Scott's Beni Trip

In the first week of December, I had the opportunity to fly out to one of our orphanages in San Lorenzo for a day trip. San Lorenzo is located in the Beni province of Bolivia which is north of Cochabamba. I flew with three of the other men from our team, Mike Timmer, Steve Morel, and Steve VanderWerf, as well as the ITeams director for Latin America. Our pilot, Tony Murrin, is one of the elders of our church here and his mission here is flying supplies and rescue missions around Bolivia from Cochabamba. This picture is of me with the two Steves from our team and the Latin America Director, Woody Roland, in front of the plane we flew in to get there.

The flight took about an hour and fifteen minutes and the scenery was really quite beautiful. This is a picture of Cochabamba from the air. In the middle, on top of the hill, is the Cristo statue and the tallest mountain in the background is Mt. Tunari which is around 16,600 feet tall.

We flew over the Andes north of Cochabamba and over the rainforest of Bolivia to get there. On the other side of the mountains the clouds are backed up for miles in every direction.

San Lorenzo is in the lowlands of Bolivia and as you can see from these pictures it is almost always surrounded by water.

We landed on a dirt runway and walked to the orphanage, pictured below.

After visiting the orphanage and walking around the town we went on a fishing adventure. We found a guy with a 20 foot long canoe that had a motor and we set out into the "Everglades" of Bolivia.

It was ridiculously hot, and I was sweating within two minutes of getting in the boat. It was a little freaky as our guide was telling us about the 20 foot crocs and the Bolivian anacondas, which are supposedly the largest in the world, that live in those waters. So for the first 30 minutes I jumped at every ripple in the water. We caught mostly piranha and I caught one Dorado, which is kind of like a mix between a piranha and a trout. 

Because of how sharp their teeth are you have to kill the piranha before you take the hook out of its mouth. When Steve Morel caught the first piranha one of the villagers that was with us grabbed the fish by the gills, pulled out his bowie knife and stabbed it in the head. It was pretty shocking at first, but it is better than losing a finger while trying to get the hook out!

If you have never seen a piranha, they are pretty scary looking fish.

In all we caught around 15 fish, I caught the only Dorado, and we left the fish for the house parents of our orphanage.

It was an amazing trip and it was really good to get to spend some time with the other guys of the ministry outside of the work environment. It was also great to meet the house parents and see a completely different side of Bolivia.

Keep checking the blog as Natalie will be doing a post for Christmas and the new year sometime next week.