hold fast

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia - British woman, resident in the city for almost eight years, continues to offend and confuse locals with her questionable Spanish abilities. Sarah Allen, 30, has been living in Cochabamba since September 2014 and claims to have taken classes from local language schools and completed considerable amounts of independent study - something that she does not display in many of her interactions with locals. A former landlady of hers told us, "The day we met Sarah, she told us that she had gone to the US for treatment for extreme constipation. We were very concerned for both her well-being and the well-being of our facilities here. To travel all that way surely meant a very severe condition. However, we came to find out what she meant was training. I don't understand how you get those two mixed up." We also talked to a mother whose child was in Sarah's class. "We went to a Mother's Day party, and after an emotional moment watching a video of ou...

I remember being 11 or 12 and thinking I was a robot, because my feelings just didn’t work right. Wondering if I was a clone, or if God had made some catastrophic mistake with me. I remember staying up night after night obsessing about questions that had no answers. Falling asleep to the TV that wasn't supposed to be on, only when my eyelids couldn't stay open any longer. I remember checking every single night if my family were all breathing. Standing at the door of their room, waiting for someone to take a breath. Over and over, night after night. I never said anything about it though, I hid it well. I was happy and bubbly and there was no way anyone would believe that I had any major issues. Truthfully, I didn’t even realise yet. Until it hit me like a train. The world got so dark, darker than I had ever known it to be. I couldn’t see light. I couldn’t see God. And it broke me. Reading and reading, looking for Him anywhere - but nothing. On my knees, asking forgiv...

6 de agosto Yesterday was Bolivia's Independence Day. We celebrated as best we could from 6000 miles away. I miss Bolivia, it's been home for the last 5 years of my life. But Edson yearns for Bolivia in a different way - it is his home, it's all he knew for the first 7.5 years of his life. So I knew we needed to mark it, needed to celebrate the country that made us a family - the country that gave me him! (Plus, their food is just 😋) So we celebrated all week long - I cooked his favourite meals (which I am steadily becoming more proficient in, although I'm counting down the days til we get back to Bolivia and I don't have to be the one to cook them anymore...) and he wore his Bolivia shirt as much as he could until it was dirty beyond all recognition, then switched to Wilstermann (one of Cochabamba's local teams - and our favourite!) We started off with pique on Tuesday night, which aside from being mine and Edson's favourite Bolivian meal, has also become...

Today, at one point, Edson and I were cuddling in a chair and both crying. Not sure either of us could have actually told you why we were, other than the fact that we are just both tired. Tired of waiting. One night recently, Edson was lying in bed looking pensive (not his default), and I asked him what was going on. He sighed, and said he was sad for one of his "brothers", because he was going to have to wait so long to get a family. "I waited a long time for you to adopt me. I knew you would, but it took a long time." Sometimes I forget that those months when I was doing paperwork, waiting for the next piece of paper to be handed on, he was waiting too. And then I got visits, and we had to wait for him to come live with me. And then he came home, and we had to wait for finalisation. And then we got finalisation and we waited for the next thing, and the next, and the next. And now, Edson asks daily when we can go to Ireland, but we're here -...

I could go back and check the date, but I would guess that backpack was in my cupboard for about 18 months. I had one like it, and Edson loved it. He’d put it on, walk about, pull all my stuff out of it and put his stuff in. And so I decided he needed one of his own, for that day that seemed so far off, but that I think I always knew would happen - the day he came to live with me forever. I loved the beauty of it, the mirror image of it, that by buying one backpack, two kids would get the chance to have a bag all their own to move out of their home with. And so in there it stayed, even when mine broke - I powered through until I could get a replacement, because that one was his. There was something about it, almost sacred, holding space, all through the in-between. Some small show of faith that I truly believed it would happen - in God’s timing, not mine - but one day he would come home. One day the hoped-for would become the now-here. It sat there, through the mo...

I took this photo early this year, but I've loved that bridge for far longer.  Those blue letters spell out, “I love you Cochabamba”, and as I've gone past them during the past two and a half years, I've smiled as I've read them, because I do. I wrote about the bridge and its message just after I arrived here in September 2014, remembering all the ways that God placed Cochabamba in my heart before I even set foot here. Now, two and a half years later, I find it hard to believe all the things I didn’t know, couldn't have imagined, back then. I didn’t know that Bolivia would nestle so deeply in my heart. I didn’t know that it would feel every bit as much home as Northern Ireland does. I didn’t know that I would miss Northern Ireland as much as I do. I didn’t know Bolivia was landlocked. I didn’t know how much I would miss being able to walk on the beach. I didn’t know that through the hard times and the good, friends would become fa...

As we walked up, I told him we were going to pray, and as I said the words he repeated in whatever language it is he speaks. "Lord, heal me. Let my heart be healthy. Amen." To tell you in that moment that I had faith the size of a mustard seed would be a wild exaggeration. So go about three seed sizes down from mustard seed and you're around the size of my faith. You see, we've heard all these scary term thrown around recently, "murmur, another one, catheters, open heart..." And in our flawed human hearts, that was all we could hear, and we could think. We went in, and his doctor was wonderful. He did all his testing, said, "don't move" about 30 times, bribe him with a lollipop, said, "don't move" another 30 times then sat at his desk and typed for what felt like an eternity. As he typed, scenarios of what the next weeks, months, years would look like for the little travieso ran through my head. Less invasive procedure, wo...