My college didn’t have a study abroad program; we did missions abroad. The new campus pastor began Missionary Internship Service (MIS), with teams going along with faculty or staff members to foreign missions. Soccer or basketball teams, musical teams, puppet teams all dispersed for a short-term summer mission experience. I felt called to missions, and I wanted very much to work with John and Opal, a couple working in Bolivia whom I'd met through my church and with whom I’d begun a correspondence. So I began trying to raise funds, as any missionary would, to get to Santa Cruz during the summer between my junior and senior years. Here is a salient fact about my parents: they hated to say no to anything my brother or I wanted, even if they didn’t want us to do them or to have them. When I fell short of the money I needed for five weeks in Bolivia with missionaries my church supported, my mother held a garage sale, with all the proceeds going toward my plane ticket. John and Opal, not young by then, had made a life for themselves in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. They had an orphanage just outside of the city, and Opal taught English at a local college to help make ends meet. They worked with another free agent couple, a woman who had married a Bolivian and lived in the city. I flew—my first-ever airplane ride—with another student who was headed to Cochabamba to do her student teaching. We went from Cleveland to Miami, where we met up with another student teacher. After a long layover that included a trip to downtown Miami, we flew to La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia. I was dazzled, completely prepared to dismiss the airline’s loudspeaker warning of thin air and going slowly to adjust to the high altitude. Then I saw the stewardesses sitting in the back of the plane with oxygen masks on, and reconsidered. This was not Vermont and I was not Julie Andrews singing across the tarmack. We were at 11,975 feet above sea level, in the world capital that had the highest altitude, more than twice the height of mountains in Vermont, and about eleven times higher than Akron, Ohio, the city named for height. The day after, I got onto a tiny plane headed to Santa Cruz. I'd sent Opal a letter detailing when I would arrive, but I had made the mistake of thinking the post office functioned as it did in my country. She later told me that the post office workers put what mail they could in the proper mailboxes. However, whatever mail was left at the end of the day would be buried by the next day’s avalanche of mail. She had never received my letter. I had two years of high school Spanish, not enough to make sense of the mess I was in. Finally someone called the German consulate—I have no idea not the U.S. one, unless there wasn’t one there in the early 1970s. I had only a few words of German, so that didn’t seem promising, but they knew the couple that John and Opal worked with and took me to their house. They got hold of my missionary couple; Opal pulled up in a Jeep-like affair with Lucas, her adopted Bolivian son, riding shotgun. “Good morning,” he said to me in English, and they were the sweetest words I’d heard in a long time.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
Categories |