Frogs in the Loo: And Other Short-Term Missions Tales

Chapter One

BOLIVIA:

The Mennonite Connection

Watch Out!

It was late at night, and the car’s headlights were just barely able to light up the road as we drove through the darkness of the farmland outside Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The roads were treacherous enough in the daytime as they are narrow, not painted to indicate lanes or shoulders, and pocked with deep, wide potholes. It was normal to see a car ahead of us weaving like a drunk driver, but he would only be trying to avoid the deepest holes in the pavement. But at night, there was the added danger of pedestrians in dark clothing, stray farm animals, unlighted bicyclists trying to get home after a long day at work, and horse carts plodding in the roadway, also without lights.

We were wary and taking it slowly when an impatient driver careened around us, speeding ahead. Good, we thought; he can light the way ahead of us and make our drive safer. But he was traveling faster than we were, and the gap between us lengthened. Then all of a sudden, we saw his red taillights swap for headlights, back to taillights, then headlights, then, whomp, his car skidded into the ditch on the wrong side of the road. We quickly slowed down, and as we neared him, crept onto the right-hand shoulder while asking each other what on earth was going on!

It was good that we pulled onto the shoulder, as right in the middle of the road were two huge black humps several feet tall and blocking the entire roadway. Dave turned on the four-way flashers and got out to investigate the roadblock and to check on the driver and passenger of the other car. The black blobs turned out to be two large and very dead cows left right in the road where they had been hit, most likely by one of the large tractor-trailer trucks that traveled regularly between Santa Cruz and their supply houses in Brazil. This narrow, dangerous road was the main transcontinental highway that linked Bolivia to Brazil.

Dave ran across the road to the car stuck in the ditch and was relieved to see two men getting out of their car. Our Spanish was extremely limited, but he was able to tell that they were uninjured. By that time, other vehicles were approaching the accident scene, and other Bolivians were offering their help to pull the car out of the ditch. Some had flares that they lit to warn other drivers of the roadblock. We knew it would probably be morning before a farmer could come with a tractor to move the carcasses and there was little further help we could offer, so we continued on our way home, vowing not to try that drive again so late at night!

The next day, I received an e-mail from my friend many miles away in Washington State telling me that she had felt prompted to pray for us the previous day and hoped all was well with us. When I worked out the time difference, she was praying for us at the exact time that we could have hit those cows blocking the highway! Wherever we traveled in the world on missions projects, we asked people to pray for our safety and health, and that is why. And when we returned home, we told those who prayed for us how effective their prayers were and encouraged them to keep praying for us.

I will keep on being glad, because I know that your prayers and the help that comes from the Spirit of Christ Jesus will keep me safe. (Philippians 1:18-19 CEV)

The Mennonite Connection

After twenty-three wonderful years of living in Alaska, a plunge in the state’s economy forced us to move to the Seattle, Washington, area. We had two children, the oldest entering high school, and their upcoming college expenses to plan for, so Dave accepted a job offer, and we left the land that we loved so much. A pioneer spirit was still strong in Alaska, and everyone had a can do attitude, something that defined us well.

Although we missed our friends, many of them had also moved on; and we lost touch with them. As the Internet developed, e-mail made it possible to reconnect with some of our old Alaskan friends. One day Dave opened a message from friends we knew from our former Anchorage church and its associated Christian school that our children had attended. When they left Alaska, they became medical missionaries and were serving in Bolivia. He wanted to put us in touch with a group in Santa Cruz that wanted to build a Christian radio station.

Our friends remembered that Dave was an amateur radio operator, so he was asking Dave if he could answer some of their questions about FM radio. He thought it was simply a shot in the dark and did not know that we had both been involved in radio broadcasting before we met them. Dave’s involvement started in high school, continued through his college years, and into the early years of his career in electrical engineering. While he had done a fair amount of announcing, his strengths were in radio engineering, including building stations.

