Farewell

Well. Here we are in the U.S. We left Bolivia a week ago today, spent a few days at MCC's headquarters in Akron, the weekend at a "re-entry" retreat nearby, and drove down to Harrisonburg to spend this week with the Schrocks. More on all (or at least some) of that later. Here are a few snapshots from our week of farewells leading up to leaving the country. In the photo above we are with our family of families in Bolivia: Peter and Lena Fehr, Helga and Wesley, from Canadiense II colony.

 The church we attended in Santa Cruz, Sinai Mennonite Church, held a bit of a farewell moment and meal for us our last Sunday - together with fellow MCCers also ending their term, Andy and Cassie Herringshaw (Andy is at right in the photo). Pastor Freddy Barron is at left.

 Meal at Sinai Mennonite Church.

 The Masavi women have been great for our kids. Here are a few of them: Elly, Junana, Vicky, Maritza, Julia, Lisbeth, and Isabel's daughter.

Our farewell at MCC, also together with the Herringshaws, was the next day. Here Cassie plays for group singing.

And what would a farewell be without folks stopping by when the baby has just fallen asleep?! Here we are moments after MCC co-workers Eloina and Nati burst in with all things boliviano.

All our earthly possessions (or at least from our Bolivian life) ready for the plane, the night before.

With Willmar, who brought us to the airport, ready to start the marathon travel day. We left the MCC Bolivia yard at 5.45am and arrived at the MCC Akron, PA yard at 3.30am the next morning - just a few tears, throw-ups, naps, and ginger ales later. We're glad to be back!

Last one!

Last week I finished the August-September Menno Bote, Ramont wrote the last report for the Charagua "Water for Life" project, and with that we ended our four-year MCC assignment here in Bolivia.

Here we are in front of Centro Menno on the last day it was open during our term.



And the last day at the front desk for this little guy.

Nine months

Anna is now nine months old! Here are some photos from her over the last week or so, as well as some with Jonathan (and since I cannot figure out how to smoothly arrange photos in Blogger, and because we have a few other things to do, I'm going to just leave them as they are).

And a few details about our little baby-soon-to-be-college-student:

Walking: Oh my, does she ever want to. No crawling yet, but lots of spinning on her belly and yowling with frustration that she's not going anywhere fast enough.

Teeth: two middle bottom ones came in as usual, and then on her 9-month birthday, out pops one of the "fang" teeth on the top - it's quite funny!

Health: This month she had a fever and sniffles one day. To us it was a bit scary that she was so limp (i.e. not straining out of our arms, but almost settling into them), since she hasn't been sick before. But it's not surprising, given that it's winter here.

Sleeping: Anna's almost predictable schedule is that she wakes up between 5am and 6am, naps from 9am until about 10am, and then again for half an hour sometime between 1pm and 2pm. Her night still begins at about 5.30pm (when we're home). We've been out a lot of evenings lately, which has been a bit rough on her/us.

Playing: Anna likes to be on the tile floor and in the grass, and also likes to tear around in her walker. Yesterday she was in her walker and Jonathan was zipping around on his trike on the concrete basketball/soccer court on the yard here, and it was so much fun to watch the two speedsters! 

Here Anna sports her Old Colony dress, given to her by our friends, Isaak and Aganetha Doerksen from Durango Colony.

Jonathan is now almost two and a half, and at a really interesting stage in life - words, words, songs, words, and a few more words. As I write this he's in his room (quiet time) singing songs that we'll be singing in church in about in hour: Cristo, te necesita para amar...
 

 

And here is a photo from our marathon farewell tour through Morgenland on Friday. Almost every yard had an old tractor, which is just pure bliss for Jonathan. Almost every yard also had a third cousin or two. Here is Jonathan "driving the big tractor" with third cousin Jason, who was just a baby when we first visited his grandparents (Will and Justina Braun) on our first trip to the colony four years ago.

Five years

Five years ago last Saturday, Ramont and I got married. It was a hot, dry summer day, with a tractor pull contest across main street from First Mennonite Church in Mountain Lake, Minnesota. The ceremony was exactly what we wanted: a choir of our friends singing music we liked as well as congregational hymns, great organist, family members participating in different ways, a loong sermon by Willmar (wait, we requested succinct... :), faspa afterwards, and several other family/friends events before and after. We so much enjoyed that weekend. It was a good start to our married life.

