LosKauffman's Xanga

Busy, busy, busy

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:56:26 GMT

We are finally getting a breather after a very busy fall. After Anna Sophia's birth, we returned to La Mesa and began to work on final details for the coming RAD team in October. RAD is a program for young people who want to grow in the walk with Christ through community living, intentional discipleship experiences, and service/outreach in an international context. A team of five young women signed up to come to Colombia this year for 8 months. Some of the things we needed to organize on our end included visas, service assignments, Spanish classes, and host families. We had most of the host families lined up by September, but still needed to find some. Once we had all the families we did some orientation meetings with them to prepare them for the cross-cultural experience of having a North American live in their home. The final hurdle was getting a week of orientation activities planned for the RAD team once they arrived. We wanted them to get the introduction we never had! They learned about culture, safety, the political context, and the Mennonite Church of Colombia.

Since the team has been here, we've been meeting with them weekly to help them manage situations, share about their experience, and organize their service assignments. They are a great group. There have been times when we've been able to counsel or encourage them as issues come up. For example, one of them went through some homesickness a few weeks ago. Another had some issues with her host family. Overall, it's been a rewarding learning experience for ourselves.

But...

It has also made us really, really busy these last two months. I had to keep up his classes at school during all of this, plus new challenges have come up at both church and the Anapoima project. On top of that, I was taking another online class at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. It all kind of converged in a particularly stressful way the first week of December. There were some moments where I felt like I seriously could not handle all of the responsibilities I had. Thankfully, we were able to escape that weekend to a retreat with MCCers, and have become progressively less busy since then. It was a good reminder to plan and prioritize carefully for these final six months in Colombia. We don't want to burn ourselves out!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. We'll see if we can't update this page with a little more frequency in 2008...

Baby Update

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:34:31 GMT

Well, it's been far too long since we've updated this weblog...

A few things have changed. First, we both are using Facebook, so we've been keeping in touch with people that way instead of through Xanga. Plus, most of our friends seem to have stopped blogging as well.

Another change is that we have a new baby in the family! One September 2nd at 11:00 pm, Anna Sophia was born in a beautiful home birth attended by a wonderful team from the offices of Procrear, a medical group that specializes in home births, often done in water. It's pretty amazing, actually. They bring all the equipment necessary for any kind of emergency. They bring an inflatable pool, with a water heater, which they fill for the moment when the baby is born. (In Laura's case, things progressed so quickly that there wasn't time to get her into the water. But she got in afterward with the baby and it was very relaxing.) There's the doctor, a midwife, and a nurse, all attending the laboring mom, and there's even an ambulance parked in front of your home the whole time in case there's the need to go to a hospital.

Anyway, it was a very smooth process for us, thankfully. Laura did an amazing job. Just three hours after her labor began, she was giving birth! Anna Sophia weighed 6 lbs. 12 oz., and measured 19 3/4 inches long. Everyone is doing well. It's fun to see the similarities and differences between her and Abigail... She's smaller than Abby was, definitely got more hair, just as good a nurser as Abby was, but quite a bit more relaxed (not that Abby was a super fussy baby, either).

I guess that's it for now. Hopefully we'll visit this blog a little more often now. :) It's nice to be back.

Luna Earns Her Keep

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:30:39 GMT

So our dog Luna finally earned her keep today. After a year of chewing furniture, slobbering, eating trash, peeing with excitement when we have guests, and waking us up every morning at 6:00 am sharp, Luna has finally proved that she is worth it.

Today Luna was playing out back on a beautiful sunny afternoon. Laura noticed that she was not playing alone. She looked closer and saw that she was toying with a poisonous mountain coral snake, a very common species here in Colombia. She yelled to me and I came running out with the machete, armed and dangerous.

Luna actually had the snake by the neck, and maybe she would have killed it herself. But as soon as I got a chance once Luna dropped it to the ground, I went at it with the machete.

