FBC Missions

HOLA!!  This is Heather from Cochabamba, Bolivia!  July 3 was a great day full of wonderful suprises and team bonding. 

The team started off the day at the Church were we have been working on constructing the two playgrounds for the past week.  We were able to finish the one that is for the church and also spent the morning touching up on paint and taking apart the second play structure so it could be delivered to the orphanage.  We did not know what to expect at the orphanage but we loaded the VW van-truck and Johnny´s trailer with all of the parts of the big toy and headed off to the other side of the city.  We were energetically welcomed by over 15 beautiful girls who were very excited about their vistors for the day who were bringing a ¨big¨ gift! 

Our team fell in love with the girls instantly and played with, tickled, held, and loved on the girls for the rest of the afternoon, while re-constructing the play structure.  We are planning on going back the orphanage on thursday to visit the girls again.  The orphanage is incredibly ¨luxurious¨ with three floors and plenty of room for each girl.  They blessed us with an amazing lunch of ¨pollo y arroz y papas¨ and none of us on the team could finish our plate (but most of the girls had seconds)!  When the evening came, the ten of us were totally exhausted and we piled in our two jeeps and loaded up all of our extra supplies (including 3 full paint cans).

I was in the back of Johnny´s jeep and we were probably half way back to the mission when I saw a splat on one of the side windows.  At first I thought it was bird poop, but the size of the splat grew exponentially in a matter of moments.  I couldn´t get the words out fast enough but I realized that it was yellow paint that had been put on the top of the jeep.  By the time we stopped on the corner, the whole (full) can of paint had emptied out over 1/4 of the red jeep.  Now I must make this clear that this is oil based paint that we have had on our skin for the last week because it WILL NOT come off our skin for anything!  We didn´t know what we could do so we just took down the paint and drove back to our mission, leaving a trail of yellow paint behind us.

We drove up and the other half of our team could not believe what they saw…later we found out that the jeep had just got a new paint job last week!  It was clear that water would not get the paint off and paint thinner would destroy the paint job…so we decided to use gasoline.  Dan turned on his car and faced his lights towards the car (it was long past dark by this time).  Ironically the song playing from his car was ¨Yellow¨ by Coldplay.  With three headlamps, Winston on the roof of the car, Kyle with a toothbrush and the rest of us with gas soked rags, we mananged to get the majority of the yellow paint off within the next two hours.  The whole time we were joking about how flammable we were, but it was Johnny´s car and we did what he asked Later that night Dan went back to his house and his dad told him that one little spark from friction could have lit us all on fire…God was definately with us!  This has been one of my most random, unpredictable, and joyful moments on the trip.  It was a great time of laughter and team bonding.  I would definately do it again!

Thanks for all the prayers…hope you enjoyed this story!

Love in Him, Heather

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Bolivia 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.