I met Dave in Fairbanks, Alaska, at the local CBS radio affiliate; he was the engineer, and I had just been hired as the all-night disc jockey, which allowed me to attend college during the daytime. Our friendship blossomed and resulted in our marriage six months later. We had finished our studies at the university, where we lived in the dormitories. We looked for an apartment for after the wedding, but there was no available housing in Fairbanks. It was still recovering from a devastating flood two years earlier, and housing was still scarce. So we flew to Nome, Alaska, where we served at a missionary radio station for the summer. They provided a little two-bedroom house and all our meals. Our involvement in radio continued on and off during the subsequent years.

Dave made several contacts with the people in Bolivia and learned that they had a broadcast license for an FM station, had all the equipment, including a transmitter and antenna, already had built a 360-foot tower for the antenna, but needed help with how to assemble everything to begin broadcasting. Dave soon realized that what they were asking was like doing brain surgery by e-mail. He felt God’s call to take time off work and go put the station together. It was not long until we found ourselves in Santa Cruz. We had given ourselves three weeks to complete the project before we had to return to work.

The station director and his wife hosted us and gave us a thorough orientation to both the country and missionary work. We were surprised to learn that they were with the same church denomination as we were. We had not asked many questions before going, as the Christian radio project was foremost in our thinking. Then we learned that the primary intended listeners to the station were Old Colony Mennonites living in several farming colonies about thirty-five miles east of the city. As we worked on the new station, we also learned a lot about that group of people. Their presence in Bolivia, numbering 45,000 in the entire country, was virtually unknown to us and our home church. When we returned from the project, they, too, were full of questions.

Those Old Colony Mennonites’ ancestors had emigrated from Eastern Europe to Russia, then Canada beginning in the mid-1900s. The current generation left Canada to set up colonies in Bolivia where they could be separate, away from modern society. They were hard-working farmers who were not permitted by their beliefs to use any modern equipment, so they worked their farms much like we did 100 years ago. A few had tractors, but they were only allowed to have steel wheels, no rubber tires. Colony elders did not permit them to work outside their farms, so despite being in a five-year drought and having failing farms, they could not find work elsewhere to support their large families. The average number of children in each family was eighteen. In addition, their beliefs prevented them from learning any language other than Low German. Some of the men knew just enough Spanish to carry on commerce, but the women and children could not communicate with anyone outside their colonies. They were poor, trapped on failing farms, and full of despair.

Christian radio had the potential to become a vital link to the closed colonies, as it would bring them hope through salvation in Christ. But how would they hear the radio station if they were not permitted to have electricity or radios? If their elders found radios, stereos, boom boxes, or CD players, they collected them, took them out into a field, and smashed them to pieces. The station director found out, however, that many of them had battery-powered radios that they hid under their mattresses and brought out at night when the colony was in total darkness.

They faced certain danger if they were caught listening to evangelists or if they converted and were baptized. The elders had the power to excommunicate or shun them, which would cut them off totally from their families. We heard one story of a young couple who were shunned for professing to be Christians. Mennonite friends who lived outside the colonies were going to visit this couple. As they drove by the colony’s large, brick church, they noticed ten austere men in long black coats, tall black boots, and black headgear leaving the church. Those were the colony bishops coming out of a high-level meeting.

As our friends visited with the young couple, everyone heard the loud sounds of a horse and buggy approaching the house. Looking outside, they watched as the buggy pulled right up to the living room window. Two messengers from the bishops knocked hard on the front door. The young couple tried to be polite and invited them in, but one of the men said in German, No. We’ve just come to tell you that you are excommunicated. Then they turned and left as abruptly as they had come. There was no discussion and no chance of appeal; the sentence had been delivered. The lady admitted that she listened to the radio, and she smiled as she said, When the children’s stories come on, it just tickles my stomach!

Another colony lady had traveled into Santa Cruz to do some shopping, and she visited a little shop that sold handwork sewn by some of the Mennonite ladies. The proprietor told me that normally she came in with a dour expression and was not very outgoing. That day, by contrast, she entered with a big smile on her face. When the shop owner inquired what had changed in her life, the lady admitted that she had become a Christian since coming in last, and said, I’m a new woman! The impact of Christian radio on the colonies has been tremendous. Many stories of changed lives have been told.

