More adventures of my mission

     I served a mission in Bolivia 1997-1999.  At the end of my mission my mission president showed me the record of each parasite that I had the pleasure of hosting.  It was two pages long.  I’m not sure if Giardia or the Ameoba was my favorite of the many.  This is a classic picture of what it was like in the jungle of Bolivia. 

We would cut down huge leaves from the rain forest with our machetees and drag into town to help make roofs for houses.     

       All the roads were dirt, so they would get very muddy.  When it rained—(almost every day) it poured!   About half the time it reached my waist and on one occasion it reached my chest.  When it would get really deep I was always afraid of the aligators and piranas floating in from the flooded river and creating missionary soup of us.        

Then there was the rush of taking off in an airplane from a muddy runway, but that was nothing compared to taking a motorcycle taxi riding at breakneck speeds in 2 ft deep water while giving a mini discussion to the driver.    

   
 Speaking of floods I remeber the time the flood destroyed the bridge that was on the only road to my area 14 hours away, so we had to improvise.  Since the road was untraversable, train tickets were all sold out, so we had to take a taxi to a remote place where we had heard the train stopped sometimes.  It was about midnight and pitch black when the train finally came.  The train did stop for about 20 seconds in which time we climbed aboard as stowaways in between two train cars.  The train started going before my companion was aboard, so he started running alongside the train, grabbed my hand and I pulled him up.   Since we were between the two train cars I had to stand up for the 16 hour ride straddling the pole. 

     

When we got to a tiny town about 1 1/2 hours away from our area we jumped off the train taking the chance that somehow we could make it the rest of the way.  We saw a truck and asked the driver if we could pay him to take us to Camiri, our area.  We climbed into the back of his truck where there were several bags of cocaine leaves.