Now I do not enjoy killing things. It really was a beautiful creature. But as a father of a very energetic two-year-old, I decided that having a poisonous snake in my backyard is just not acceptable.

This was not the first time we'd seen the snake. On three other occasions we had seen it in the backyard, but it had always eluded us by the time we got the machete out.

We will still need to keep our eyes open for other dangerous critters in our large backyard, but at least we know this one won't cause us any more problems.

Winds of Renewal

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:51:21 GMT

The La Mesa Mennonite youth group has been experiencing some exciting changes recently. It started with our retreat back at the beginning of the month. We took 25 youth to a small church in a small town about an hour away. The pastor, Luz Mary, and her three daughters live there, and there were probably 8 other people around that weekend. Since there was only one shower, the boys had to bathe in the river down the hill.

It was an intense weekend focused on spiritual renewal. As leaders with Martin and Elsy, we led devotional times each morning, and had some structured group activities. Especially meaningful was the day we talked about confession. I led a Bible study on Psalm 51, opening up the topic for the day. Martin later expanded on the theme, inviting them to make things right with God and with others. After lunch we took the group to a quiet place by the river and everyone had half an hour to write personal confessions and make a commitment to change. Amazingly, there were some smoldering ashes by the river where someone must have had a fire earlier that day. We used these (and a few matches!) to light our lists of sins and leave them behind. Then we each found a stone or other object to serve as a reminder of the covenant we were making with God. It was a special time.

Just as special were the three worship sessions led by our hosts. One evening and two mornings we had long, emotionally-charged times of singing led by Luz Mary's gifted daughters, followed by short but powerful messages, and "ministry" times. At the end of one session, youth were invited to come forward to receive empowerment by the Spirit to live the Christian life. In another, they were invited to receive healing for emotional scars and release from spiritual bondage. A number of youth had vivid encounters of the presence of God as they responded to these invitations. Some wept as we laid hands on them and prayed. Others were overwhelmed by the Spirit and collapsed to the floor. A couple of the youth even had more violent reactions, crying out and thrashing on the floor as if there was a spiritual struggle going on inside.

Before you write us off as a bunch of charismatic kooks, please realize that we did not prep the youth about what to do or lay any expectations on them beforehand. We simply encouraged them to come with a desire to grow closer to God. I knew that Luz Mary would encourage openness to the work of the Holy Spirit. I was pleased to see, however, that she never forced or manipulated anyone during the retreat. She simply radiated love and care for the youth, and wanted them to have a genuine encounter with God.

One of the youth group members, Sebastian, later shared how he didn't even believe things like "being slain in the Spirit" were real, but he responded to the altar call anyway. Laura remembers praying, Lord, make yourself real to him, and a moment later when Luz Mary laid her hands on him and prayed, he fell down instantly, overcome by the Spirit's presence. He said later that he felt like he became a Christian for the first time that weekend, even though he had attended the church since he was a child.

If the weekend had consisted of ecstatic religious experiences and nothing more, I would have seriously doubted its usefulness. But the transformation that we've seen in the lives of the youth since the retreat has convinced us of the authenticity of their encounters with God. Several youth members who had personal conflicts with each other were reconciled during the weekend. Others have shared that they have a new vitality in their prayer life, or that God has given them strength to break bad habits. As a group, they have a new sense of purpose and show a desire to grow in discipleship. Several are pursuing baptism classes so they can become members of the church. A few even sense a call to pastoral ministry.

We pray this new enthusiasm continues and grows contagious to the rest of the congregation, and beyond.

Lessons in Boldness

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:31:39 GMT

It seems this week God has been teaching us to be bold. Sometimes the phrase "being bold for Christ" can imply rudeness or insensitivity, synonymous with "Bible-thumping." That's not what I mean.

It's more like boldness in prayer. Boldness in showing and sharing Christ's love. Boldness in encouraging others. Boldness in believing that Jesus transforms lives.

