Dear family and friends,
It was so wonderful to visit the States and to be reminded of all of you and how so many of you are committed to praying for us. Both the prayer support and the financial support were and continue to be a blessing to us. We appreciated sharing conversation, coffee, and meals with many of you. It was a little overwhelming with the relatively small amount of time we had compared to all the people we wanted to see. We were sad to go, but also excited to return home to our apartment in El Alto, and back to our ministry there. We feel refreshed and re-commissioned in many ways.
We also feel better equipped to continue with the Suti Sana micro-enterprise. The five women we hired in March have developed some designs of purses and we happily sold several of those on our visit to the States. Chatting with others and doing some information gathering, we have some new ideas for what will be helpful to the business side of this ministry. We appreciated all your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions.
As Adam mentioned in the last prayer letter (August), our theme for the Staff Gathering was based around a book by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove called, The Wisdom of Stability. Each night during the Staff Gathering, we heard from a staff member their thoughts on stability and perhaps what it means in their life or field. One discussion was on our sense of home. Walter Forcatto serves in Argentina and he talked about the way, as a community, we love people well. But he went on to say that part of making a home where we are means loving, not just the people, but also the place. If we always consider the States as our home, we may miss out on being stable in our current countries and fields. But if we look at the things we love, for example, about El Alto and Bolivia, then we can begin to call it our home.
Toward the end of our stay in the US, Adam and I both expressed to each other one day our desire and readiness to go back. We were enjoying our time with family and friends, but were sort of wanderers without a home. We often call our parents’ houses home, but when we said we were ready to go back home, we meant our apartment in Bolivia. It was great to know we both felt we were beginning to make a home there.
Even though our time in Bolivia has been short to this point, we can still identify things we enjoy about the place, like Walter was saying. For example: I really love the white cheese they have there, it’s good and salty; I love the folkdances that we learned at the language institute; Spanish is a pretty fun language to learn; the mountains are beautiful; I like hopping in a bus or trufi and not having to navigate the traffic; Adam likes bird-watching and hiking; and even though it’s cold in winter, you can almost always count on sunshine. Perhaps Adam and I should make a list of what we love and put it up in our home to remind us why we call it home.
We truly appreciate you joining in with us as we continue to grow to love both the people and the place.
We also want to invite you to notify us via email if you would like to receive emails about current Suti Sana products and when shipments are being sent.
Warmly,
Becky (& Adam) Thada