The Van Ausdal's: June 2010

Because my husband is being lazy and wont write his own post, I am being his scribe....so here is his story (he's telling me what to write):

In April, I had the opportunity to go to Bolivia with Kate's family to check up on her dad's study projects for BYU, and do a little humanitarian work. We spent the majority of our time in La Paz, which was my favorite city we visited. While in La Paz we visited a lot of small nearby cities where many of the families were in need of food and clothing. We went to the markets in these towns and bought a bunch of food to hand out to multiple families. Spending $30 would supply a large Bolivian family with food for over two months. Some of the most humbling experiences came when i walked into these people's homes (if you could call them that) and saw their living conditions. It's amazing to me that they can actually survive the way they live. After visiting these families we went further out on the Alti Plano and took school supplies to some children in schools there. They were pretty surprised that a gringo was speaking spanish and they were making fun of me because I was so big. As we were handing out coloring books and crayons to the children, I was surprised to find out that they had never seen anything like this before and we had to teach them what to do with the crayons. Before we left to Peru we went and visited a few "supposed" ancient book of mormon sites/ruins....pretty impressive! We also traveled down the famous ROAD OF DEATH (youtube it) to a little jungle town called Curoico. After we spent nearly a week in Bolivia, we flew to Cuzco, Peru where we traveled to Machu Pichu. Although our tour guide wasn't too fond of Americans, we still enjoyed our time there and were amazed at the Mayan architecture. We were even more surprised when our very expensive travel agency lost our bags and landed us in the Machu Pichu HOSTAL!! Kate's mom was completely disgusted so she worked some magic, and we ended up in a very nice hotel for the night. In order to catch our flight home, we had to go back to La Paz, where we spend our last day in South America visiting an orphanage which was a very sad, but gratifying experience. When we arrived at the orphanage I was shocked when I saw a "baby drop off" at the front. Mothers that didn't want to keep there babies could drop their babies in this little turn table thing, and when the mom turned it, it rings a bell letting the orphanage workers inside know that a new baby had arrived. We handed out popcorn, suckers, clothes, and milk to over 100 orphans. I spend most of my time there in the nursery playing with and holding the babies/toddlers. When you'd pick one up, they would want kisses, and then the rest of the babies would reach out their arms waiting and wishing they'd be the next one to receive some attention. There was definitely more than one baby I wanted to take home! After the orphanage we headed back home! That was the best trip I have ever been and hope I can go back someday and help out more people!!