foot is amazing, the chicken foot less so. Its just really skin and cartilidge on the bones, so its not particularly tasty. Nerves soup was a different matter: its a soup made of the juices of cows feet with all the nerves still attached to them, with the foot left in the soup and a couple of onions added. Its not that great, and frankly made me want to vomit a little bit, but I ate it all up like a good missionary! Apparently its extremely nutrisious because its such an intense dose of calcium, but that does also mean that it made me incredibely sleepy.

Interesting news from Bolivia land is that we have two visiting teams at the moment, a DTS outreach team from England (Marjolein, I love you, you're the best person in the whole wild world!) and a team from a school of counselling in Chile. I helped Gabi make majadito (ricey meaty cruceño speciality) for the dts team today - I fried the bananas, which is always fun. It is also always nice to have a few more people around who speak English!

Its been another week of going to the dentist, probably the most traumatising experienc was having to sit with one of the girls through what looked like an extremely painful root canal, which still remains unfinished due to the complication that are added because of her pregancy. I feel like I'm beginning to know slightly more what I'm doing when I help Sergio, which always helps to make me feel like less of an idiot. Occassionaly I even know what he wants before he asks for it! But that doesn't happen that often.

Sandra and I did have one really bad day last week when Salustio and Yany left for the day. Not only did the water cut off the evening before so that we had to go to the neighbours to collect water in buckets to wash, but the girls where a total nightmare the next day. They were filled with the most unbelievable laziness which is always quite difficult to snap them out of, especially when I know that it only seems to come on when Yani is not there... Funny that. They started to get extremely mouth, and after managing to go almost four months in the home without this happening, one of the girls made me cry. Still, I think that four months is a sign of some level of strength of mind, as they do have a habit of saying reasonably horrible things when it takes there fancy. But I still believe that love is something that goes beyond all the horrible things a person can say or do, I still have huge amounts of compassion for my girls: who knows what my character would be like if I had grown up in the same situations that they have. She asked my forgiveness the next day (with a tiny bit of coersion!) and we are certainly friends again - at least until the next time she loses her temper.

The rains have started in a major way here: its making me glad that I decided to fly to Peru instead of get the bus, as it seems that all of the bridges on the moterways to Cochabamba have fallen down, and a similar situation on the way to La Paz! My room-mate just travelled to Oruru (another department of Bolivia) and they were waiting for a full day on the side of a river with no way to cross, and no way of getting anything to eat. Being here makes me realise how incredibely destructive that rain can be, but it does always amuse me that even the slightest amount of rain seems to make life stop, and no one leaves their homes!

Yani and Salustio went to visit a few of the girls who have left the home recently. Yani told me that when she went to visit the girl who was smuggling drugs into the home (to give her her 'libretta' the sheet proving that she passed the year of school), she was so angry that she couldn't even look at her, just gave her her sheet and left. However, the good news is that she is still living with her mother, and has not left to go to the street. They also went to visit the young girl who was living at the home with her son, again good news, as she is still living with her grandmother. There have been conflicts between her and her aunts, but her son appears well cared for. One of the other girls who left in the middle of the drugs scandal, is attending the church of an English minister who used to be the director of the home, which is great as it means that she's still staying in contact with the ministry. However, the location of the last girl who left, as I mentioned before, is still a ministry. One of our neighbours thought that he saw her in San Jose (the village we live in), but her family are following some kind of a lead to try and find her in Cochabamba.

Well, thanks for thinking about me enough to have kept reading this blog after being out of the country for four months! I hope that you are all still praying for me and for all the people we work with her in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.