Returning Home

Hola friends and supporters,

Most of us have now arrived back in Sydney after around 4-5 days in transit. We left the Tans in Sucre, Bolivia on sunday afternoon and five of our team members arrived in Sydney this morning around 8:30am.

In between, we stayed in Santa Cruz, Bolivia for a night, Buenos Aires, Argentina for 2 nights, went on a shopping spree and did much sightseeing in Buenos Aires, and experienced a 13 + 3 + 3 hours flight delay. As I write, Johnny and Daniel are still on a flight back from Auckland to Sydney, please keep them in your prayers.

Meanwhile, I know we have been lacking in the photos department for a while due to difficulty and time restrictions in uploading photos while we were in Bolivia. Here are a few from my phone. Hopefully it helps you understand our previously described experiences in a better light.

This is on the first day of our hike. We started near the top of the mountain and desend quickly down into jungle areas. Most of the track on our first day were these rocky paths which required quite a bit of mental energy and hard work on our knees and ankles, because you had to think about every step you make. But what grand views!

We have just completed our 3-day hike and after a hot shower and a good lunch feed at Coroico, we hopped on a bus back to La Paz to meet Freeman.

We travelled with the Tan's, and a few brothers and sisters from a Sucre church, to surrounding rural villages to set up medical clinics and run some childrens programs. It was encouraging to see brothers and sisters from Sucre city take the opportunity to share their faith with villagers who were waiting to be seen by Dr Tan, Johnny and a few medical students.

These rural villages were quite far away, and our group travelled in a convoy of three 4WDs. This one was driven by Liling. We really appreciated her courage and driving skills, especially on our 5-6 hours trips back home in the dark, on dusty and rocky roads that wind around the side of mountains!

Here, Annie Tan is being the "tap", helping us out with teaching local children about personal hygiene and washing hands. We shared 4 simple steps (soak hands, scrub hands with soap, rinse, and dry hands) and children then lined up to wash their hands. Afterwards, we gave each child a cake of soap and a small handtowel to take home. Maybe, due to the nature of the work the children do, often we found not just dirt but small cuts (like paper cuts) on their hands. For us in Australia, we might think that washing hands is a simple daily task and take it for granted. But in the villagers, patients would go out of their way to bring their children (and themselves) to line up to wash their hands!

We say goodbye to the Tans at Sucre Airport.

There are a lot more photos and stories to share, but we'll do that in more detail at our sharing night. Thanks for reading our blog and praying for us regularly.

- Hannah