Proyecto Libertad Through The Years

Here´s a video we made to share at a couple of churches to give an update and overview of what is going on with us and Proyecto Libertad.

¨Jefe¨ is a Daddy!

Jefe at his graduation from elementary school, 5 years ago.

Today, Jefe is all grown up and 8 days ago he became a father!

This is his daughter, Cheili Carolain (pronounced Chaylee Caroline) who is the spitting image of her daddy!

Jefe with his partner, Dina and Cheili. I say partner because they aren´t married. They live together in something like a common-law type marriage. I´m not sure what kind of legal validity it has here but it is very common in Bocachica.

Andrea and Christian wanting their photo taken too! Christian is Cheili´s uncle and Andrea is her cousin.

The Minnesota Team

This past week we hosted a team from North Heights Lutheran Church from Arden Hills, Minnesota.

We had a great time with the Minnesota team this past week! A great group...worked hard, wonderful attitudes, well-prepared, generous, etc... lots of good stuff to say about them!

Rochelle playing with the kids in the cancha.


Lindsey helping in the kitchen.

Cell group night...Robin leading worship Bocachica style.

(If you are on Facebook, I posted a video of this...check it out!)

Wish you could have been there for this one...Neider and some buddies doing a rap song at the cell group. They brought the house down!

(This one too!)

Jeff sharing a testimony at our cell group meeting and Ben translating.

Jeff and Reinel working on latrines.

(I must confess that I stole this photo from Rehanna off Facebook)

Playing Limbo in the rain.

(This one too.)

Bathing and playing in the rain.

The first couple of days the team arrived our cistern was dry so the rain was a welcome sight! Thank the Lord, the water barge came the next day and filled us up!

Lindsay playing with the kids.

Cachaco´s Story

Nearly a year ago I received a message via the comments section of our blog from Claudia, in New Jersey, who had stumbled upon our blog when she was Googling ¨Bocachica¨. Claudia is an American-born Colombian and her husband, Giovani is from Bogotá but moved to the USA when he was 9 years old. About 3 years ago they were in Colombia on vacation and they came to Cartagena for a few days during their trip. Unfortunately their experience in the Jewel of Colombia (as many Colombians refer to Cartagena) was not all that great and for different reasons they had no desire to ever return! There was one experience, however, that they couldn´t get out of their hearts and minds. One day on a tourist outing their boat made a stop in Bocachica for lunch. Their day had been pretty horrible so far and they were just counting the minutes until their boat would finally leave to take them back to Cartagena. They were already planning to cut their trip short and leave this city ASAP! During their wait in Bocachica, they came across an 11 year old boy who´s nickname is ¨Cachaco¨ (that is the word that people in Bocachica use to refer to white people or people from the interior of the country). Cachaco was different from the rest of the crowd because he wasn´t hounding them about buying something or asking for money or anything like that, he just wanted to hang out with them and be their friend. After about 20 or 30 minutes with Cachaco, he had stolen their hearts. It was time for the boat to leave though and as they were loading up, Giovani wanted to find some way to help this kid so he pulled off his sneakers and gave them and a pair of shorts to Cachaco. They assumed they would never see this kid again and off they went. Too make the story a little shorter I´ll jump ahead about 2 years or so later. After all that time Claudia and Giovani couldn´t get Cachaco out of their minds and one day Claudia was Googling ¨Bocachica¨ on a whim to see what she might find. Well, lo and behold, she found our blog and couldn´t believe her eyes! So she wrote me and told me her story and asked if there was any way we could find this little boy for her! One good thing in Bocachica is that pretty much everybody knows everybody so I was pretty sure it wouldn´t be too difficult! With the help of some of our teenage helpers at the mission, I was able to find him without any trouble. I wanted to be sure it was the same kid though so I just told him a tiny bit of Claudia´s story and waited for him to fill in the blanks. As soon as I mentioned that I had heard from a couple from the USA, he immediately got a huge grin on his face and started to tell me the whole story, just as Claudia had told me in her email. It turns out that these past 2+ years or so he couldn´t get them out of his mind either and he would tell his mom and the rest of his family that he JUST KNEW that those people were going to come back some day to see him! His family just told him he was dreaming and he might as well forget about them! Over the last year I have been sending emails, photos and video´s back and forth between Claudia, Gio and Cachaco and it has been fun being a part of their reunion story. About a month ago I got an email from Claudia again, telling me that they were considering using part of their vacation time to come to visit Cachaco in Bocachica and sure enough, last week, I was able to host them and help reconnect them with this boy (who´s not little anymore) that stole their hearts 3 years ago! It was so neat to see them with him again, meeting Cachaco´s family and they were able to take him to the city for dinner and a movie. I believe that their ¨conincedental¨ meeting 3 years ago was no conincedent at all...God has neat things in store for Cachaco and his relationship with Gio and Claudia. They are looking at ways to sponsor Cachaco through our sponsorship program at the mission and hope to be able to help him by giving him the opportunity to get an education and learn a profession. I am excited to see what will become of this. Cachaco really is such a sweet guy, a wonderful boy who loves his family and wants to make something of his life and it is an awesome thing to see how God has orchestrated all of these events to help make that happen.