The station is also popular with Spanish-speaking farmers nearby and with long-haul truckers on the transcontinental highway to Brazil that passed right by the radio station. On the first day of broadcasting, right after Dave threw the switch to turn on the transmitter, several truckers stopped in to thank our friends for the new station. They reported that they had kept their truck radios tuned to the station’s frequency for months, just waiting to hear the first programming come over the air. All of us joined in a prayer of thanksgiving for the new station and the work it would be doing in listeners’ hearts.

When we left Bolivia after just three weeks, we had helped the group progress from a pile of boxes to a functioning FM radio station that was on the air twenty-four hours a day with programming in both Spanish and Low German. There was more work to be done to embellish the station and move the control room from its temporary location in a remodeled shipping container into a permanent studio building, and we again felt God’s call to leave our jobs, become missionaries, and return to Bolivia to complete the work.

A voice cries: In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 40:3-5 ESV)

A Life-Changing Experience

It is often said that a short-term missions trip will change one forever, and that is exactly what happened to us when we took vacation time from our jobs in Seattle and traveled to Bolivia for a three-week missions project in Christian radio. When we returned to our home in Washington State after successfully building and powering up a new FM radio station that would broadcast Christian music and programs throughout a wide area around Santa Cruz, we both agreed that this was something we wanted to do again. In fact, Dave asked, How can we do this full-time? It had been incredibly rewarding, and we both found needs that we could fill from our lifetime of work experiences. Dave called it convergence—all the disparate activities we had done over the years in our jobs and through hobbies were coming together to fill real needs on the mission field. It was so exciting.

In Bolivia, Dave put his electrical engineering, power engineering, broadcast engineering, and even ham radio skills to the task of building the FM radio station. It felt like Christmas (except for the heat) as he opened all the boxes containing the transmitter, power amplifier, many antenna pieces that needed to be assembled, huge spools of audio cable and transmission lines, and a variety of other parts and pieces. As he sat on the floor of the shipping container that would house the transmitter and, temporarily, the announcer’s console, he looked like a kid who couldn’t wait to put together a new toy. The neatest thing to see was the confidence he felt that he could put it all together and get the station on the air in the three-week window that we had allotted for the project.

My favorite activity during this trip was helping him by offering an extra pair of hands to pass tools or to hold equipment steady as he worked on it; or an extra set of feet to run around finding tools and materials, to dig through the boxes for the instruction manuals (though he hardly needed to refer to them), and making sure that we both had plenty of cold, filtered water to replace the liquids we were losing in the scorching heat.

Six months after this first missions trip, we found ourselves returning to Bolivia. I had been laid off from my job in Seattle as an office manager, and Dave took a one-year leave of absence from his engineering company. We planned to continue our work with the radio station in Santa Cruz. The station had been broadcasting smoothly twenty-four hours a day since the day Dave had turned on the transmitter, and the response from the community was enthusiastic. Dave would continue to refine the operations from a technical perspective. The transmitter could stay at the base of the tower in the shipping container that had been fashioned into a transmitter building, but the main control room needed to be moved to a more permanent location in a newly-constructed building nearby. That move and all the rewiring it would entail, along with numerous other engineering projects, would keep Dave busy for several months.

I was asked to assist with the station’s bookkeeping, entering all the expense receipts from over three years of construction activity into a computer accounting program that I loaded onto my laptop computer. I had done business bookkeeping by hand many years previously, and I used a checkbook program on my home computer, so I felt certain that I could learn the program they provided and do what was needed to produce financial reports for the current year and three previous years.

There was no room at the cramped radio station office in Santa Cruz for either of us to work, so we turned one of the bedrooms in the furnished house we had rented into a home office. As I worked my way into a large box of construction receipts from the project, I had to take over the large dining room table to sort and organize each little receipt before entering them all into the computer. The receipts were all in Spanish and in the local currency, so I had quite a challenge to translate each item and calculate the U.S. dollar equivalent to record. Most of the Spanish I learned in our first few months came from terms for construction materials like cement, bricks, rope, roofing, ceramic tile, electrical wire, and similar items.

