Debra Snellen, right, with the assistance of one of her students, strains fruit for a jam and jelly-making workshop in Cochabamba. (T-G Photo by John I. Carney)

Previously: Part 1 | Part 2

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia -- It was Gail Drake who invited me on my first LEAMIS International Ministries mission trip, a January 2003 trip to Nicaragua. I'd already known Gail for nearly a decade thanks to her work for Mountain T.O.P. (Tennessee Outreach Project), a domestic missions program which was founded by her father and which I serve as a board member. Gail has since left Mountain T.O.P. to devote more attention to LEAMIS, but at the time she was involved with both groups.

Gail is a turbo-charged bundle of energy and enthusiasm, and everyone who meets her likes her immediately. If you're in Monteagle, you really need to stop by Lorena's Gifts, a gift and coffee shop which Gail founded last fall and which helps to support LEAMIS.

Students in a crochet workshop work with loops of plastic cut from grocery bags. (T-G Photo by John I. Carney) [Click to enlarge]

It wasn't until I got involved with LEAMIS that I got to know the Rev. Debra Snellen, who co-founded the international missions group with Gail and who serves as its chief executive (simply because one of them had to have the title). Debra was raised Methodist, attended a Baptist seminary, was ordained by the Assemblies of God, and now is back attending a Methodist church in Monteagle, despite some misgivings about the denomination. She's been involved in missions since she was a teenager and once spent three years living among the Inuit (you probably call them Eskimos) in Canada.

Debra will also probably be uncomfortable when she finds out that I'm writing a whole segment of my series about her, but there were only two of us on the trip, and I'm already sick of hearing about myself.

Obviously, when you go into a country with a normal LEAMIS mission team you can accomplish a lot more in terms of workshops and activities. But in this case, it turned out to be a very good thing that we had a smaller, two-member team. As I've already discussed, our trip was plagued by some of the normal misunderstandings and miscommunications that accompany going into a new territory. Some of our workshops turned out quite differently than we expected. During the first half of our work week, the day was supposed to begin with a jams-and-jellies workshop led by Debra, followed by a health-and-nutrition workshop which Debra and I would co-lead, using curriculum prepared by Debra. Then Debra would lead a workshop in crochet using plastic grocery bags.

But our surroundings turned out to be quite different than we had planned. The health and nutrition information Debra had prepared was geared for people living in more primitive rural surroundings, not Villa Candelaria. So the health and nutrition workshop basically turned into a cooking workshop, led by Debra.

Many of the ladies who signed up for the crochet workshop were already experienced crocheters. Once Debra showed them the basic technique for cutting a plastic bag into loops and stringing the loops together to form a sort of plastic yarn, there wasn't much else she had to show them.

Debra fretted that she wasn't providing enough content in any of the workshops, but the students seemed to be having a great time. In fact, when there wasn't time to complete a dish on the third day of the cooking workshop, the students agreed to come back for an additional section the next day. That bonus session was possible because our leadership workshop, originally intended for that time period, had been rescheduled for the evenings.

That was a particular frustration for Debra. The workshop deals with Biblical leadership principles that could be of broad application to anyone, but it's particularly intended for church leaders. Pastors of small rural churches in the developing world often have little training, and if the leadership workshop is properly promoted to them many will travel for hours in order to attend. The smallest crowd Debra and Gail had ever had for the workshop was 30.

But our hosts in Cochabamba never got a clear vision of what the leadership workshop was about and apparently didn't promote it other than on the flyer circulated around Villa Candelaria advertising the other workshops. We had only a handful of participants, none of them pastors. The rescheduling of the leadership workshop was a source of frustration to us. It meant that we wouldn't have time to present the complete course, and it also left us with a lot of free time during the day for three days. That would have been a disaster for a team trip; Debra and I were better able to go with the flow.

Actually, the free time came in handy for me on the first day, when I was out with a bout of traveler's diarrhea and some related dehydration. I went home and crawled into bed.

