Merry Christmas

On Christmas Eve after Mass at the Bishopric we walked through the Plaza Colon and watched a variety of Navidad-related activities, such as posing for photos beside nativity scenes, riding horses, riding in kid-sized battery powered cars, jumping on trampolines, sliding on slides, dancing, watching street performers, just looking at the lights and feeling good. We saw many happy families there.

After making the circuit around the Plaza, we walked north on the Prado, past the booths for silpancho, pasteles, and jugos and other refrescos (yes, lots of Coca Cola, and on one of the taller buildings on Avenida Heroinas there is a US-style Coca Cola billboard of that iconic jolly figure in red rather than a Father Christmas/Santa Claus or elf. Whatever opinions there may be about this secularized Santa icon--and there is a great history of these images at the following address:  http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html --it seemed a better billboard subject for mixed audiences than a previous one in the area depicting a man and a debriefed woman glaring at passers by as though they ought to mind their own business.) We passed more people riding horses at a walk--up one side of the block and down the other--and I noticed that the children riding seemed especially absorbed in the activity, maybe transported into dreams of galloping on the open range, and one horse making a turn on a tiled area lost its balance for a moment, the steel shoe of one rear hoof skating suddenly out wider than expected, but a quick sidestep and recovery, and the young rider never seemed to notice.


Despite being summer here, the wind was chilly and damp. This promised to be a colder Christmas than two Lynn and I spent years ago in Beaumont, Texas.  (Those years taught me that I really am better acclimated to an environment with four distinct seasons despite my love of puttering along on a motorcycle in the warm sunshine, remembering when it felt just as good to run.) By the time we were approaching the restaurant Brazilian Cafe, I was already thinking expresso. We sat at one of the tables on the deck close to the street.  The double lanes were bumper-to-bumper with vehicles, but the wind must have been blowing away any exhaust fumes, and the sidewalks both in front of the restaurant and on the avenue's inner esplanade remained full but not jammed with pedestrians strolling or hustling and lots of colored lights.  We talked for about an hour about our past semester's activities--what things worked and what needed to change--and what we might be doing in the coming one.


When we left, we decided to walk back across the Plaza and up the three or four blocks to Heroinas where it seemed we might catch a cab more easily for home.  On our way to Heroinas it began to sprinkle, then drizzle and finally to settle into a steady but not heavy rain.  When we reached Heroinas, we saw that the usually busy avenue was virtually deserted, to the point that we felt a little vulnerable waiting there for a cab.  We wanted a radio mobile, a driver actually working for an established company, because it would be more secure.  None came after a ten minute wait so we decided to return to the Plaza and the Prado.  With all the activity there--even if we had to wait to clear the traffic jam--we would catch a cab and be home in no time.


When we reached the Plaza, the rain had already worked its magic.  As if everyone had been made of sugar or salt and had been melted by the rain, the people in the plaza and most of the colored lights were gone.  The restaurant was still open, so we took our place in front of it and soon were on our way back south to our house below Laguna Alalay. The cab was warm, and the red, yellow and green of the street lights we passed spread a reminder on the wet pavement of the happy crowd we had seen in the Plaza.  We looked forward to returning to our place and checking on Blondie the dog and Kitty the cat who was just beginning her recovery from the sterilization operation.

That Time of Year

Christmas: Somehow the handful of ornaments Lynn and I brought with us from our Christmases together as a family in Tennessee¹ were powerful enough to bring back to life many memories and to remind us of the good will we experience in our lives here in Bolivia. Lynn and I celebrated our second and perhaps final Bolivian Christmas. (We are about to enter our third year of this contract period with Franciscan Mission Service.)  As with the preceding Christmas season, we are far from our families but hardly alone. Family, friends, and other mission supporters in the United States have stayed in contact through the many communication modes available in modern mission (email, Skype, Magic Jack, Cell Phones, prayer). Our Bolivian circle of friends, which includes not only Bolivians but many of the broad-based community of missioners from other countries grows as we extend ourselves through our work and social relationships.² We also sometimes acquire new friends on the fly as we suddenly find ourselves displaced and in need and discover that people recognize this and unbidden respond when they can.

