Dear Friends,

      “And rock will break open and pour out water…” Psalm 113:8

     When I read that and it makes me think about what I witnessed a few weeks ago. A smart 12 year old boy, who has been emotionally guarded, cried like a baby when our gigantic team of 40 people from Kansas and North Carolina said goodbye to the kids and staff of Talita Cumi. Granted the boy did not get to know the 40 individuals well, in fact he bonded with just a hand full, but I think the thing that touched him most was the idea that complete strangers could love him and his brothers and sisters at the home unconditionally. I think he saw and understood what the body of Christ looks like, witnessed the power of the Holy Spirit, and most importantly felt what the Love of God feels like.

     Seeing the effect that love has on our children is almost scary. Here are 30 kids who have come from painfully abusive backgrounds at the mercy of their own parents. They have been abandoned, abused, and hurt deeply. It’s completely understandable that they would be guarded. But you would never know that they have been scarred by looking at them. They greet people with warmth and hugs and are open to friendship, but inside they are living with unresolved burdens that we can not see or get close enough to break open like a rock.

     I wrote in our prayer letter in January that we have failed to unburden our kids who have already left Talita Cumi from the emotional junk that holds them back from being the young men and women that God has indented them to be.  We spend countless days teaching them about God and his word and we have Aunties who love and care for them and teach them from right and wrong… yet the moment they are on their own they forget that God is who He says he is, all powerful! And they forget that they can believe HIS promises. They are the sons and daughters of the King. Instead they believe who the world says they are, NOTHING…a lost and poor orphan unworthy of anything decent, unworthy of love or happiness.  Instead they choose to settle for counterfeit love and happiness that is offered by lions roaming around looking for a victim.

     Seeing this young boy open up and cry in public, unashamed, breaks my heart and gives me hope at the same time.  It also makes me hope that our psychologist, with the help of Christ the great physician, can bring health to this boy and his Talita Cumi brothers and sisters.  We pray that we can provide them with a emotionally safe place to break open the rock walls which hold in the their pain and suffering and keep them in bondage and from being who their true Father wants them to be.

Run for the bus!

  Brian Thomas ran and ran! See Brian RUN! See God work. Brian and his friends have collected enough money for Talita Cumi to buy a mini bus for Talita Cumi praise the Lord. Brian raised more than money and he also raised spirits with his unsinkable joy and contagious faith that all things are possible with God. Thank you Tio (Uncle) Brian for taking on this huge dream and making it a reality!

 Love, Heidi

Hey Everybody,

     Happy New Year to you all!  We pray that God has many blessings in store for you in 2010 and some interesting challenges as well to grow you in your faith and reliance on Him.

     Well, I obviously haven’t gotten into the habit of blogging yet...one more New Year’s resolution perhaps. So, to ge started in 2010, I want to take this opportunity to tell you about an exciting new challenge God has put before us.

     Last September, our World Concern team entered into an intensive process to research and discern changes in our direction, enabling us better to serve the last and the lost. This process led us to the Chaco area in southern Santa Cruz department, where the Guarani people have their home. The Guarani have inhabited this area for centuries. Originally nomadic hunters and gathers and known as fierce warriors when provoked to defend their families and lands, they have now settled into grinding lives of poverty as subsistence farmers and laborers, often exploited by large landholders into indentured labor.

     In the very dry Chaco region, the Guarani people are among Bolivia’s poorest people, clinging to lands that once produced abundantly and sustained a growing and thriving population but now has become a region plagued by drought and fierce dry seasons that has caused many to abandon their communities and forced others to look for work outside their communities to sustain their families.

     Guarani divide their lands into autonomous governing bodies called capitanias.  In Bolivia, there are at least 26 capitanias guaranies, distributed in the departments of Tarija, Sucre and Santa Cruz.

     We intend to begin our ministry in remote communities in Capitania Gran Kaipependi Karovaicho (GKK). These small Guarani communities, that once sustained 60 to 100 families in each village, are now down to 25 or 30. Lack of water, both from rains and from the ground, to sustain the needs of the families and their animals has been the main reason for this exodus. The aquifers in the region are very deep, making well drilling very expensive and impractical. There are some streams and springs in the surrounding mountains, but they are few and generally far from the areas that are flat enough to be used for agriculture.

      As my team and I did interviews with these families, we were saddened to find that many live with little hope.  Their difficult life in the region, a generational cycle of poverty, dramatic climatic and cultural changes and the lack of water seem to have created a general lack of vision and hope for a better future.  Parents treat their children with detachment and as a group rather than individuals.

     Education is not valued and higher education discouraged. The young people do not envision life beyond this cycle and leave school to work as poorly paid laborers in the large farms in the lowlands. Girls leave the communities at 12 or 13 years old to cook in the camps of the laborers and return to their communities as young mothers.  Schools generally teach up to the 6 or 7th grade.  Few students complete even that level of study and very few who pursue further studies.

     A doctor visits these communities only once a month. Though there is a health care assistant shared by several villages, medicines are scarce and many turn to shamans and traditional practitioners for care.

     The church is very weak in the area. Two communities have Protestant churches that meet in ramshackle buildings and are run by local elders who receive no support or training. Neither the Protestant nor Catholic churches, that are visited only occasionally by a priest to perform mass, are actively involved in addressing the needs of the communities.

     We will start working in these communities this year and our plan is to become extensively involved at the community level, working in small groups that will reach into every household.  We will facilitate a process that enables community members to more deeply understand and address the cycles of poverty and helplessness that have destroyed their hope. We will help them come up with plans to begin to reverse this cycle and then will provide training and resources to help them carry out these plans.  We will also do a parallel process with local churches and church leaders to strengthen the church so it will have more impact as God’s instrument of spiritual and social change in these communities.

     This will not be easy, the depths of poverty and hopelessness among the people and the extreme remoteness and difficulty of access to the area will make this the most challenging project we have undertaken. But, we are strengthened in knowing that we can count on the support and prayers of so many of you who have been faithful in seeing us through this far. We are confident in knowing that God will be faithful to complete this work that he has started.

Stay Tuned...

God Bless,

Bill

More at: www.renovar.net

Hi everyone,

We are trying something new here to try to do a better job of keeping you all informed of what is happening with us here in Bolivia, both in ministry as well as family. Please bear with us as we get used to this and see what will be the best way to use these tools.  This is the first time I have tried this, so we will see what happens….

I'll start by sharing with you about a fun trip I had this week back to Cordillera, a Guarani Indian community that I wrote about in my last prayer letter. (You can read it at  www.cvmusa.org/Document.Doc?id=2243 )  The people in Cordillera are very poor and World Concern is helping by providing them with micro-loans.  These loans are given to groups of people and each member of the group can decide how they want to use their money.  We worked on Thursday with a group called "Tembipe" which is Guarani means "light".  Almost everyone in the group uses their loans to buy pigs, but their techniques for raising those pigs are very primitive.  They lose a lot of animals to disease. On Thursday we did some exercises with them to find out what kinds of diseases they have and then did some training on how to vaccinate and treat for parasites.  In the afternoon we went out and vaccinated their pigs to give them hands-on experience so they can continue to use these techniques on their own.  Below are some pictures that tell the story better then I can.