La Paz

Mission La Paz
Crossway Community Church 2011
October 14-24
The All-Star Team:
Mark Larimer, Susan Larimer, Emma Larimer, Jackson Larimer, Marcus Tyree, Christel Tyree, Alexis Tyree, Cheyenee Collins, Hannah Smith, Austin Moore, Andrea West, and Mike Creech

Hey Everybody! This is Hannah Smith typing. I've been sent to report on days 1 and 2 of the 2011 La Paz Crossway mission trip.

DAY 1
Day one started out wayyy too early for most of us. Everyone except Andrea and Austin, who drove up to Indianapolis early, met at 3:00 am to get on a 21 seat charter bus and drive an hour and a half to the Indianapolis airport. Our flight left at 5:30. We made it to the airport and through all of the security in plenty of time, boarded around 5:00, and settled in for a 2 hour nap. The plane arrived a half hour early, adding 30 minutes to the pre-existing 2 hours of awesome layover in Houston Texas. We were only a little bit bored.

After this we boarded a plane direct to Cabo. This was a slightly longer flight, but most of us finagled our way into getting seats all together. Not me, I was stuck by myself, in the last row, by the toilets. Thanks guys :)
When we got to Cabo it was a huge shock. Here I was in my sweats and a t-shirt, and it was 95 degrees when I stepped off the plane! The line to get through customs was about as long as the flight to Cabo, but we made it through without a single hitch. David and Joyce Reed, local missionaries and friends of the Larimer family, met us at the airport with a rental van. We loaded all of our stuff into the van and we were on the last leg of our trip to La Paz!

Somebody, Mark, choose the shorter, more hilly road to La Paz instead of taking the scenic route which resulted in a few cases of motion sickness. It didn't phase the teens though, they spent the trip playing tic-tac-toe in the back of the bus.
We all stopped for sandwiches on the way to Casabuena, the B&B at which we were staying (owned by Miltuna and SuSu, also friends of the Larimer family and local missionaries). When we arrived at Casabuena we were all exhausted from the long travels and the lack of sleep from the previous evening. We unpacked and had some much needed down time for the rest of the night. We were told that the next day of work wouldn't be too strenuous so some of us stayed up too late listening to podcasts and wishing for poptarts.

DAY 2
I never understood how farmers could wake up to the sound of the rooster crow every morning. Now I get it. Roosters are relentless, loud, and they mean business. If they have to be up, you have to be up too. This is why I spent my morning trying to figure out what to do for the next 2 hours instead of sleeping like I should have been. David Reed met us at Casabuena at 9:00 am to take us to the work site for the day. A few weeks ago, the house of a local family burnt down. Our mission for the day was to clean out the debris, 2 hour job at the max. It was supposed to be our light day. When we arrived we were informed that there was more work to do in the cleaning out than we thought. We ended up working for 4 hours, intense labour in intense heat. But we all performed wonderfully. We kept hearing the family call us something we didn't recognize, afraid of what they were calling us David was called for assistance. To our surprise they were actually saying that we were working as hard as the locals, which is an outstanding compliment coming from the actual locals. After 4 hours of intense labour, breathing in concrete and soot, and learning small snippets of Spanish we were finally finished with clearing the area out. In the words of Sir Reed, this is really when we were able to show the physical love of Jesus. And although we were all sore and dirty, the family had seen the love of Christ and that's the only thing that matters in the end. After we returned back to Casabuena and hosed off we headed out to see the rest of La Paz. It was nice to become acquainted with the level of poverty and the kinds of people we were going to be working for during the next 8 days. Then we returned back home again, scarfed down some quesadillas and headed off to bed. We have church in the morning :)