NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

Without sharing too many specifics, we would like to ask you to pray for the country of Bolivia.  There is a lot of turmoil here between the government and the opposition.  Please pray for safety and for resolution. 

We started Spanish classes about three weeks after we got here. There is a really good institute here, run by Bolivians, that caters to missionaries who need to learn Spanish. We have really enjoyed getting to know the different teachers and meeting other missionaries who are working in Cochabamba. Right now, Dan is going to class 2 hours a day, 2 days a week and Laura is going to class 2 hours a day, 3 days a week. On top of classes, Dan needs to put in 40 hours a week in Spanish study and Laura needs to put in 20 hours a week. We also have a language helper who comes over twice a week. On top of all our Spanish study, we need to keep our home running!

Fortunately, Anna and Ben have adjusted very well to our move here. They continue to amaze us and make us laugh every day! They are now walking and love to explore our condo. They enjoy playing with each other and following each other into different rooms. Anna is actually saying a few words now, like “ba” (ball), “ha” (hi), and “ba” (bye). Ben points to things and says “dis” (this). They are making friends with our Bolivian neighbors and have drawn a lot of attention from people here– because they are so fair and because they are mellizos (twins)! It’s been a good way to meet new people and practice our Spanish.

We are deep into our Spanish classes now!  Please pray that we would absorb all the new things we are learning and hearing and be able to put them into practice.  Pray that we would be able to balance home life and school life.  At times, we feel very overwhelmed! 

Thank you all for your prayers for our family recently! We are happy to report that Ben and Anna are back to normal! We need to get them checked for amoebas one more time so we know if we are in the clear or not. We are so thankful to have a healthy family again. We felt the prayers of everyone and were comforted by that when we were feeling very discouraged. Please pray that the twins would stay healthy. We are very aware that they are being bombarded with new germs and viruses all the time and we can only do so much to keep them healthy. We have to put it in the Lord’s Hands every day.

We will be beginning our language classes this week. We had our evaluations this past Thursday. Dan did great and the director was very impressed with his vocabulary. He will be going to class for 2 hours a day, 3 days a week until he is at a certain level- which I don’t think will take too long! I will be going 2 hours a day, 2 days a week for now. Language school is a little bit expensive ($9/hour per person), so that is determining how much we can do right now and we also have to be here to care for the twins! It is going to be a challenge balancing our home life and school. Besides taking classes, I will also have a language helper who will come to our apartment to help me even more with learning Spanish. I am feeling overwhelmed with thinking about how our schedules are going to work out. It is also recommended that we get “house help” soon to help ease the stress of living. We don’t even know where to start with finding someone to help us around the house with cleaning and cooking. We have been asking other missionaries about how go about this and it seems like it’s just trial and error until you find the right person. Please pray for us that we would find the right person- someone who is trustworthy and friendly and who even might be a Christian!

We are still waiting to get our crates! We thought they were already in Cochabamba, but we just found out they are in Chile! It might be another 2 months until we get them. It is discouraging for us to think it will be that long, but we are thankful for what we already have. We are praying that the Lord would allow the paperwork for the crates to move along quickly and that it would be less than 2 months.

On Saturday Dan was able to take a trip up one of the mountains outside Cochabamba with a group of NTM guys. The drive up the mountain was only 12 miles but it took 1 hour and 45 minutes! In 12 miles, the elevation went from about 8,000 feet to almost 14,000 feet! They went to a lake up there to do some fishing and hiking. The pictures below are from his trip.

We were able to move into our own apartment almost 2 weeks ago!  We are slowly getting it set up now.  It takes a little time!  We’ve had to buy a fridge and a stove and will be needing to buy a washing machine soon (the one that was left here is not going to make it too much longer!). 

After about 1 1/2 weeks of being here, the twins got sick with rotavirus and amoebas.  They both ended up in the ER with IVs for a few hours.  What a way to get welcomed into the country!  We really had to put our trust in the Lord as we watched our babies get poked with needles.  After about a week of them being very sick they are now on their way to health again. 

It looks like we will be starting language school in about 1 1/2 weeks.  We are not exactly sure how it will work out since one of us will always need to be home with the twins. 

We are excited to be here and to get settled into the way of life here- which is totally different than what we were used to in the states!  Thank you for your prayers for our family!

We are typing this from the NTM guest house in Cochabamba, Bolivia!  We arrived here on Wednesday June 25th after a pretty uneventful trip.  All our luggage arrived when we did- which is a huge answer to prayer! 

