Navidad en Bolivia 2009

Christmas is just a couple months away and our friend and former co-worker Adrian Nickols has a special desire to see that children in Bolivia have a wonderful Christmas. His goal is to provide Bolivian children with individual Christmas gifts as well as provide Bolivian ministries with some practical needs. Last year he raised over $3000 for Christmas gifts and practical needs for various ministries in Bolivia. Well, he is doing it again and this year there are many more sponsorships and the project will attempt to raise over $8000 for practical needs and Christmas gifts for 7 God-focused ministries in Bolivia and our ministry is one of the sponsored ministries! The project is called "Navidad en Bolivia 2009" (Christmas in Bolivia) and Adrian has put together a great website explaining the purpose and goals of the project.

Check it out at...
www.navidadenbolivia.info

You can find our ministry sponsorships under "The List" category in the section "Group Gifts: El Centro de Amistad". There are various amounts you can choose to help provide for our Christmas party or to help provide for an internet connection at the Center. The party is expected to have around 100 children and 50 or 60 parents of the children. We hope to provide a gift for each child as well as food, decorations and costumes for a Christmas play. The internet connection will be primarily to help children with their homework in the library at the Center. There are many other sponsorships as well including the ministry we worked with last year called "Zona Frutillar" on the website. And the other ministries are also wonderful...sponsor them all!

If you want to contribute to this project and make a donation towards a gift you can either request the sponsorship you would like from the website or you can email us (mattandelsa@gmail.com). If you would like to do it from the website just put our names in the "referral" field. Since Adrian lives in Australia he has organized a US contact who lives in Texas named Kristen Polcyn, who is also a former co-worker of ours. Once you let us or Adrian (through the website) know what you want to sponsor then we will get Kristen's information to you to send her a check. Kristen is coming to Bolivia shortly and will bring what she has received up to that point and then there will be an alternative way of receiving money after she comes to Bolivia.

Some kids from the Center that would be receiving these gifts.

When my family was here visiting Linnea brought supplies to do the stained-glass cross project that she does with her kids at preschool. She brought enough supplies for all the kids at the Center do do it but the girls in my class loved it so much that we used up all the supplies ourselves. I could never have guessed how much fun the girls would have doing this project. Each girl made at least 3 or 4 up to 6 or 7 crosses each and we kept going til all the contact paper was gone. Most of them ended up going home with the girls but we also kept some at the Center and above are the finished products. Thanks for bring the supplies, Linnea!

We recently took the kids from the Center on a "paseo" to a water park. Except calling it a water park isn't really accurate as it is really just a park that also has a pool. But if there is one thing Bolivians know how to do it's making big, fun parks for kids, right Eric?

As it's getting colder in the States it's getting warmer here so it was the perfect time to go. The kids had tons of fun especially cause it was a very special activity that most of them would not have a chance to do otherwise.