Bolivia Report

March 31^st - April 15, 2006

This year Melodie Thompson and I (Kathy Smith)  journeyed to Bolivia for two weeks.  We enjoyed the hospitality of Tom and Kathy Sutherland in Cochabamba. 

We joined in with everyday life at the Sutherlands - enjoying fellowship times with other short-term mission groups from the US, Sunday services - morning and evening, getting to know Tom & Kathy's family.  Tom had also lined up several opportunities to witness the ministries that Pioneers is involved with.

Some of these ministries are:

• Church planting - we helped clean up an old garage area that has been donated for a new church building - cleaning the floors and walls, pulling weeds, moving boxes out of the way.
• Prison Day Care: - we joined with Shirley and Jerry Margraves who have been faithful at gathering up between 30 and 40 children each day who live in the local prisons with the mom's or dad's. The children are free to go outside of the jail each day so they are collected and brought to the Margraves home where they are bathed, given clean clothes, feed, played with, taught Bible stories and enjoy a nap time! This ministry has outgrown the home and we saw the new location of the day care property. Plans have been made to build and as funds and help allow this centre will hopefully be completed sometime within the next year.
• Chaski Radio station - this project has been ongoing for several years. The broadcast is in Quechua and goes throughout the Andes mountains. Galcom radios from Hamilton ON have been tuned to receive this radio station and many have come to know the Lord through this radio ministry. We met several of the people who volunteer with the programming - writing Bible studies, doing dramas, playing Christian music and broadcasting the weather and local news! Alex Muir who is a home missionary with Pioneers in New Brunswick has taken several thousand of the Galcom radios to Bolivia and he continues to go once a year to see them distributed. We have supported this ministry.
• High Risk Children - A school at the edge of town that is being supported by the church Tom & Kathy attend. Their church started this school when they realized that many of the local children in this area where from broken homes and they could not afford to go to school. They start at kindergarten ...however, there is a small day care happening here as well as many of the children bring their younger brothers and sisters with them to school because there is no one home to look after them. The school offers up to grade 8 education. They have a full time cook who prepares a meal at noon and most times this is perhaps that only meal these children receive.
• Baby washing - Melodie had an opportunity to go downtown and help ‘wash the babies'. Several of the country Quechua ladies have come into the city hoping for a better life and perhaps just to sell this year's food crop so while in town a local church has taken on the task of washing babies every Saturday afternoon. Melodie was excited to be able to help out her ...I think she ended up almost as wet as some of the kids!

All of these programs are currently supported by North American funds and the hope of Pioneers is to be able to support from within their own country.  Tom has been given several thousand acres of land and he has built a proposal called "PLANTING HOPE" which should see profit going back to the above ministries, to the local churches and several other areas of need.   We continue to pray and seek out where we can be of most help in this new project plan.