Teaching: I'm pleased that our English classes in Carcel Abra continue to stimulate interest among the original students who began to study with us this past February.  Their pronunciation has improved, and they make appropriate responses in English when we look at photos and can construct grammatically correct short sentences. We have also attracted and retained some new students, some with previous exposure to English (one or two with some formal study, and others with exposure to U.S./British film and music).  For those interested, we (Lynn and I) continue to use the textbooks Top Notch Fundamentals and Top Notch Level I and to supplement that with some grammer handouts from the American English Files, some of the downloads and other activities from the BBC's Learning English website and other English language-related websites, some songs in English with lyrics in English and Spanish (very roughly translated with Google translate, but that too becomes an exercise). To add variety(and broaden the language use during discussion to include as much Spanish as they care to use), we still are trying to offer one film per month in the carcel library either in Spanish with English subtitles or vice versa.  The most recent offering was El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). We had good discussions about the cruelty of Vidal, the depiction of the Catholic church, the affection for fantasy and values of Ophelia/Princess Moana, and the implications of the conclusion.³

Our Growing Family: A couple of months ago we were adopted by a small calico cat.  She was maybe a year and a half old, dirty and hungry, and had a divot out of her left ear. She first appeared on the roof of the empleada quarters by the kitchen.  She had probably been surviving off of bits of dog food, and that probably also explained the occasional piles of bird feathers I had seen by the garden.  She never came very close, and never allowed us to approach her. We decided to leave her some tuna on the top of the wall, and pretty soon she began to eat that.  As we watched her, it seemed that she might be pregnant or might have had kittens.  Eventually we learned that she was sleeping in the woodshed, a real eyesore of a structure on the property that is filled with stacks of lumber, piles of lumber, dust-coated power tools (well, everything within is dust coated) pieces of broken furniture, steel rebar, chicken wire, pieces of pipe with one end encased in cement.  Eventually we caught sight of kittens in the woodshed.  We tried to catch them, but they were already up and darting faster than I could move to catch them, and the woodshed was a perfect shelter.  Eventually we convinced the mother cat to let us approach and then to touch her.  Over the course of a month we eventually captured the kittens and took them to a nearby vet to be wormed and have their first shots.  (Lynn got a nasty bite from one, so just as a precaution we couldn't give them away for ten days to be sure they didn't have rabies.) We were worried that we might not be able to find homes for them, but surprisingly we quickly did, for them and two more (that's another chapter in this burgeoning kitty ministry). The grey and white one went first, then the cream and white one.  The last one, a calico like her mom but long haired, sneaked back into the woodshed and eluded us for another week until we could capture her and award her to a young, very patient woman up the street.  I think all of the kittens got good homes. Then Lynn and I resumed trying to make friends with the mother cat.

She is definitely a cat of the streets--eats anything without hesitation, does not purr, does not particularly care to be touched.  After a week of cat taming, we began to hear the howling and wailing of cats either killing each other or swearing their undying love. It proved to be the latter in a case of dueling toms: one grey and white old boy and a cream and white younger, lighter weight but feistier looking lad.  For several nights they threatened death to each other out by the lavanderia, and it seemed like we were headed for Kitten Time Redux for sure.  Lynn and I took action. We lured mom into the house with a can of tuna, threw her in a plastic trash can,⁴ slapped on the lid, and hailed a cab for the Garfield Kitty Hospital in midtown, right across the street from the Viedma Maternity Hospital. That was a week ago, and now she's back at the ranch, no longer able to bear kittens, and wearing a belly sling for the next few days while she recovers from the operation. The recovery seems to be going well, and we hope Kitty will stay with us at least for a while.

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¹ The big glitter-encrusted snowflake still has six points.  One of the two angels broke a wing, but we repaired this with super glue purchased from a street vendor at the corner of Heroinas and España. I've lost my touch with this stuff and while attempting to pick up tools and also close the tube of glue managed to glue various fingers to my Swiss army knife and a pair of folding pliers.  I looked like a bumbling Edward Scissorhand until Lynn liberated me with her bottle of acetone.
² I think we're on friendly terms with the various groups of evangelicals who knock on the outside gate and leave pamphlets and talk about the Bible with us, and likewise with our meetings with the pastor of the evangelical church inside Abra Carcel where we teach English.  The carcel has two churches inside the grounds, the other being Catholic and erected by former missioner in Bolivia Michael Johnson, OFM, who led one of our formation sessions in Washington, DC in the fall of 2009.
³ We have had equal interest in this film after showings to the university-aged group of students at Pastoral Juvenil in the film series Filmanía that Lynn assists, and at the hospice in Santa Vera Cruz where I work on Tuesdays. The Calcutta Sisters who operate the hospice have also said that they would like to see the film. In each case our goal in showing this and other films has been to use  popular media to promote discussion.
⁴We had tried and failed earlier with a cardboard box.