22 March 2012

Plans? What plans?

I think I have probably mentioned to many people of my frustration with how nothing ever goes as it is planned here. Literally every day something changes or comes up at the last minute. Thankfully it is mostly just small stuff, but even that can get annoying after a while. But we can thank God that the big stuff does continue to go well and big doors continue to open despite our failings and the failings with the little stuff.
One day this week, I had the whole day planned out, and like always it didn´t go as planned, but today it was mostly good interruptions for a change. I had to review some material all morning with Ann that Juan and I had been working on and then had a meeting in the afternoon, and in the evening we were going to talk on Skype to my parents and my cousin. Well, first thing Ann had to postpone our meeting because she had some unexpected work to do with the accountant.
When we finally got started we were barely through just the beginning when a pastor from a Guaraní community just showed up wanting to talk to me. This was the first good interruption. turns out he had heard me speak somewhere and wanted to know more and see if we could come visit their village and find out if Paz y Esperanza could work with them. He happens to be from a place not far from another village we work in so after 2 hours of talking we finally got around to figuring out when we would visit. He is going to go back and invite the pastors from 4 or 5 surrounding communities to come and have a chat with us.
After this I had a quick chance to eat something before I had a Skype meeting with a volunteer in the States. We had said 2:30 and I was on then, but for some reason our connection was bad and on my computer he showed up as offline and I to him as well, so apparently we both sat staring at our computers for almost half an hour before it suddenly popped up and we were able to talk. It was a good conversation.
As our conversation was wrapping up, the next unexpected guest arrived. It was a Mojeño man from Beni up north who is a member of the comitee of our indigenous church network FE NATIBA but couldn´t make it to the meeting a couple weeks ago due to blockades. He also is a leader in the indigenous rights movement here and he had been busy recently coordinating a large protest here that will take place next month to defend the TIPNIS, which is a long story I won´t get into here, but you can click the link or just google it figure out what it´s about. They have already declared that the demonstration will begin on April 20 and this man is the creative mind behind what the march will look like. Turns out, his idea was born in our meeting with him in December--the last time I saw him--and he wanted to show me his proposal and ask us for our support in a few details. Second amazing interruption of the day.
The doors just keep openning. I´ll write more about what our role in this protest might be later, but I can only praise God for his goodness and his timing, which almost never seems to be my timing, at least not here.
The last interruption of the day was when five minutes into our skype conversation with family our internet died. But it did come back later and we were able to catch up and it was good. Just learning to go with the flow.

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