Part of this new attitude stems from reading the astonishing biography of Brother Yun, a leader from among the house church movement in China. He tells of incredible stuff like divine healings, visions, miraculous escapes from prison, etc. When he was 16 he memorized the entire book of Matthew in 28 days, then recited it in his first "sermon," only to see the congregation turn towards God in repentence.

His story would be hard to believe except for the numerous witnesses who corroborate the events. And for the fact that his life bears a consistent witness. When he meets a Catholic priest in prison, he doesn't try to "convert" him to evangelicalism, but rather treats him as a brother. He openly talks about his failures. He combines passion for sharing the good news and compassion for those who suffer.

Reading his story has made me tired of being timid.

Tuesday a youth group member who also attends the Colegio was visibly having a rough day. We have a good friendship with her, and so we asked her what was wrong. She said she felt worthless and that no one loved her. As we listened and tried to encourage her, she revealed that she was hearing voices that were telling her these things. We began to pray for her and the immediate physical reaction in her convinced us we were dealing with something more than just low self-esteem. She got a wild-eyed, desperate look in her eyes, and said her chest hurt. She pleaded with us to tell the voices to be quiet. So we did. She still seemed to be struggling, so we took her to the church where Pastor Martin was working in his office. We joined together in prayer for the young woman, and eventually the voices left her and she felt better.

Thursday she came to me at school and said she wanted to talk to Martin. I told her he was in Bogota, and asked what it was about. She said the voices had come back the previous night, and her parents wanted Martin to pray for her and her family. I told her that he would probably be glad to do that when he got back the next day, but that she could do some things in the meantime to fight these voices on her own. I asked her if she truly believed she had accepted Jesus as her savior and committed her life to him. She said she did. So I told her that as a believer Jesus had given her authority to renounce any satanic powers or voices that tried to attack her. I shared some of my own similar experiences from when I was a teenager. I suggested that she use the Word of God as Jesus did when Satan tempted him. Finally I wrote down a few verses for her to meditate on that affirmed her identity in Christ and Jesus' power over any satanic force.

The next day when I saw her she seemed her usual cheerful self. I asked her how things had gone the night before, and she said she had been just fine. She had been reading the verses I had given her and that really made her feel better.

Just in case you were wondering, we are not "Frank Peretti" Christians who see demons behind every corner, responsible for any bad thing that happens to us. We know there is such a thing as mental illness, and that psychological disorders are not simply reducible to demonic possession.

And yet we can't deny what we experienced. It was precisely when Laura began to pray silently for the girl that she began to talk about her chest hurting. She didn't even know Laura was praying for her! And I can truly say that I had no fear in praying for her and commanding the voices to be quiet. Or in giving her advice about what to do if the voices came back. It wasn't about having some power trip or some spiritual experience. It was about loving this young person and desiring to see her made whole.

I'm praying that God will continue to give us boldness to share Christ's love with hurting people. In the end, we've really got nothing to lose. And so much to gain.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 02:36:04 GMT

It's been another exciting week with classes at school, a trip to the clinic on Friday, and a "Valentine's" event for the youth this evening.

It felt good to be back in class after a week of nothing but peace events. I had an especially interesting class with 11th grade. We're talking about American culture, so to start they wrote short essays about whether they would like to live there or not. Then we talked about some stereotypes of Americans (they're fat, they're rich, they all eat fast food, etc.), and compared them with some actual demographic data I found online. 11th grade's a hard sell right now because they've already taken their version of the SAT, which seems even more crucial here than in the states, so there isn't much external motivation now in their classes. Having a good lesson with them felt like an accomplishment.

Thursday evening, however, was my second night of abdominal pain that hardly let me sleep. So we decided it would be best to go to the clinic just in case it was something serious. After an initial examination, they suspected either appendicitis or amoebas. I was in the clinic all day reading C.S. Lewis (in Spanish) and trying to find a comfortable position on the hospital bed. They took some other tests and found that it was neither my appendix nor parasites. That was sort of a relief, and yet my pain continued without explanation. Last night it flared up again, but finally today it seems to have left me. I was so glad it wasn't appendicitis and we didn't have to have another awful hospital experience like we did with Laura.