Giovani, Cachaco and Claudia (he´s bigger than they are now!)

At Cachaco´s house with his family.

Martin and I with Gio and Claudia

Some Random Tidbits

Today I am in Cartagena to pick up my mom and her best friend at the airport!! As you can imagine I am very excited to see them both! This will be the first time my mom has been here since about 8 years ago! I will post some more updates soon about our time together but for now here are a few tidbits from the last couple of weeks.

Ana and Chienye have been such a joy to have with us these past 5 weeks or so. We are really going to miss them when they have to go back home to University!! Here they are washing their clothes by hand... I'm sure their mother`s will be proud to see them doing it with a smile!

We had a short-termer with us for 2 weeks... Drew Reuss from Minnesota. Drew was also wonderful to have...such a blessing! He had a great attitude about everything and a real servant's heart. He just totally became part of our family and we were sad to see him go!

Drew and Samy planting grass in our back yard at the mission. We are PRAYING for God's annointing to make this grass grow!

Jorge with some of his ¨Apostles¨ . These boys love to come to the mission and they LOVE Jorge!! He is discipling them and mentoring them.

A couple of weeks ago we celbrated Samy's 21st birthday with cake and coke during the half-time of the America's Cup Soccer Final. We had about 30 people crammed into our tiny living room... the pile of shoes at our front door was almost a mile high... OK, I am exagerating but you get the point.

Back to Bocachica Life

On June 10th we arrived back home to Colombia!! We spent the first night in Cartagena at the YWAM base and then the next morning took the boat out to the island. It has been SO HOT since we got back; we are still trying to get acclimated to the heat and humidity once again. It´s not just us though, it really is extra hot right now... even the locals agree!

Another thing that has been really hard to get used to is seeing how the prices of everything have gone UP and the value of the dollar is going DOWN!!! Unfortunately for us, this means that our money doesn’t stretch as far as we wish it would! This also means we won´t be able to get as far on the clinic construction as we had hoped. But we are trying to take it in stride, knowing that this too is under God´s control!

On our first day back to Bocachica we received a team from YWAM-Hurlach, Germany who were on their DTS outreach. The team was made up of Germans, Americans and a Brazilian and they were with us for their last 4 days of outreach.

One of the team members gets braids by one of our neighbors, Sorleis. Sorleis could probably win some world record at speed braiding…seriously folks, she braids at the speed of light!



It was great to be back with our staff again… our first week was spent unpacking, and meeting with different staff, getting updated on all the latest happenings and starting the transition of taking back the reins of leadership once again. We are very blessed to have such a fine group of people that God has brought to work alongside us! We also are praying for a few more long-term staff members to fill some key positions.


Three days after we got back I celebrated my 37th birthday! We had a little get together with some friends. I got sung to several times during the day… first by Jorge at 3:00 in the morning, then by our staff and the German team at breakfast, then by our two cooks at the foot of our stairs, then by a group of about 15 young boys at our front door…and then finally again in the evening over cake and Coca Cola.

You may have noticed that I have put on some extra pounds... I only mention it to share a funny part of the culture here. In Bocachica, having some meat on your bones is a very good thing! It means that you are healthy and strong, not weak and scrawny! One thing I love about Bocachica is that every time I come back from the USA and I have put on some extra pounds…this is what I hear from people in the community (and this is what I have been hearing the last few days): ¨Sister Karen you’re fat!!! You look so PRETTY!¨ ¨Karen, you came back fatter!! You look so ELEGANT!¨ ¨Karen, you are wider… you look GOOD!¨ It´s amazing how acceptable it is here to comment about people´s weight right to thier face! This is a shock to a lot of our visitors! Two nights ago a guy even told me that he felt like he was looking at 2 of me!! Now that one wasn´t so nice but still, I just chuckle and think, it’s so funny, in the USA it´s just plain fat, nothing glorious about it! But, here I am pretty, elegant and I look good!!! It does a lot for a full- figured gal’s self esteem!


A day in the life… this is me doing laundry last Saturday! One bucket is the soapy water, the other one is the rinse water, and a third one has fabric softener… so it goes like this: scrub, scrub, scrub; ring it out; soak, soak, soak; ring it out; soak again; ring it out one last time, and then hang it on the line to dry! It only took me about 2 hours to do 5 days worth of clothes.

