Ch'airo For The Soul: The Adventures of Eddie Eagle

I first met Eddie Eagle through a mutual friend. Could Eddie please come and visit us for a while here in Bolivia? Grace, the friend of my mutual friend, needed to send him abroad for a time. So I agreed. After making his acquaintance I knew at once that we would get along fine. Now that it is time to send him back home I will miss him as I have become quite fond of him. Following is his account of his adventures here, in the form of a letter written to Grace. I am sure you will see, after reading it, that we have indeed had quite the adventure.

Eddie Eagle

Dear Grace,

I have had a really good time here in Bolivia. Yes, I have missed you and am eager to be back home with you. I will be there before long, but I wanted to write about my adventures while they are still fresh in my mind.

When I first arrived in Santa Cruz, Bolivia my new friend took me to meet a group of Kinder and Pre-kinder children. They made me think of you. We passed our time together doing crafts, coloring, playing games in the yard and having a Bible story. It was great fun. My friend says he usually meets with this group twice each week.

That's me with the kids. They are showing off their necklaces that they made.

Our biggest adventure, though, was a trip to the jungle city of Riberalta. We flew there by airplane. When we arrived it was very hot. There were three others along with me in our group and we all were sweating like crazy.

On the airplane and ready to go!

The first thing we had to do was to go to our hotel, or alojamiento as they called it there. All the taxi's in Riberalta are motorcycles or motos. So we rode on the back behind the driver to our alojamiento. You would not believe all the motos everywhere. Do you like motorcycles? I can't remember. Anyway, all weekend every time we went somewhere we had to ride on the back of a moto. It wasn't too bad except fort the first night where our driver did not see a pile of dirt blocking the road and so we crashed into it and we all fell over into the road. Thankfully it was a nice soft dirt road and not on the paved highway!

One of my taxi drivers posing with me for a photo.

The first night we all went to someone's house for a little meeting. My friends were in Riberalta in order to help start a new church. The meeting that night was outside and we almost all stood up because there were no chairs. But that was ok. A young man opened his heart to Jesus that night.

The brother of the pastor and me.

The next day we had two meetings, one in the morning at a house with the pastor of the new church and the second meeting was where the new church is being built. While the church people, the hermanos, were carrying big boards from another place to make benches for the meeting, my friend played roll the hoop with a little boy. They were playing in the middle of the street which didn't seem like a good idea to me but I guess there really wasn't any other place to play.

Playing roll the hoop in the middle of the road. What would my mother say?

Any way, my friend spoke from the Bible during the meeting. After the meeting it was time to hop up on a moto again and head back to our alojamiento.

Bringing boards to make benches.

Saturday afternoon church.

The next day was Sunday and we took taxi's again out to the new church. It was early. The meeting began around seven in the morning. There were about 40 people that came to the meeting. My friend had a special class for the kids who were there. They learned a couple of new songs, had a Bible story and then colored some pictures about the story. I wish you could have been there. You would have liked it. When church was over we went back to our room and got ready to fly home to Santa Cruz.