I was also glad that I felt good enough to be at our youth group's celebration of "Amor y Amistad," Colombia's version of Valentine's Day. Laura and I gave a little talk about love based on 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. It seemed to go well, especially the parts where we shared about our own dating experience. Then we all walked to a church member's house for a party. We played games, ate pizza, and exchanged gifts. It was really satisfying to be part of an event celebrating love from a Christian perspective. The youth get so many other negative images of love from society and the media. But man, the group is really growing--we now have some 36 youth. It feels like we should try to recruit some other youth sponsors. They are manageable with three or four adults, but barely.

I can't say that any of the last number of weeks has been boring. But I could certainly go for a low key week without special school events, trips to the clinic, or major youth activities. We'll see how this one goes.

-Aaron

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:09:08 GMT

In the aftermath of our miscarriage, we received a huge basket full of mums, grapes, apples and granadillas artfully arranged from La Mesa Mennonite Church . The sharp smell of the mums reminds me so much of a Virginia September. Another teacher gave us a bag of fruit and cheese. Ruth Daza said fruit is the Colombian's version of a casserole brought over in a time of need.

My favorite gift was a beautiful bunch of fragrant purple-black concord grapes. Again, a September smell in a land with no defined seasons. I knew exactly what to do with those grapes. Comfort food, my mom's specialty: Grape Pie, which can only be made with these particular grapes. The taste took me back to back-to-school days, the crisp air and changing leaves of Septembers past.

I felt this need to fill the house with sweet warm smells, so the next day I made sweet rolls. I even plucked an orange with doughy hands to add some orange zest, just like mom always does. It had been so long since I made bread. I loved kneading it to the satisfying smooth elastic consistensy, my hands knowing when it felt just right.

It feels good to make familiar, family recipes. I find myself wanting Abby to grow up with the same delicious food that I did as a child. Thanks to my mom and grandmothers for their wonderful cooking and for filling my childhood with marvelous homemade food.

Sunday morning we looked online at the hymns being sung at Zion that morning, and we sang through them at the breakfast table. Verse 2 of "My Hope is Built on Nothing Less" says:

When darkness veils his loving face, I rest upon unchanging grace.
In every rough and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the vale.

We both started crying unexpectedly as the words made an impact, and could barely finish the song. But it's just things like that which come up suddenly and remind us that we are still a little raw from the experience and not quite "back to normal" even though sometimes we feel we are.

Abby continues to fill our lives with joy. Her big interest now is drawing. She clutches a pen and lays down on the floor and almost puts her nose to the paper with concentration. She'll draw small, intricate circles and then give a satisfied sigh, and then pull me down on the floor with her to draw faces and animals. Last night we heard a new Spanish command. She said "siÃ©ntate" (sit down) while patting the floor, wanting me to come draw with her.

Well, time to refill the coffee cup. Maybe I'll have a sweet roll this time! Blessings to you all,

Laura

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 01:35:09 GMT

We just got back from a wonderful four days in Melgar, Colombia, with our friends David and Ericka. Despite its proximity to La Mesa (55 miles away), the climate is quite a bit hotter. David's clock thermometer read 93 the other day, and that was in the shade! We stayed in this resort which, because of the off season, cost us a mere $32 a night for all of us to stay there in a cabin. The main attraction was the swimming pool just a few steps from the door of our cabin, but we also visited the zoo, the zip line (which was 440 meters of pure adrenaline, according to the advertisement), went on a hike, and tried two of the restaurants. With how busy we've been these past six weeks, it felt good to have a few days with no agenda and almost zero responsibilities (still gotta be a dad on vacation, I guess).