Electrical power in Bolivian homes and offices was 220 volts, so we had to remember not to plug 110-volt equipment or appliances directly into power outlets in the wall. They had to be plugged into a transformer, or they would burn out immediately when they were turned on. Luckily, our laptop computer power supplies could handle either. The building wiring, however, was not grounded. I cringed every time I went to plug in the computer and got a bright blue arc between the outlet and the power plug. I was always afraid that I would fry a circuit board in the laptop whenever I plugged it in.

The entire house had ceramic tile floors, which felt good on our hot feet, and the tiles were easy to clean of the constant dust that blew through open doors and windows. But as we sat at our laptops to work, we started to notice a buzz on our skin as we slid our hands over the metal trim on the keyboards. Since the electrical wiring in the house was not grounded, our bodies became part of the electrical circuit as our bare feet touched the floor tiles and provided a pathway to ground for the electric current. We came up with a simple solution: wearing rubber flip flop sandals provided insulation between our feet and the tile floor. We didn’t always remember to wear them, but as soon as we felt the buzz, we would go searching for our flip flops.

Before our year was up, we made another dramatic decision. We conferred with our mission supervisor back in North America and changed our status from short-term missionaries to career missionaries. Dave resigned from his company, we found longer-term house-sitters for our home in Washington State, and we asked our supporters if they would honor our decision and continue, if possible, to support us financially and in prayer. A desire that had been born in our hearts when we were first married had come to fruition, and we couldn’t have been happier.

Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing. (Psalm 100:2 KJV)

Wait! It’s Upside Down!

At the beginning of our service in short-term missions, we made three consecutive trips to Bolivia. Our packing for overseas travel became more refined with each trip, but on that first trip, which was for three weeks, we did not know what to expect: What clothing would we need? What personal products should we pack and which ones would be available there? What would our hosts like as a special treat from home? Or even, how many changes of clothing would we need before we would be able to do laundry?

I sent an e-mail message to our hosts to pose these questions and received valuable information in return. The customary dress for missionary women was long skirts or dresses and short sleeves. That meant no shorts or tank tops to help keep cool. Although open-toed sandals were common there for both men and women, Dave and I packed full shoes and socks: for safety purposes during construction for Dave; and for me, to help protect my skin from mosquito bites. I am a regular mosquito magnet, a condition that would continually plague me for the next nine years of travels.

This first trip overseas occurred just a few weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, and our grown daughter called us on the phone and cried, What are you doing leaving the country at a time like this? She was anxious about the safety of her mother and father while the country was still reeling from the shock of the attacks. We tried to assure her that our skills were needed to build a Christian radio station in an area that needed the Gospel, and that we would be staying in the home of North American missionaries, who would be watching out for our safety the entire trip. I’m not sure that mollified her fears, so I told her that if God had called us there, which He clearly had, He surely would protect us. The safest place we could be was in the center of God’s will. And His hand of protection remained on us over the next nine years as we served Him in eleven different countries (Dave also did short projects in Peru and Brazil).

We left Seattle with little difficulty and had to change planes in Miami for the flight to La Paz and then on to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. As we deplaned in Miami and started working our way across the concourse to our connecting flight, we were in awe of the great number of uniformed National Guardsmen with helmets and powerful rifles, patrolling all the hallways throughout the airport. We were not frightened by this, because we knew that they were there for our safety, but it was a novel sight in a United States airport. I secretly was happy that our daughter was not there to witness it!

We knew from researching Bolivia on the Internet that October would be hot, but nothing could have prepared us for the blast of heat and humidity that hit us when we landed. The daily temperatures out at the project site ranged from the 90s to over 110°F. And with an even higher heat index, even our light-weight summer clothes felt hot and heavy on our perspiring bodies. We showered at least three times a day to try to keep cool and to wash away the perspiration. After living in Alaska for twenty-three years before moving to the Pacific Northwest, we had never experienced the blinding sting of salty perspiration running into our eyes.

Three weeks after our arrival, and the day before our scheduled flight home, Dave turned on the new FM transmitter, and it sent the broadcast signal up a 360-foot tower to the antenna we had assembled and raised just days previously. The station was on the air broadcasting Christian programs and music in quality FM-stereo to a large area east of Santa Cruz. The station was at the crossroads of two of Bolivia’s major highways, which were heavily traveled by trucks hauling freight between Santa Cruz and Brazil. Within the first hour of broadcasting, several truckers passing by stopped in to express their excitement that the station was on the air. They had left their radios tuned to our frequency for weeks, just waiting for the station to begin broadcasting.

