Bethleham

First, Feliz Navidad to all of my family and friends. I pray God blessed you with a Christmas filled with laughter and love!

Everything about Christmas this year was different. There weren't any final exams to prepare for, architecture projects to sleeplessly slave over. There weren't any baked goods, or traditional Christmas food. No snow (in fact it is sweltering here, unbearably hot and humid), no tree. And there weren't any family or friends with which to share Christmas.

Most days I forgot Christmas was coming. The only way I knew that it truly was that time of year was the daily shopping I was doing for 145 girls' gifts, and prayer. What a gift the season of Advent is - a time to be reminded daily that we are called to joyfully await Jesus - for His birth on Christmas, but also to await Him daily, and be joyful about how He decides to show Himself to us in small moments. In reflection during the Advent season, I realized what a special Christmas I was being invited to celebrate: I wasn't in my cozy home, surrounded by family and friends, or enjoying old traditions that our family always enjoyed. I was in Bethleham. I was surrounded by poverty - material poverty and spiritual poverty. I could more easily feel and visit the barn of His birth. Besides being away from comforts, I could more easily relate to Mary and Joseph, being strangers in a foreign land on Christmas Eve. Jesus was asking me to wait for Him there - in Bethleham.

The big celebration in Bolivia happens on Christmas Eve "Noche Buena". We attended a 10 pm Mass celebration, complete with a living Nativity scene, lots of incense and holy water. After walking home from Church, we enjoyed a traditional pork feast. It was a little like New Year's because all of a sudden the nuns started shouting "It's midnight! It's midnight!" and there were endless fireworks to celebrate Jesus' birth. After dinner, all of the girls stayed up, and we placed Jesus in the Navitity scene (pesebre), and danced traditional Bolivian dances in front of it. As it was explained to me, we dance for Jesus out of overflowing joy and gratitude; it is a really beautiful tradition.

On only 2 or 3 hours of sleep, my site partner and I hid stockings we had made under all of the girls beds - mostly candy, school supplies, and kleenex (yes, kleenex are scented here, and they just love smelling them). I dumped tiny styrofoam pieces all over the volunteer's kitchen to insure my site partner didn't have to suffer being away from a "white Christmas". And a one-hour nap later, my site partner and fellow SLM volunteers were busy making breakfast for the girls: chocolate chip pancakes and hot chocolate!

In the afternoon, Papa Noel came to hand out the gifts we had been working on for the past two months. The girls received a new outfit and a new backpack or messenger bag for school. Then we got to go to Mass again (with all of the girls wearing their new outfits... so cute!). When we returned home, we all watched The Grinch (5-10 year olds) and The Elf (10+). The older girls were unsure of Elf, but I was tickled that the humor was cross-cultural, and they were laughing hard through the whole thing.

Skyping with my family was hard, but it was a blessing to be able to see them and talk to them on Christmas. I know for them, the 'giving' of me this year was a powerful reminder of Christmas. All in all, it was a very blessed Christmas, and one that will always be special, as it is the Christmas I shared with the girls here at the Hogar.