this is La Paz at night' bonita no?

I look around....yes this is poverty. These homes, these people, this pain. It hurts me and embarrasses me that I have come here to help and can´t solve all their problems. But hey, if I had that power then we can´t sit back and watch God use us. I visited a woman yesterday who managed to get around crawling on her hands and knees. See her diet is horrible, potatoes and well, potatoes. Her bones have suffered from the loss of calcium and has led to complications of osteoporosis mixed with arthritis. On top of this debilidad she has a mental handicap that has come with age. In her dirt floored, mud walled, dangerously tittering on a side of a cliff home she birthed her 13 children. Only two have stayed to take care of her, one pregnant without a husband the other only 9 years old. How do they manage? They can´t afford milk. She needs tests to prove to the government that she indeed has a handicap and qualifies for the help they offer. But the family can´t pay. Well we aren´t here for our entertainment-- to just listen to her story, nod, smile, give her a hug. Irene (a very kind hearted, sympathetic woman I work with) has arranged for us to raise the money through raffling off goody boxes of necessities. I pray that we reach the amount needed. If we help at least one family, I feel like our visits to the poorer areas aren´t a waste.

There are alot of broken families here. Barely any have both parents, for one reason or another. I visited one family who had 6 children, three of them were her own, the other were her sister´s who recently passed away from cancer. She took them as her own and has shown no favoritism. They are happy, well behaved, dirty, runny nosed children. One of the four year old boys cracked me up today. We were looking at where Salud Integral was helping build a larger house (larger than the one room living condition they have). This little one, named Diego, was climbing up one of the dirt walls. I said ''Cuidado''. He looks at me with his rosy cheeks and gorro almost over his smiling eyes , and says--''soy macho!'' and continues on. This is a boy who runs down ladders, sleeps on the same mattress as his 5 other siblings, just lost his mom to cancer, and has no dad. They raise them tough here. I let him prove his macho-ness, then swooped him up, hugged him and kissed him.

I am not telling these stories to depress you. I am revealing a little of what I see everyday. A little bit of how a large portion of the world lives. We are blessed. If you leave this site with anything, I pray that it is either the gratitude of what you are blessed with, or the knowledge of how others live. Or both...that would be great too.

Last weekend I went to Tiwanaku, one of the pueblos nearby with old ruins from before Machu Picchu. The sad thing is, its such a poor country they don´t have money to un-earth the to

wn that lay just below our feet. It was beautiful and frustrating at the same time. Beautiful at the history and beliefs they have. One was that they would tie fabric around their head from birth and tighten it, while re'enforcing it with rocks. Why? you may ask. Well two theories. One, to

appear more intelligent with a taller head! And the other, apparently the taller the head the higher the social status. I think I´ll stick with who has a nicer car...

It´s frustrating because there is so much historia lost beneath, just waiting to be told. Just walking along an area, we found bones scattered about, volcanic stones, and handcrafted ceramic pots so delicately painted (no we weren´t allowed there). But it was beautiful and exciting to see.

I´ll end with a question one of the kids asked me. ''¿Por que dios ha hecho personas de diferente colores?'' I was going to go into great detail about the necessity of different skin tones, about depending on where you lived and all that...but instead I asked him why he thought God made people with different skin colors. He said, ''El dios le gustan cosas interesante.'' God does like interesting things. I liked his answer.