It was time to return home to the States; and as we arrived at the Santa Cruz airport, we saw a long line of passengers with suitcases waiting for security screening. The airport did not have any equipment for x-raying luggage, so uniformed security personnel were hand-searching every piece of luggage bound for the United States. We guessed that either the U.S. Government or the carrier, American Airlines, had insisted on tighter security screening before our plane could depart for Miami. We joined a line and shuffled slowly forward toward the ticket counters.

We had traveled down with three clamshell plastic suitcases we had bought on our honeymoon, thirty-two years previously, and that had proved to be indestructible over the years. Being an older style, our suitcases had flip-out latches that had to be locked with a key so keep them from popping open in flight.

When we reached the head of the line, there were two screening tables side by side in the middle of the large, open lobby. A security man took Dave’s suitcase and lifted it up onto one of the tables, while a woman hefted mine onto the other, laying it down flat. I handed both people keys to the locks. They would not allow us to get close or unlock them ourselves, so I had to watch them struggle to get the keys inserted correctly.

Then I noticed that both suitcases were lying upside down. If the security people opened the latches and lifted what they assumed were the lids, everything was going to fall out! Only the real tops had a plastic mesh barrier to keep the contents secure when opening or closing the clamshells. Oh, how I wished I could remember the Spanish words for Stop! or It’s upside down! I tried to move toward the woman to gesture for her to flip the suitcase over, but she shooed me away rather impatiently and proceeded to open the case.

The man with Dave’s suitcase opened his at precisely the same moment, and we cringed as our socks, underwear, pajamas, nightgown, and everything else spilled out onto the floor. The security people did not flinch; they reached in with rubber-gloved hands and groped through what was left. Then they picked our clothes up off the floor, tossing them haphazardly back into the suitcases. I didn’t feel any pity for them as they struggled for several minutes to get the suitcases to close again, but they finally succeeded, relocked them, and returned my keys. So much for neatly packed suitcases! At least nothing broke, including the souvenirs that had been packed carefully inside.

Thereafter, I learned how to pack everything in large, zippered plastic bags. It was easy to press the air out after they were filled, leaving densely compacted packages that security personnel could squeeze and look into without opening. An added benefit was that any liquids packed as baggage would not leak out from air pressure changes in flight, ruining our clothing in the process.

It was a hard lesson to learn, and I will never forget the embarrassment of having all my underclothes scattered across the shiny tile floor of a large international airport!

O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end! (Deuteronomy 32:29 KJV)

Taxi!

During the time we lived in Bolivia, we did not have the luxury of a car to get around. We were house-sitting a couple of miles from downtown Santa Cruz and could walk to most places we needed to get to except for the grocery store and church. But we quickly learned that we could go almost anywhere in the city by taxi for only US$1.00 each way!

Most taxis did not have meters. Some were from registered taxi companies, but others were operated by unregistered drivers who were not always reliable or honest. The safest thing to do when flagging down a taxi on the street was to ask, before getting into the car, if he were a radio taxi, which meant that he was part of a large company with radio dispatchers. We also learned the hard way to ask what the fare would be to our destination before getting in; otherwise, once we were seated, we were at the mercy of the driver for whatever fare he required when we reached our destination.

Each neighborhood had its local taxi company, so we could call on the phone and let the dispatcher know we needed a taxi. If we asked the dispatcher, he would tell us the fare ahead of time so we could have proper change. Once I only had a large bill, so the driver stopped along the route at a gas station so I could change it into smaller bills. The drivers never admitted to having change and sometimes got a nice tip from the difference of the fare and the smallest bill I would have in my wallet. The gas stations were as good a source of change as any bank, and a lot faster for the transaction.

The regular drivers got to know us after a few weeks and became rather protective of our safety. If I were going to the shops downtown, they would always warn me to take off my watch, necklace, and earrings and keep them out of view in my pocket so I would not be robbed. Getting a taxi back home was not quite as convenient, as I would have to flag down a taxi on the street, making sure it was a radio taxi, and give directions in Spanish back to our house. I did not have a cell phone to call our regular taxi company, so I had to be able to recite our barrio (neighborhood) name, the street name, and the house number. Then I hoped that the driver would not try to strike up a conversation with me in Spanish during the ride home.

