Gracia Mamani, who will turn 3 in August, is not a morning person, especially when life in her household has been turned upside down by a visitor. (T-G Photo by John I. Carney) [Click to enlarge]

Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia -- My work week in Cochabamba was bookended by two birthday parties, each of them held on a Sunday.

I attended the first party purely by accident. On our first Sunday in Cochabamba, Rudolf Band had taken Debra Snellen and me up to the Inca-Rakay ruins, high on a mountain top southwest of the city. He had borrowed a family member's SUV because it was more suited to the mountain roads. After the trip, we dropped off Debra at Gaston and Bea Saavedra's home and then went to meet Rudolf's wife and children so that we could return the SUV.

The rest of the family was at a birthday party, at a rented banquet hall in Cochabamba. It was a nice, party; the clown was leaving just as Rudolf and I arrived. I'm not sure exactly who the birthday child was or how they were connected to Rudolf and his family, but there seemed to be a lot of friends and family members in attendance, and they insisted that we stick around. We had leftover birthday cake and the first real full-calorie Coke that I had consumed in months. Then, they started serving dinner. Then, they brought around glasses of red wine. I checked to see if Rudolf and his wife were drinking the wine, and when I established that they were, I had a glass as well.

Meanwhile, everyone was conversing happily with friends and family, in Spanish. I'd have probably felt like an outsider at this party even if it had been conducted in English; in Spanish, I felt even more lost.

Finally, though, it was time to leave. Rudolf's wife and kids would follow us to the condominium where we needed to drop off the SUV. As we walked to the SUV, Rudolf referred to a topic that he, Debra and I had discussed earlier in the weekend -- the idea of two Bolivias, a rich nation and a poor nation. Rudolf said that as executive director of OESER, a non-profit community outreach, he has to be careful not to get too caught up in the rich Bolivia we had just experienced.

That divide was also a source of frustration to Debra and me, and it tied into some of our miscommunications and misunderstandings prior to the trip. You see, on previous LEAMIS trips there have always been daily or even twice-daily worship services, scheduled by our host church but featuring skits or sermons presented by the visiting LEAMIS team members. But in this case, we turned out to be working directly for OESER, which is a non-profit agency rather than a church. So there were no daily services. When we realized this, in advance of the trip, we contented ourselves with the idea that we would at least be attending Sunday services twice during our visit, and we assumed that we might be asked or expected to preach. Debra and I each prepared a sermon to take with us to Bolivia.

The Mamani family were T-G city editor John I. Carney's hosts during his stay in Cochabamba. Top row, from left: Gracia Mamani, John Carney, Freddy and Norma Mamani. Front row: Susan and Alexandria Mamani. (Photo by Debra Snellen) [Click to enlarge]

But the church we attended, Cochabamba Christian Community, was made up of middle and upper class people from the center of Cochabamba, and we saw few of the people from Villa Candelaria with whom we worked during the week. The projects we were doing in Villa Candelaria weren't really on the church's radar. We were politely introduced during the services, along with all of the other visitors, but the church services really had no connection to the work we were doing.

After some of the remarkable worship music I'd heard in rural Nicaragua and rural Kenya, I finally thought to bring a tape recorder with me on my Bolivia trip. But the church in Cochabamba sang bland praise choruses, with the lyrics on PowerPoint slides. There was nothing even remotely Bolivian about them.

The other birthday party I attended in Bolivia was a lot more informal than the one at the banquet hall. I stayed in Cochabamba with Freddy and Norma Mamani in a scruffy, working-class neighborhood called Villa Candelaria. My bedroom was quite comfortable, but the rest of the home had reminders that you were living in the Developing World -- the on-again, off-again water service, the electric shower head rather than a hot water heater, and so on. The Mamanis have three girls, one of whom -- Susan -- turned 9 during my visit. Her actual birthday was on Wednesday, July 4, a date which Freddy knew was also significant to the American visitors in Cochabamba.

"ˇHappy Estados Unidos!", Freddy said to me cheerily as we sat down to breakfast that morning.

Our breakfast conversations were always fun. Freddy knew about as much English as I knew Spanish, but it didn't keep us from having a good time. Freddy would pull out his old school books -- he'd apparently studied some simple English nouns and verbs -- and would call things out to me, asking what the English word was.

One night, I taught Freddy and the two older girls, Valentina and Susan, how to play Jenga. I meant to bring a Jenga game with me to Bolivia but never got around to it. I found an off-brand knockoff in an outdoor market in Cochabamba, for less than a third what it would have cost me in the States.

Normally, I would eat a very simple breakfast -- bread with butter, peach jam or liver paste -- at Freddy and Norma's house, and they would often serve me exactly the same thing late in the evening. (That included coffee, often right before my bedtime, and I would lay awake in bed trying to figure out why.)

We were usually all gone in the middle of the day, and so Freddy and Norma hadn't had a chance to serve me lunch, which is the big meal in Bolivian culture. They asked if I was free for lunch on Saturday, but Gast--n and Bea already had plans to take Debra and me to a downtown market to buy souvenirs. So it was agreed that Debra and I would have lunch with Freddy and Norma on Sunday, our last full day in Cochabamba.

After a wonderful meal, Freddy and Norma busied themselves with the dishes while Debra and I sat in my room discussing various aspects of how the trip had gone. Despite the small crowd that I mentioned in Wednesday's installment, Debra was pleased with my presentation of the leadership workshop material and we discussed the possibility of me being a part of the workshop on future trips.

Just as we were wrapping up our discussion and thinking about getting Debra back to Gaston and Bea's house, we discovered that Freddy and Norma were setting up for a birthday party. I realized that they were about to celebrate Susan's birthday from a few days before. At this point, it was obvious that neither Freddy nor his taxi driver brother, Rodolfo, would be free to take Debra back until after the party was over with.

This party -- unlike the one at the banquet hall -- was mostly attended by children. We had cake, and Coke, and watched as Susan blew out her candles, but then we returned to my room while the kids enjoyed themselves.

On Monday morning, my last chance to talk to Freddy and Norma together, I thanked them for their hospitality and presented them with some small symbolic gifts -- a box of pencils from Musgrave Pencil Company's 90th anniversary last year, and a pen in a wooden case from National Pen Corp. I also left the girls the Jenga game and a Frisbee which I had brought along for the purposes of a devotion I never got the chance to give.

SUNDAY: Escape from Santa Cruz