Well we arrived safe and sound last weekend after a long haul...4 countries, 2 days, and not a lot of food! We spent the night in the Lima airport which actually was quite nice. We slept till 8:30ish on the chairs in one of the gates. At one point, I heard the announcements for a plane boarding from the gate we were in and saw a bunch of people and then fell right back to sleep. I'm sure those people thought we were crazy Gringo's sleeping on the chairs in the airport. We arrived in Santa Cruz where the Masseys picked us up and took us to the mission base. They are AWESOME!!! They have 3 kids Ty, Sam, and Georgia who are great! We stayed at the base Friday night and Saturday they had organized a little welcome party for us with all the SAM (South America Missions) missionaries. The team is great and quite large! It was wonderful to meet them all but right after the party we packed our bags and took a 10 hour bus to Cochabamba for 3 weeks of language school. Joe's Young Life leader, Johnny Kilmartin and his wife Jennifer, live in Cochabamba teaching English in a school here and recommended a language school to us. We have been here in Cochabama for 5 days and it's great! The climate is PERFECT and we love our school! We are living with a lady named Carmen (Dona Carmen) who was a biochemist but now is retired. She is super nice and the house is pretty cozy. We quickly learned a hard custom of Bolivia and have had to adjust our schedules. Typically, Bolivians eat breakfast (with instant coffee) as we do, then eat a HUGE lunch around 2pm, and then only eat bread and drink tea for dinner. We have been a bit hungry at night but have found places to get light snacks before going home to eat bread and tea with our family! We visited a hosptial yesterday and both were astonished at how NICE and CLEAN it was! There were no stray dogs or cats anywhere...a little different than the hospital in Granada! We might be volunteering a few days a week there or another clinic while here in Cochabamba.
Johnny and Jennifer have been in the States for the Holidays so we have not seen them yet but they arrive here this weekend. We are pumped to hang out with them and see what their lives look like here in Cochabama. We are surrounded by gorgeous, gigantic mountains so hope to explore the many parks with the Kilmartins when they return. The city itself is a mile higher than Charlottesville and we have seen a few affects...we went running the first day here and after 5 minutes, Joe said he heard my heart beating is was working so hard! I was DYING!!! Day by day we have increased our minutes of running-we are up to 20 minutes!!! A big goal I know! We are headed to La Paz this weekend and a lot of people get altitude sickness pretty badly so we are hoping for no vomit! Anyways, we are alive and safe and will update you soon!
Love you and miss you all!
Julie and Joe
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