PS: We do have a washing machine but here on the island there is no running water so the process is to fill up the machine by hand with buckets of water for each wash cycle and then again for each rinse cycle, so by the time you do all that, it just seems easier to do it by hand, unless you are washing hard things like jeans and towels. Also you use so much more water doing it that way and here water is at a premium and we have to use it sparingly.

This week our dog, Estrella, got really sick… she wouldn’t eat or drink hardly anything and all she wanted to do was sleep and sleep. For about 3 days she was so pitiful! We were worried about her. But finally on the 3rd and 4th day she started to wag her tail again and started wanting to play. She´s still not back to normal but she is getting better. We have also been trying to keep her separated from the puppies in order to wean them and let Estrella recuperate. It’s pretty funny trying to keep them apart. When they slip by us they look like little sharks running towards Estrella to try to get a few drops of milk and we are all running behind them, trying to pull them off her and get either them or Estrella into a closed room. Estrella seems to be grateful to us for this, we can see that she feels relieved not to have the three of them pushing and pulling at her all the time! They are the cutest things though; we get a lot of laughs just watching them play, even though they will steal our flip-flops right off our feet if we aren’t careful!

Jorge and Erika working in the office.


Relaxing on Sunday afternoon with Marley and Astrid over a ¨friendly¨ game of Phase 10, our newest form of entertainment (thanks Carole, Sue and Gram!)


This is Anne and Chienye! They are here with a University exchange program that YWAM operates out of Madison, Wisconsin. Anne (left) is from Singapore and moved to the USA 6 years ago. Now she lives in Delaware and is a Pre-Med student at Yale University. Chienye (right) is from London, England and is a Pre-Med student at Queen Mary, Universtiy of London. Chienye´s father is from Nigeria and her mother is from the Philipines. They are both sweet girls and we are looking forward to hosting them over the next 6-7 weeks as they have the opportunity to see first-hand how the Lord can use them and their professions for His service!

The other day I was sitting on our front steps and I got a kick out of this... this is Yesenia giving her little sister and a friend a ride in an old suitcase!

These are our special friends, Luis and Diati Luz with their little boy, Isaac David, who is 4 1/2. Diati was scheduled to go in for a C-section the day after I took this photo but when she was in the operating room, before they started, the equipment stopped working so they had to cancel the surgery. Since it was a Friday they didn´t want to schedule it for the weekend and Monday was a national holiday so they told her to come back early in the morning on Tuesday. She returned on Tuesday and was suppossed to have the surgery at 8:30 am but just as they were going to take her in there was an emergency surgery they had to attend to so she had to sit there and wait for 6 hours until the surgery was over so she could have her turn. They next day at around 10:30 am (less than 7 hours after having surgery!) she was bouncing in the back of a speed boat, headed home to Bocachica (ooouuuucccchhhh!!!).

This is the new arrival, a little girl named INDI JOANNA.

She weighed in a little less than 7 pounds.

OUR APARTMENT
A lot of you were asking me what our living arrangements are so I wanted to show you some pictures so you could have a better idea. We have a small apartment inside the mission compound. It has a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room.

Four and a half years ago, in February 2003, we held a construction seminar for some of the men in the community and as part of their practical experience they helped to build our apartment. We still have a few things to do to complete it but it is a nice place for us to live and have a little more space than just the bedroom we used to have downstairs.

This is our living room. We still have to buy and install the double doors to the balcony so in the meantime we have clear plastic hanging to keep out the rain.

This is our kitchen and as you can see, there is still a way to go to get it ready. Jorge is working on finishing the walls and getting some cabinets and counters built and installed. Hopefully we can post some new photos soon.

This is our bathroom…notice the buckets on the floor. We have no indoor plumbing in Bocachica so even though we have a nice bathroom we have to bring our water upstairs in buckets each day. The white bucket is fresh water to use at the sink. The red bucket is salt water that we use to flush the toilet and the small garbage can in the shower is fresh water for bathing!

This is our bedroom and it is pretty much completed, except for a few decorations and a few pieces of furniture.

COLOMBIA!!!

On January 28th Jorge and I were able to travel to Colombia for 2 weeks. We were in Bogotá for the first 3 days and then in Bocachica and Cartagena and then the last 2 days we were back in Bogotá before catching our flight back to Mexico City. We had a WONDERFUL trip!! We came back with our hearts full and excited about getting back as soon as possible! Here are a few highlights from our trip:

While in Bogotá we got to visit with our dear friends, Nelly and Lucho! We just love them, they are friends that we can just be ourselves with and we laugh and have fun together! Lucho and Nelly have brought many mission teams to work with us in Bocachica over the last 7 or 8 years.