And here we are five years later, absolutely unable to imagine life without the other. We are among the lucky few who have spent almost every single day more or less together (and will for the foreseeable future). We've lived four-fifths of our married life in Bolivia. We've had one of our wedding rings stolen at gun point (when we were both there, wearing them). We've learned two new languages. We've come by two little kiddies. And we talk a lot about the next sixty years, namely how great they'll be.




Yes, we are truly among the lucky.

Happy Famirly*

*So said the pillow case Mary Raber sent us from Ukraine on the occasion of Jonathan's birth. Our famirly happiness has only grown since then.

Jonathan, 2 years and 4 months
Anna, almost 9 months

Santa Cruz, Bolivia
July 2012

Las Gamas

Yesterday we attended church with our MCC colleague, Juana Masavi, and her sister Maritza. For about three years now they've been leading a small Mennonite congregation in the small town of Las Gamas, about 40 kms northeast of Santa Cruz. This church was begun somewhat informally back in the 1970s (by MCC workers of all things); first home Bible studies, then a women's group, and then officially the church "Corazón de Cristo" in 1977. Today there are about 5-10 adults (but 15-20 kids) that attend weekly.

The building, freshly roofed a few weeks ago by Mennonite young adults from the U.S., is in the photo above.

Juana teaches/preaches the Bible lesson, while Maritza leads singing and one of the children's Sunday School classes during the service. In the photo below, some of the kids recite the verse they (and we) learned for memory this morning.

In order to get to Las Gamas on time each Sunday morning, the two women leave on the bus the evening before - a journey of two hours one-way (when the dirt road is passable). It's no small commitment and service they are engaged in!

Our kids have been rather amazing church-attenders recently. For the last two months or so, we have never had to leave our bench during the 1.5-2 hour services. Granted, we're exhausted by the end of the wrestling session, but still, it gives us hope!
(our secret: graham crackers. Notice both kids are working on them).

After the service, the church folks took us on a walking tour of the small, tranquil-seeming town - the plaza, the school, the thatch-roofed market stalls that never got much use. Then everyone had lunch at the home of folks that also serve meals-for-purchase on Sunday, at a table underneath a shade tree. Jonathan points the way.

In these pots are the "restaurant" meals (peanut soup, picante chicken, and chops of some kind), as well as the chicken-rice-potato stew that we all ate. Food cooked over a wood fire tastes much better (and is quicker to prepare), they say.

The cooking and our eating took place under this thatched roof. Just outside of it was this guy pounding steamed rice into a flour. This was going to be mixed with yucca, lard, and cheese to make a dense kind of bread (also to sell).

One of the highlights of the day for us was hearing Jonathan speak so freely and naturally in Spanish - first with the Masavis in the vehicle, and here with Octavio and his little red car. And, course, we nearly burst with pride at our little charlador.

Holding pattern

In many ways it feels like we're in a holding pattern these days. Most of our MCC Bolivia colleagues are out of town/country at the moment, so there's not much activity around the office. We're holding down Centro Menno until Willmar and Hannah return after their 10-week home leave. And we have only three weeks left in the country before we return to the U.S. and begin our next life. We're not very motivated to go out and be adventurous. All this to acknowledge that our blog posts are and have been rather boring. It goes without saying that our kids, with their ever-evolving personalities and achievement levels, are the main excitement in our life right now. So here are a few word and photo snapshots of 2 1/3 years old and 8 months old.

First, Anna has been joining us for meals in her highchair (photo above). Meals have nicely become a full-family event. This is especially great for me, in that I can feed her and eat my own food at the same time. I've been feeding her solids rather differently than I did Jonathan. Whereas he ate mainly pure(ed) fruits and vegetables for most of his first year, she eats pretty much what we do, and lots of it - stir fry, pasta, curry, cheese, eggs, beans, lentils, chicken, etc. What's nice about this is that I don't need to prepare all kinds of "special" foods for her - although there are some cubes of pureed fruits/vegs in the freezer to add to her meal if necessary or to cool something off quickly. Also, preparing meals now is quite like a stint I did in a  nursing home kitchen, in terms of three different forms of each food: the original meal, then a plate for Jonathan that can cool off and be cut into chunks, and then puree a bit of everything for Anna.