The next few months are going to be full of special activities at school and church. We've got Peace Week at school in a couple of weeks, which by default fell in my lap since I actually asked Justapaz about it. Then in October there's the big Bingo event at school, followed by Cultural Week, in which our fledgling seventh grade choir will get to see what it's made of. The first day of November we'll have Linda Shelly, our director from Mission Network, here with us in La Mesa. Then later that month we'll be traveling to Cali (a big Colombian city we haven't visited yet) to go to an MCC AIDS conference. And with December comes our trip to the US for the holidays. Lots of stuff to look forward to.

One surprise this week was getting asked by La Mesa Mennonite Church to assume the roll as pastoral couple once Martin and Elsy finish in February of next year. We were honored to be asked, but quickly declined saying we want to support Colombian leadership. It made us feel affirmed in our gifts and the level of trust we have with the congregation, but it was not something we expected or desired in the least. But I think I'll always remember that my first invitation to be the pastor of a congregation came from a church in Colombia.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:17:23 GMT

Lots of exciting things going on here lately. We just finished some major DVD projects including one for our families, one for Zion, and one for La Mesa Mennonite's sister church in Nebraska. It meant many late hours staring at our little computer screen, but I think it was worth it.

This week we gear up for David and Ericka's visit from Ecuador. We're eager to see them and catch up, show them around La Mesa, and have a few days of "vacation" at a resort town nearby. I know, I know, we just had vacation, but with all the stuff we've been working on lately (extra classes, parent-teacher meetings, DVD projects, sex ed. presentations, youth group, etc.) it kind of feels like we need a few days away.

Despite the busy days we have noticed that we don't feel the same heaviness or longing for home or negativity about certain Colombian cultural quirks that we did before the the semester break. I guess you could say that life feels normal and good and we feel like we can see God working in us and in the church/school community. Maybe it's psychologically helpful to know that we will be heading to the US for Christmas. But I think too we're just at an upswing point in the cultural adjustment cycle.

Today I learned what not to do when you want to hide some money. We were in a taxi and I noticed that the picture on the ID card in the taxi did not match the face of the driver. Just in case, I tucked $20,000 pesos ($8) in my undies so we'd have something left to get home in case we got mugged. Thankfully, we arrived safely to our destination with no problems, but the $20 thousand peso bill stayed in my shorts. Guess I've lost a little weight, or my clothes have stretched out, or something, because when I was trying some pants on at a clothing store I realized that the money wasn't there anymore. We looked around the store and retraced our steps in the mall, but nope, it was gone. Guess we made someone else's day. Anyway, loose undergarments may be comfortable but they're no good for hiding money.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 12:00:14 GMT

Well, this has been a week of uncharacteristic initiative taking on my part. Last Saturday I finally went and got my hair cut (after a year of letting it grow) and it was actually not as scary as I anticipated. I don't know why I always think that hair salons are going to be high-pressure, awkward places, but thankfully this proved me wrong.

Wednesday, I went to the orthodontist and got an appraisal for braces. It looks like it's going to happen folks! And they might even be off by December 2007 - all for a fraction of what it would cost in the U.S.

Bigger than all of this stuff, I helped plan and present the first sex ed. forum for 9-11th graders. Lilian, the chemistry teacher and I talked about Dating, Marriage, Safe Sex, and STDs ( complete with scary photos). After anticipating this for months, it was such a relief to actually present the material, and have a positive response from the students. It was the first time I talked up front in Spanish, and while it almost led to a nervous breakdown the night before, it went smoothly! More than anything, it feels good to me to have done something concrete with Sex Ed., finally!

Other very very exciting news from the Kauffman front....

WE WILL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS!

Yes, that's right, after talking with our families and director, we've planned to fly to the States on Dec. 15th and stay until Jan 2nd. That's 19 precious days to spend with family and friends over the holidays. The timing is great...it's in the middle of our term. My family who was planning to come at Christmas is now planning to visit us next summer. We have so much to be thankful for, and are grateful for the support and love from our families.

Time to go make some coffee and enjoy the sunshine with Abby and Aaron on the back porch. With love,

Laura