We have been staying at the NTM guest house since we arrived, but have found an apartment to rent and hope to move in in the next day or two!  We are excited to have our own place and to start getting into a routine.  The twins seem to be adjusting well- despite the colds they have been fighting since we got here.  We are now going through the huge task of buying things for our apartment.   It’s not as easy as running to Walmart or Ikea for all your household needs!  There are many different places to go to for many different things!  We are thankful for the many people here who have offered to drive us to the places we need to get to.  You never realize how nice it is to have your own car until you don’t have one anymore! 

We are excited to be here and to be involved in what the Lord id doing here.  We couldn’t be doing this without our "team" behind us. 

For calmness and peace as we finish packing before we leave.

For safety as we fly to Bolivia and that we would make all our connections.

That Anna and Ben would be flexible and adjust to all the changes coming our way.

That all our luggage would arrive in Cochabamba when we arrive!

Anna and Benjamin turned one on May 12th! We celebrated with a big family party and they were spoiled with many fun presents.

They are a joy to us and it is so fun to see them developing and growing everyday! They are both crawling around everywhere! It is cute to watch them follow each other on different “missions”- like crawling into their bedroom to look at the nightlight. They definitely have their own personalities and keep us on our toes! Anna loves to walk around holding on to our hands. She just needs to get the whole balancing thing down! Ben is not interested in walking at all. When we try to help him walk, he just falls down and starts crawling! Please pray with us as we enter this new toddler stage and are starting to see their “will” come out. We want to be godly in our responses as we correct and teach them.

A lot has happened since our last update! The biggest change is that we have moved up our departure date for Bolivia. The new date is June 24th! After talking to some of the NTM missionaries down there, we decided that a June departure would work out better for many different reasons. We will depart from Chicago at 3pm and arrive in Cochabamba at 8 in the morning! We will be exhausted, but we felt it would be better for the twins to travel through the night. We are praying that they will sleep for most of the flight!

Once we get to Cochabamba, we will be met by some fellow NTM missionaries who will take us to the NTM guest house, where we will stay for the first week or so. During that time, we will have some field orientation, look for a place to live, meet our fellow missionaries, and start looking for appliances and furnishings for our new home. We already have some friends down there who have been keeping a look-out for a place for us to live– which we are so thankful for! In our last newsletter we mentioned that we had to build some crates for our stuff and get them up to Minnesota and another organization would ship them to Cochabamba for free for us. Everything worked out beautifully and our crates our on their way to Bolivia as I type this!

Our family drove down to Elizabethton, TN on March 6th to share in our other "home" church and to get together with friends that we hadn’t seen in a few years.  Oak Street Baptist Church was the church we attended for 4 years while we lived down there for Dan to attend Moody Aviation.  We hadn’t really had a chance to reconnect with the church since we had moved away in 2005 to begin our training with New Tribes.

It was so refreshing to see so many friends and to drive around the town that we had lived in for most of our married life.  We also had the chance to see Dan’s parents again.  They ended up helping us out alot during our visit.  Besides being very busy getting together with people and sharing in the church service, our son caught some bad stomach virus about half way through our trip.  We ended up taking him to the emergency room twice in the middle of the night.  That’s where we were so thankful that Dan’s parents where nearby and could watch Anna for us.  We left to come home a day early so we could get Benjamin back into his own crib and familiar surroundings.  Once we were back home again, we took him into the ER two more times.  He was getting dehydrated and was extremely lethargic and weak and was losing weight.  They finally admitted him and got an IV in him.  We did not want him to be in the hospital, but our son was not getting better and it had been almost a week.  When they took out the IV the next morning, he was like a new baby.  He was smiling again, talking again, eating again.  We don’t know for sure what he had, but we are so thankful that he is feeling better again.  And we are amazed that Anna never caught it- especially since she would take Ben’s nookie out of his mouth and suck on it! 

We don’t understand why Ben had to go through this and why it happened during our trip.  We felt like it was deja vu from our trip to Arizona in November.  We do know that the Lord was using it to teach us- to depend on Him, to trust Him, to exercise our faith in Him.  We spent a lot of time praying!!   We are realizing more and more that once we get to Bolivia life is going to be hard- it’s not going to be an easy adjustment.  We are not promised an easy life, but we are promised that He will be with us and will comfort us when we cry out to Him.  And we are really starting to understand that our babies are in the Lord’s care and that He loves them even more than we can fathom.  A friend of ours gave us a book right before we left for TN called "The Power of a Praying Parent".  We started reading it in the van on the way down and were reminded that our children are truly gifts from God and the best thing we could do for them was to pray.  Boy, did we pray for our babies this past week!