Jonathan is at a great life stage right now (actually, each stage so far as been the best one yet). He has become a chatterbox. While this can get a bit, well, exhausting, it is also fascinating. We're seeing the world anew through a 2-year old's mind and words. And it's extra interesting because he is so verbose in all three languages. The funniest sayings all seem to be in Low German, so I won't bore you with those here.

One other characteristic right now is that he is quite solicitous of his little sister. Yes he will often love her a bit fiercely (luckily she seems on course to become a bruiser - very tough, she is), but generally he pro-actively and re-actively wants to make her happy. We are lucky indeed.

At eight months old, Anna keeps us hopping. She is generally content...as long as she is doing something. This is asking a bit much of parents who like to sit quietly and read or take a nap after lunch. But it also means that she is no boring blob of a baby, and for that we're grateful!

If the weather is nice, we spend the late afternoon outside on the lawn. Anna loves grabbing fistfuls of grass and examining the blades, or eating them. Meanwhile Jonathan plays in the sandbox or rides all over the MCC yard on his car (trike).

And of course she's reading. Didn't your baby at eight months?

Anna's schedule has become slightly more predictable. She generally sleeps an hour in the morning, sometimes half an hour in the afternoon, and at night from 5.30pm until about 5.00am (with a few meals in between).

For the first year or so of Jonathan's life, we kind of neglected to read him books. We were seriously worried that he would never be interested in books or learn to read. But now he cannot hear enough stories in the day. The best reading session is before bed. Here I'm reading to him one of the daily requirements: Danny and the Dinosaur (dinosaur in Low German is still dinosaur).

Since it's been raining so much, we spend a lot of time playing inside. Here's a big load on "Opa's big tractor."

And that, aside from hugging water bottles to stay warm, is about all that's new in the Harder Schrock household this week.

July Menno Bote: some hot topics

The July 2012 Menno Bote, published by MCC Bolivia, is going into colony mailboxes this morning. In addition to the usual columns, this issue features a photo spread with extended captions of Willmar and Hannah's travels to/in North America: Panama Canal, Central Valley (California) agriculture and irrigation, and sightseeing in the Grand Canyon area. There is a report from a recent conservation agriculture workshop put on by MCC and partners in Honduras, which the Rural Programs coordinator of MCC Bolivia attended. There is an article describing life in Del Sur colony, written by one of its members.

Phil Bender, our political analyst of sorts, also wrote a third article in a series describing Bolivia's indigenous people. The focus this time is on the Ayoreos (also called Moros), a lowland group that has lived in the Bolivian and Paraguayan chacos for hundreds of years and were relatively less "touched" by the Spanish over time. In fact, the advocacy group Survival International noted that Paraguay’s Department of Indian Affairs confirmed in February 2012 that an uncontacted Ayoreo tribe was living on farmland in the northern Chaco region. The photo above-left shows the house of previously uncontacted people, which was discovered when a road was bulldozed through the area by the company.

Another interesting, perhaps controversial, aspect of this Menno Bote are two articles touching on the sensitive topic of colony Mennonites and schooling. One article, taken from the small book Geschichte der Mennoniten (compiled by Abram Unrau), describes how Durango Colony began in Mexico in 1924. It points out that the Old Colonists in Canada were increasingly leary of the government requiring the use of English and approved school material in colony schools; this is suggested as a primary motivation for moving to Mexico. So that is one article in this issue.

On another page is a recent article lifted directly from the pages of El Deber, the main newspaper of Santa Cruz, around which most of the Bolivian colonies are clustered. This article is entitled “Mennonites included in the national education system: The Bolivian government is committed to improving education” (my translation). It reports that the Mennonite school, supported by the EMMC and other missionary groups, in the Villa Nueva community near Pailón is now an officially recognized school in Bolivia. The article has many interesting details, one of which is that on the occasion of signing the official documents, "the students sang the national and cruceño anthems in Spanish and in their native language" (my translation). The article also makes several references to Bolivia's committment to respecting the culture, customs, traditions, and religion of the Mennonites.

Here's a photo of the school, when MCC visited it a few months ago.

This is interesting stuff (I'll leave the analysis up to you readers). "Oh the times, they are a changin'..." (Bob Dylan).