We met up with Samy at the YWAM base in Bogotá!! Guess what! Remember in my last Bocachica update I mentioned that Samy was praying about doing his DTS this year? Well, he is now in Bogotá and has started his school! We have already seen God´s provision for over half of his school and we only need to raise $440 more dollars for him to be paid-in-full! Would you like to partner with Samy?? If so, please write and let us know and we will get you hooked up!

Our first night in Bocachica we were left speachless when the local FourSquare pastors and a group of 30+ from the church came to welcome us home with a beautiful flower arrangement and a serenade!!

Of course the biggest highlight was to see our staff!! Pictured on top are Robin, Werling, Jorge, Karen and Conny; on bottom is Erika, Astrid, Josefina and Marley. Martin hasn´t gotten back from Germany yet so we weren´t able to see him this time.

Also on our first night we had the opportunity to meet with the students from the first Mini-DTS and to hear them share about their experiences in the school! It was so encouraging to see them excited about their relationships with Jesus and with each other and looking forward to what lies ahead.

One of the main reasons we went to Colombia this time was to film a special ministry video to be able to share with all of you during our USA visiting tour. Wow! What an experience! God just totally blessed us with the way that He put together all the pieces of the puzzle! In this photo you see our Producer, Alejandro and our cameraman/editor, Alvaro (both are from Bogotá) hard at work in Bocachica. Later, back in Bogotá we spent our last day with them editing the video and we are really excited about the results! We can´t wait to share the video with you all! Both Alejandro and Alvaro really wanted this project to be anointed by the Holy Spirit so a lot of prayer and effort went into this venture!

We had a special visit by our very first team from Korea! This was a group of Christian University students from Seoul. They were only with us for about 24 hours but they were such a big blessing! I don´t think we have ever had a team that bonded so quickly with the community, they just totally opened their hearts and ministered, especially to the youth of the community.

Jorge reconnected with his special group of boys that he has ministered to over the years...they are nicknamed ¨the Apostles¨.

Jorge with some buddies, Werling, Luis and Humberto (and Humberto´s daughter, Shirley.)

We were TOTALLY surprised when DESTENI visited us in Bocachica!! Desteni was Jorge´s assistant during our first year in Ensenada and we have continued a special relationship with her ever since. We were so excited when God called her to Colombia!! Last year she did the YWAM School of Counseling in the city of Medellin and now she is working on staff at the base there! So her leaders there in Medellin, who happen to be friends of ours, let her take some time off and she flew to Cartagena to spend a few days with us! What a blessing!!

I have quite a few ¨special little friends¨ in Bocachica but Yorelis has had a special place in my heart for especially the last 3 1/2 years. If God and Jorge would let me I would adopt her in a heartbeat!

Our friends, Chucho and Gloria, came to visit us from Cartagena and then when we went to Cartagena we stayed one night at their house. They have been such a blessing over the years, always eager to use their resources to help and bless us (for example, using their pick-up truck to help us pick up people at the airport or transport cargo to the dock, etc...) When we return to Bocachica full-time they have agreed to be our advisers for our upcoming ¨small buisness venture¨ which we hope will help several local families to own and operate their own businesses. Chucho and Gloria have thier own scrap metal company and a furniture company and they do international importing and exporting so they will be a great help to us!

We were also blessed by the Hwang Family (John, Jonathan, Elliot, Drew and Monica) who invited us over to their house to spend the night in Cartagena and treated us to a delicious homemade Korean meal!! The Hwang´s are now on staff with YWAM Cartagena, heading up a ministry to University students.

A few of our staff girls came to the airport to see us off as we returned back to Bogotá. Here we are with Conny, Marley and Astrid. I already have my sweater on, getting ready for the Bogotá weather!

Back in Bogotá we visited with our friends, the Viera Family and a mutual friend, Irma Raquel. Here Irma and Vilma are making homemade Colombian buñuelos, one of my favorites. Yum, Yum! They are deep fried bread made from yucca and cheese. They are best when they are hot and spongy and they go great with hot chocolate!

The Viera Family used to live in Cartagena but 2 1/2 years ago they moved to Bogotá. Our other mutual friend, Irma Raquel (far right) also lived in Cartagena but is now working in Bogotá. They celebrated a belated birthday for Jorge and we had a great time catching up on the latest with them! Jairo and Vilma (standing in white t-shirts) are both civil engineers and when they were in Cartagena they were our advisers for the clinic construction project. Vilma´s sister, Sandra, (far left) also helped us with our bookkeeping for a year or so.

Everyone in Colombia has to have a Cedula, except for tourists. It is a government identification card that tells what your migratory status is in the country. Jorge and I were issued indefinite Colombian Residency back in 1992 and since then we have had to keep renewing our Cedulas every few years. One of the reasons we went on this trip was to renew them once again. Well, to our surprise we were issued INDEFINITE Cedulas!! So I guess the plan is that these should last a lifetime! Now is that confirmation from God or what?! :-)