Daniel and Laura Swanson Serving in Bolivia with NTM Aviation We just celebrated our first Christmas in Bolivia. It was hard but not as hard I thought it would be- Thankgoodness for Skype! We were woken up at midnight on Christmas Eve by the sound of fire crackers being set off in the streets. I guess that is a tradition here!
The day after Christmas, when most people in the US are out shopping and getting good deals, we were called to go down to Immigration to do some more paperwork for our visas. This has been a long process. We had already been down there once before for about 3 hours with the twins and one man refused to sign our paperwork. So, when we got the call to go back we thought it would be a short thing- sign a paper and leave. We ended up being there for 3 1/2 hours- going from office to office to get paperwork done and spending lots of time waiting. It wasn’t exactly what I had pictured my day looking like. The twins did great and ended up eating only crackers for dinner since we had not planned to be there that long. Now we know for the future that whenever we have to do any paperwork or government stuff we need to go prepared- with food, enough water, toys, etc. Fortunately, most of our paperwork got done. Now we just have to go back on Monday to sign one more thing. This time without the twins.
As hard as it is to live in a foreign country, it gives us peace in our hearts that we are here for a reason. That reason keeps us here when everything in our hearts is telling us to go home to be with family. As we celebrated Christmas, it was pure and simple- not a ton of gifts, not a lot of glitz, no family but the four of us, but we had our mission "family" down here that we celebrated with and we read the Christmas story as a family and thought about how simple that first Christmas was. The Savior was born in a stinky stable and his crib was a manger. He didn’t come into the world with lots of fanfare. Our simple Christmas sort of reminded me of His simple birth.
We hope you all had a Merry Christmas!