Just as we had misunderstood some of the information from our hosts in the weeks leading up to the trip, they had misunderstood some of our information. They'd assumed that Debra and I were husband and wife and had planned for both of us to stay with Gaston Saavedra, a pastor of our host church, and his wife Bea in their beautiful home, which is located in a gated community in Cochabamba proper.

Actually, Gaston was gone for most of our work week in Cochabamba. He had taken a youth group from the church on a trip, and they were scheduled to return on Monday or Tuesday. But a group of Bolivian mine workers were on strike and had blockaded the roads near Oruro. The fear was that they might be armed with explosives from the mine. Gaston and the youth, who were on their way back from the trip, ended up having to bunk crammed like sardines in an office for several nights until the local police could defuse the situation and re-open the highway.

When our hosts discovered that Debra and I weren't a couple, they put me in the home of Freddy and Norma Mamani in Villa Candelaria, just a short walk from the school where most of our activities took place. Debra's home-away-from-home looked like something out of Better Homes and Gardens, but mine -- while comfortable -- was a little more representative of life in the developing world. As much as Debra appreciated Gaston and Bea's hospitality, I think she wished she was staying in Villa Candelaria like me.

Sometimes, Ronald Trujillo would walk Debra and me down to a scruffy-looking local restaurant for lunch. Lunch is the big meal in Bolivian culture, and this place served an almuerzo completo consisting of a huge bowl of soup followed by a main dish (usually rice with some sort of meat). The cost for this wheelbarrow full of food was five Bolivianos, the equivalent of about 62 cents in U.S. currency.

One of my struggles as a short-term missionary is that I am not always good at eating the local food. Sometimes it has less to do with taste or texture than with some sort of mental hang-up, but I get a gag reflex with a mouthful of food.

The nice thing about eating at a restaurant in this situation is that I don't have to feel like I'm offending my hosts by not cleaning my plate, especially since Ronald went home for lunch rather than sticking around with us at the restaurant. But I still felt bad because of Debra. You see, ever since her time with the Inuit it drives Debra crazy to see anyone wasting food. She's much too nice and non-confrontational to scold someone over it, but if you know her you can see the gears grinding. I would leave my almuerzo completo half-eaten and feel like I was letting Debra down somehow. It made me feel guilty, but not guilty enough to start eating again.

At least I was never served guinea pig, which is eaten in some parts of the Andes during special celebration.

Together, Debra and I made it through the struggles of the mission trip, and then the struggles of flight delays which made it seem like we were never going to get out of Bolivia. (More about that on another day.) Debra's Spanish skills were stronger than mine, and there were times I had to rely on her because of it.

I told her that her workshops were going well and she was contributing more than she realized, and she told me the same thing. We tried to be supportive when it was appropriate and to give each other space when that was appropriate. You don't want to be sick of your teammate halfway through the trip.

Meanwhile, Debra was always looking forward. This trip had turned out differently than we expected, but what about next year? We worked with a variety of interpreters during the week, and one of the best ones was a young woman, probably about college-age, named Jessica. As the driver was taking all three of us home, Jessica (who attended a different church than the one with which we were working) mentioned that her pastor had connections to several churches in the rural parts of Bolivia which might benefit from LEAMIS' training. Later, after Gast--n had returned with the church youth, Debra talked to him about some possibilities for next year.

Whether or not we're able to follow up on those leads depends in part on Bolivia's political situation. The country is currently being led by the stridently anti-American President Evo Morales, an ally of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Morales was elected by a very narrow margin, and you can find both pro-Morales and anti-Morales graffiti in many of the areas we saw during our trip. There have been fears about political instability and conflict in the months to come, although one person we talked to during the trip noted that Bolivia has a way of always pulling itself back from the brink of disaster.

Whatever happens, this trip only deepened my respect for Debra, a real woman of God who has a heart for missions and the guts to see them through. I would join her on another trip in a heartbeat.

TOMORROW: Salt of the earth, water in the tank