Once Dave was riding in a taxi from the airport to our house, and the driver started talking to him but speaking really fast so that Dave could only catch a word here or there. He remembered the Spanish for slow down and said it to the driver. Immediately, the driver took his foot off the gas pedal and brought the taxi to a crawl. Dave laughed. He had hoped the driver would talk more slowly, not drive more slowly.

As our Spanish improved, we would bravely strike up a simple conversation with the drivers. They always asked us where we were from, and we would reply, Washington State. Their faces would light up into a big smile of recognition, and they would reply, La Casa Blanca? which means the White House. We would shake our heads and tell them in Spanish, "No, the other Washington. Then we would add, Near California." Then they would nod in understanding.

Before I learned that each neighborhood had its own local radio taxi, I was visiting a friend on the opposite side of town. When I was ready to return home, I called my neighborhood taxi dispatcher and requested to be picked up at my friend’s address. I waited and waited, and it was getting a little embarrassing as the time lengthened and still no taxi. I made a second call and repeated the address and was assured the taxi would come. More time, and still no taxi. Then the lady I was visiting suggested I call her local taxi company, which resulted in a taxi in just a few minutes.

The taxi from my friend’s neighborhood did not recognize my street address, so I had to direct him to our barrio and the main street closest to our house. Then I had to count out the streets to the next turn onto our road, then the number of houses to pass before coming to ours. It turned out to be a good exercise in counting out loud in Spanish. As I directed the taxi driver to our house, I realized why my taxi had never arrived—the drivers only know their local neighborhoods well, but need turn-by-turn directions to anything outside their normal driving zone.

One time as I was making this same journey across town, it was raining, and the taxi broke down before I got home. Normally on rainy days, the taxis have trouble going through the many deep puddles and their engines will conk out. This time, though, it was a flat tire. The driver had no spare, so he nursed the car along to a tire repair shop. I had to get out and stand in the rain while the driver negotiated a tire repair. When I asked how long it would take, they both said at least a half hour. I was getting pretty wet and had no umbrella or rain coat, so I paid the man half the total fare and said I would find another taxi. About a block away there was a parking lot with lots of taxis waiting for fares. Great, I thought; I’ll flag down one of them.

I asked the fare to my address and the driver responded with something I didn’t understand. So I told him my barrio and he agreed that he could go there. The fare was really low (I should have guessed that something would be different on this trip). As we neared my neighborhood, I told the driver to turn right. He said, No, and something about only going straight ahead. I repeated that my house was to the right and to please turn. He said he couldn’t; he could only go straight ahead. I finally asked him to stop, gave him his fare, and got out into the rain again. We were on a small bridge crossing a drainage canal along one of the city’s outer rings—the main roads around Santa Cruz are configured in circular rings that are numbered from the city center to the outskirts. We lived just off Ring 4.

I grabbed all my bags, as I was coming home from a potluck dinner and had quite a few things to carry, and started walking down the arterial to our street, about eight blocks away. I gave up trying to skirt all the puddles in the dirt road and just trudged through the rain and mud to our front gate. I struggled with a large ring of keys and found the one to unlock the wooden door that served as a gate through our high, solid perimeter wall, and then selected two more keys to let myself into the front door of the house.

I had just secured all the locks and was headed in to change out of my wet shoes and dress, when I heard the door open again! I was alone at home and no one was supposed to be there but me. Dave was on a journey through eastern Bolivia which would take at least another two or three days. But there he was! He came in tired, wet, and hungry, but, oh, were we glad to be reunited! After all, it was American Thanksgiving Day, and we were sad that we had been apart and not able to enjoy our traditional turkey dinner together. We shared our stories as Dave sat at the kitchen counter and I fixed him something to eat.

Later I called another missionary to tell her about my taxi experience and ask if she could explain the strange behavior of the second taxi driver. Then I learned a new lesson about taxis. Not all taxis were private taxis that went door to door.