February 20, 2017
Keeping in Touch with Home
Have I mentioned before that this is my second time to live in Santa Cruz, Bolivia? Well, in the 1980s, I joined the Assemblies of God to work here as a teacher. Because of obscure rules they had, I was restricted to two years with them. South America Mission (SAM) was quick to invite me to join them. I spent an interesting day driving to a Guarani village with Cesar Cubas, figuring out quickly his intent was to convince me to join SAM. I stayed another three years with SAM mission.
Communication was very different in the 80s compared with today. It was limited to phone and letters. The Internet did not exist back then.
If I wanted to make a call back home, I had to call the operator in La Paz. I would give her the number; it was always a woman and I think the same one each time. She would tell me to wait by the phone until she put the call through. That might take ten minutes, but more likely four hours. I would get a call back and ask the person on the other side to call me. It was too expensive to call from Bolivia and much cheaper from the US. A few minutes later, I would get a call back and we could talk for just a few minutes because it was also expensive to call from the States, just cheaper than Bolivia.
The other method of communication was letters. Often, I sat home at night writing letters to family and friends. I also sent out a mission newsletter about once a month to those who financially supported me, and to family, even if they did not. I would get letters from home too, though sometimes not with a lot of frequency. During my second year in Bolivia, there was a postal strike. I doubt any of my letters got back to the States. One day in February, after the strike was over, I sat down with a pile of letters from home. I put them in order from oldest to most recent and spent a Saturday afternoon reading news from home. Even with letters nobody told me my sister-in-law Jackie was going to have a baby. I found out about her three weeks before my beautiful niece, Katie, was born.
The year 2016 (and 2017) is very different from 1989. The Internet rules. Everybody has Facebook or Instagram, or whatever is the latest means of communication. In Bolivia, they all have WhatsApp (I discovered at Christmas that is what they use in Brazil too). I post pictures on Instagram or a blog on Facebook and I get almost instantaneous responses from family and friends. I know what my little nieces and nephews are doing almost every day because their moms post a lot. Thank you, Leslie, Katie, Madison, and Brook! I know what my friends at Nash or Bristol Baptist are doing because of their posts. I was up-to-date on the contentious election of 2016 and see the funny stories and videos everyone else sees. I am sure I will be reading about the exciting (or frightening to some of you) new administration of Donald J. Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment