January Thaw, How the time flies

Jason as "George" and Jenna as "Sarah" in the play "January Thaw". 11 years ago this January we met in Dram Club for this play.

Jr/Sr (Prom) Jason's Senior year 2001. We we best friends at this point but still denied anything more than friendship.

So much for "just friends".

September 2007

Cowboys, Crocodilians, and Quicksand

Sometimes it feels like I’m living in a western with the wide open space out here and people who stop by on horses. The other day a “cowboy” rode up looking for his lost horse. Unfortunately he was a day late. There was a horse wandering around our yard the day before but had moved on.

Other times it feels like something out of Indiana Jones when I take a hike around our landlord’s property and suddenly find the ground beneath me trying to make me a midday snack. I’ve run into “quick mud” before or sand that sinks relatively fast but this was the real deal quicksand. Everywhere I stepped the ground turned to liquid and so I could not backtrack, I had to find a new path. The faster I moved, the quicker the what felt like solid ground liquefied into a soupy mess. How to survive quicksand: Don’t run, you’ll only make the quicksand “quicker”. I feel like there is a moral in there somewhere.
And then there are Crocodile Dundee moments like Tuesday night when all the dogs were barking more intensely than usual. I went out to investigate only to find a hissing pair of glowing eyes in the bushes surrounded by the dogs. At first I thought it was a small wild cat but it turned out to be a Spectacled Caiman, a smaller relative to Crocodiles and Alligators. Those of you who know me know that of course I could not leave it alone. Soon I was traipsing up to the house to display my 5 foot Caiman to Jenna.

Quicksand, Caimans, Snakes in my seedling fruit trees, and tarantulas on the porch, it has been an adventure as usual. The new year promises to bring lots more exiting things, in addition, of course, having a little one around. Last weekend we had our team out to our house for a meeting to plan for this coming year. There are a lot of projects and ministries we hope to accomplish this year. Hopefully we can get the chicken project running smoothly and put in the nutrition garden for the children’s center early this year. We have several trips to the Beni (Amazonian part of Bolivia) where we will live on a boat going up and down various rivers to various communities to provide medical aid. Often times doctors, dentists, or church teams come down from North America to help out. Our big team dream is to find a plot of land for a camp that would eventually be converted into a bi-vocational (Bible and other vocational options) training center for indigenous peoples of Bolivia, provided funds become available. I cannot wait to see some of out plans become reality as well as experience the realities we did not plan on.

The SAM Bolivia Team at Conference

Back to Santa Cruz

After only a few days in our new home out near Pailon, we had to move back to Santa Cruz. Well, not really, but we spent 5 nights back near Santa Cruz which is as long as we have been at our new house. We went back for conference, a week long retreat where all the SAM missionaries get together to get away. I am not sure we were quite ready to "get away" after just moving but we really enjoyed conference. Jenna led worship and I just sat back and enjoyed the retreat, well that and led a nature hike. I think I turned all the kids into little naturalists.

As for our new home, we are loving it. We were enjoying settling in, getting to know our neigbors, and watching Simon make friends with our landlord's dogs and chasing cows around our backyard. Below are some photos of our new place.

Dining Room

Our Bedroom

Soon to be baby nursery

Living room

Kitchen

Christmas Time = Weigner Family Moving Time

Christmas Day 2009

Jenna at 23 weeks pregnant

Yes! It's that time of year again! Christmas has come and gone and again we find ourselves moving. We have moved for the last 3 years the week between Christmas and New Years, and it's beginning to feel like a family tradition. We have been married a little over 2 years, this is our 3rd country we've lived in and we just moved into our 7th house! We are definitely ready to settle down for a little while- like a year and a half.

Christmas was great this year. The week before Christmas we attended several Christmas dinner parties where I accompanied a trumpet player from our mission as the evening's entertainment. We also were able to attend a Christmas Eve service at the English speaking church in town. I sang "Breath of Heaven"- which seemed very appropriate since I'm is getting bigger day by day. We opted to head home after the service for a quiet evening- which was interrupted by a very interesting Bolivian tradition of fireworks starting at about 8pm and reaching its crescendo at midnight. Imagine the biggest 4th of July fireworks display you have ever seen and multiply that by about 4 and that was what we saw and experienced at midnight on Christmas Eve. Everyone in the city buys fireworks and sets them off from their yards, filling the air with the smell of smoke and making it sound like a warzone. It certainly was not a "silent night", but it was fun to see that many fireworks.

As I mentioned before we just moved into our 7th house of our marriage. We will post more pictures soon. We are now living much closer to our ministry site, Poza Verde, and are about 1.5 hours from Santa Cruz. The house we are living in is owned by another missionary family that has to live in the city for now since their kids are in school. We are also located next door (about 400m) from a Trans-World Radio station where we have lovely neighbors who have already made us feel at home. The house is beautiful, in a great location and it is wonderful to be back to country living. We have a cow pasture behind our house and the occasional smells remind us of central Pennsylvania in the summer, not to mention being surrounded by lots of Mennonites who speak only German or spanish.
We have been greeted in German several times now, and I'm wishing I had paid more attention to my Grandfather when he tried to teach me a few basic German phrases. Spanish works as a nice intermediary for communication.





I think thats it for now. Stay posted for more pictures- coming soon! (After we get our internet set up in our house!)