Lost in Translation

This last weekend was my first without Pastor Jose being in the country (he'd been gone before within Colombia). It was pretty wild, mostly because of my own planning or lack thereof.

Saturday morning I went to the monthly pastors' meeting from 7 a.m. to almost 10 a.m. I got home in time to catch my breath and eat lunch. Then we headed to Chia for our youth trip that we were going to start at 2 p.m. We arrived early and waited, and waited, and only one of the 19 youth who had signed up arrived by 2. Finally about 2:30 a number of youth arrived, but we were still waiting for about four. We called, and they said to meet us at a park in the middle of Chia. We got there and waited. I was driving the mission van, and Holly our car. She decided to go towards their house to pick them up. We noticed that she picked them up down the road a ways, so we headed in that direction. We passed her, and the teens yelled out the window, "We're here!" "Did she see us?" I asked. "Oh yeah, of course!" So we took off... we got about five blocks away, and she didn't appear. Now we were in trouble because it was a one-way road. We looped around the block and she was nowhere to be found. By this time it was past 3 p.m., which wasn't good because we were on our way to Bogota, which is about 40 minutes away. I started praying fervently (granted, not very profoundly..."Lord, where is she?). She finally showed up after ten more minutes, so we happily accelerated towards Bogota. The back way is beautiful, with green mountains to the west.

About a mile or two outside of Chia, I lost sight of Holly. We pulled over, and she finally caught up, telling me that the car was having some trouble. So I told her to head back to Chia while we forged on in our intrepid journey.

I decided to take the back way to the park, which is a very bumpy dirt road. I heard some groans and some laughs as we slammed through several holes (thankfully my boss doesn't read my blog). We reached the final stretch, which was a stretch of mud. It reminded me of a boyhood adventure I had had with my friend Dirk in elementary school (that time we went through the mud with our bikes and got bogged down in the middle and fell over). With that in mind, I took the high road. A Minnesota-like grass path behind a line of trees (think Camp Swampy for those who've been there). We reached a two or three foot deep crevice, and all of the teens bailed. I think they didn't realize how much experience I have on three-wheelers, so that hole didn't bother me in the least, except that there was a steep embankment to the right. But it was no problem.

We arrived at the park and had only about 90 minutes to play soccer, tennis, fly kites, etc. Then it was time to go (note to self: don't be ridiculous with the scheduling... we're in Latin America!). The teens voted to take the route through the city for fear of the "back way." Mistake. The neighborhood you have to go through to get back to the main highway, Engativa, is almost as bad as the "back way." No, it's culturally interesting. I took a wrong turn, and we ended up on a dead-end street.

Finally after 30 minutes of navigating through narrow, hole-covered roads, we made it to the highway for another 30 minutes back to Chia. Did I mention that I had a couples' meeting at 6:30? We arrived in Chia at about 6:20. I went to the Alonso's house and slapped on some clean clothes and drove to the couples' meeting. Thankfully, everyone else was "late" too, so I didn't miss anything.

I'll spare you the details of Sunday, except to say that Holly was in charge of the breakfasts for an outreach we have to a poorer neighborhood, so she wasn't with me for the choir practice. I was running around scatterbrained to get ready for teaching Sunday School, leading the music, and preaching. After the service, Holly was with Eliana in a teachers' meeting. All of a sudden I hear shrieks, "Jon, get the vehicle and go get some clothes." Eliana had vomited in Holly's face, and they were both covered with spit up.

I think something else happened, but I have a gift for forgetting negative things, so I have no idea what it was.

As I told Holly..."It can only get better next weekend."

Just a quick note on a small blessing in my life. I've always liked reading a good paper. By good I mean one that makes me think, provides insight into the world, and broadens my understanding of culture, politics, economics, literature, etc.

Up until this week I hadn't found such an animal. El Tiempo is the paper read by most executive types here. Frankly I have been very disappointed with it. It offers think pieces on topics that don't really interest me (e.g. in-depth analysis of Colombian politics), and in general just tells about the events of the country without any interesting commentaries on what has happened. I often found that I would buy the paper and end up reading only two articles because the rest made me yawn just looking at the titles.

El Espectador is a little bit better for my taste, as it comes out only once a week. For this reason, the editors have more time to find insightful articles. But again, the paper shows a surprising dearth of information about the rest of the world.

Many of the other papers of broad circulation in Bogota are not fit for Christian eyes. One, El Espacio is like a Colombian version of the National Enquirer, only worse (as a Christian I don't even look at the paper hanging on the rack because you never know what you'll see).

All this said, I finally ran across a good weekly paper, which is Tiempos del mundo. It is a sister publication to the Washinton Times. I received a free issue over the weekend and read almost every article. It included articles on the U.S., the conflict in the Middle East, the foreign policy of Hugo Chavez, migration globalization, etc.

I have stepped up my Spanish study in the last few weeks, spending some time on Tuesdays and Thursdays with building my vocab and pronunciation. This paper is going to become part of that routine.