Ministry UpdatesRead the Latest News & Updates from El Jordán

…just a note… this is probably a PG rated note…

Hi there... well… here I am writing again… don’t worry… this one won’t be that long!!!!

Last night, Marco and I had a hard time getting to sleep… we received a phone call after midnight from Rosario… another of our students (Mery) had just arrived to her “house”… her husband/boyfriend (whatever you want to call him) had stabbed her in the leg… She is tired of the abuse… she is tired of fighting by herself to provide for her family… she is tired of being threatened… pushed around…abused…

This isn’t the first time… it has happened many times before… This might be the first time a knife has actually been used… but Mery is definitely not a newcomer to abuse… when she was a child, she was physically abused by her father… and we believe that some of her mental difficulties came from her dad banging her head against the wall… many times…  When I first met her on the streets in Santa Cruz, she was suffering from the abuse from a partner she had…  He would always kick and hit her in her legs…  To this day, Mery suffers from an ugly ulcer on her leg that never really heals and sometimes gets really bad… results of that abuse…  …so now… for Edgar (the father of her children) to choose to stab her leg… is cruelty… and I can think of a lot of other things I would love to say…

The mother-in-law who lives close by cleaned up Mery’s wound… but Mery didn’t want to go home… Edgar was still at home drunk… so Mery went to Rosario’s house to stay the night…  Marco is on his way out there now… and we are praying that God gives us wisdom to know how to act… and how to help in this situation…

Mery has escaped from Edgar quite a few times before… but has always ended up going back…

Where can Mery go???  What can Mery do??? (Although she has come to El Jordan for a couple years, and has the sincere desire to learn…she has never been able to master any skill…)  What about her 4 children who are under her care??? (she has an older child in a home.)  How can she fend for herself… let alone provide for her family?  …and yet how can you leave the children in a situation where the father has shown, time and time again, that he doesn’t want to change?  There are no easy answers… a bunch of ideas kept racing around our heads last night… but we really don’t know what is best…

Please pray for Mery… her kids… Edgar, Corina, José Alonzo and Leonardo…  and the father… whose name is Edgar as well…

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Right now there are several of our girls that are going through problems… Nelly phoned me up on Monday… crying… Omar, the man who she had lived with for 7 years… the father of her daughter “Morocha”… had died on Friday… They both had lived on the streets… but when their 11 day old baby died on the streets, Nelly came for the first time to El Jordan… and for her children, started to change…  Although Nelly has had her ups and downs… you can see in her a real desire to give a different future to her children… and she has worked hard and disciplined herself to live in a room… pay rent…and send her kids to school… Omar would show up for weeks and sometimes months at a time… but end up going back to the streets… to drugs and the pure alcohol he drank…  The years of sleeping on the streets and addictions sent their bill… tuberculosis…  Omar had many opportunities to receive treatment for his TB (free through the Red Cross in Bolivia)… but he would always only complete 2, 3 or 4 months of the 8 month treatment… when he felt better, he’d leave it and go back to the same old lifestyle… Nelly would plead on Omar’s behalf for the doctor’s to resume treatment… She would be the one who told him to come… and stay at home… that she would work… and she would bring home money for them to live – as long as he would stay at home and not go back to the streets… In every single Bible Study Nelly came to at El Jordan… she’d always ask prayer for Omar…

Unfortunately… Omar chose not to change…  At the best of times, TB is contagious… it is even more dangerous when it is not completely treated and it becomes resistant… because then, the people who are in contact with it, can get a strain of TB that the free/available medication here in Bolivia doesn’t touch… Several months ago, Nelly and Marco were able to get Omar into a free TB clinic… he knew that was basically his last option…  Nelly told him, if he escaped from there, he could no longer come home… for the sake of her kids’ health…  He lasted only a couple weeks at the clinic… He died, the day after New Years… at his dad’s house… while his dad was drunk in a back room, Omar died alone in the middle of the patio…

Nelly went this Monday to visit him… and was met with the news that he had already died and was buried…  That’s when she called me…

Watching cars downtown, Nelly has been able to save up money, and is buying a lot… with the hopes that she can have her own little place to raise her kids…  She has kept up on her payments for her lot… but now has been asked to get out of the room that she rents… She would like to build a little wood shack on her property, before school starts for the year (registration starts this next week I think)… right now construction materials are expensive… but if it is out of wood, El Jordan can have a “work bee” and put it up in a day or two…

Please pray for Nelly… and her kids, David (in a boy’s home), Miguel Angel, Gabriel and Ana Mayerlin (“Morocha”)…

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Patricia has only been coming to El Jordan for the last 3 months…  She was in jail for 5 years… and has been out for maybe a year now… When she got put into prison, she had two small children and was only about 22 years old or so…  The father of her children abandoned her and now has another wife and kids…  In jail, she started studying the Bible… and although she made a decision to follow Christ, she wasn’t very strong…  In jail she had another baby, he is now 1 ½ years old…  The father of her baby was in jail… and promised a bunch of things when he got out…

Well… he got out of jail and disappeared… obviously not wanting anything to do with Patricia nor his baby… He’s never showed up again… and Patricia is completely on her own… with two kids going into school this next month… Patricia’s childhood story is very sad… including her mother abandoning her and her younger siblings when she was young… the crazy thing is that they met up again – in a church service - after Patricia got out of jail.  Patricia didn’t have a place to live… and has been living with her mom… who now has another family of her own… There is still a lot of pain from the past… complicated by the stepfather’s addictions and everyone living in one small room with no lights or water…

So… Patricia moved out on her own this past week… and I’d like to ask prayer for her as well…from the time Patricia started coming to El Jordan (to the Bible Study) she was been faithful… showing such a desire to learn and be obedient to God’s word… She is alone… raising three small children…  This is sometimes the situation where the girls end up messed up with another “partner”… when they find themselves not knowing how to pay rent or feed the kids…  I believe Patricia sincerely desires to do what is right… she has been selling used clothes and other things inside women’s jail… which isn’t the greatest place to work… so please pray with us that God would provide for her… lead her… and give her strength every day to stand firm…

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I got another phone call on New Year’s Day… from Rocio… she was our student two years ago at El Jordan… but went back to the streets… and ended up in jail for almost a year…  She is living with her mom about 6 or 8 hours out of the city until she has her complete freedom…  She called me very upset… alluding to the fact that she was going to commit suicide… that she was tired of her mom constantly reminding her of what she had done… what she used to be… she felt alone and at the end of her rope… 

Rocio called me again yesterday… in a bit better spirits… she came into the city to do her monthly “sign in” at the court house… so she came by to visit for a couple hours while she waited for her bus back…

At El Jordan, we don’t pretend to be the solution…  What we try to do is point them in the right direction…point them to Christ who offers forgiveness and a new life… but as our students make their choices and facing their uphill battles, we commit ourselves to walking along side of them… trying not to take away their responsibilities and creating dependence on us… but we try to be people, basically their family, who they can call on, count on… shoulders to cry on… and continue giving advice that might not be the easiest for them to here but advice that we believe is Biblical… and correct… pointing them in the right direction… and encouraging and helping them along their way…

We need your prayers… we need wisdom… strength… ideas…

Thank you for being a part of our lives… and our students’ lives…

THANKS… and please pray!!!

Lots of love, Corina, Marco (and the little one!)