Piles of Documents and an Unreachable Lawyer
Midnight Call needs to update its articles of incorporation and sign a new school contract to continue operating in Bolivia. This comes with some challenges.
I had to spend a lot of time with lawyers and piles of documents to deal with the ministry’s articles of incorporation and renewing the school contract. Every association and institution in Bolivia must be brought into compliance with the law by a certain date to be permitted to continue. As a result, I had to travel to Cochabamba multiple times.
We’d appreciate your prayers for this process, as well as for the school contract. It all comes down to this: the school on our premises is run by the state, which is why we need to have an official contract with the Ministry of Education. It regulates a number of things, including the agreement that we provide the religion teachers, and priority in boarding school registrations. Since our current contract hasn’t been adapted to the new laws, it must be renewed. We’ve already been able to meet with the relevant authorities and express our wish to do so. Now we’ll need to submit an application for contract renewal which, like most everything here in Bolivia, must be prepared by a lawyer. We’re praying that we’ll find favor as a mission in the eyes of the authorities. Only the Lord can grant that.
Call Disconnected After 30 Seconds!
We were finally able to reach our busy lawyer in the city, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough minutes left on my cell phone and the call was disconnected! We’d been working on revising our association’s articles of incorporation for a long time, and we’d slowly but surely reached the last stage before submitting the papers to the office in La Paz. We needed to finish this work as soon as possible to be able to continue the mission’s work. But the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. Days passed, and then weeks … Calling and texting didn’t seem to work. That’s when we thought of trying the lawyer’s number from my wife’s cell phone, but her minutes ran out!
Two days later, I spontaneously booked a flight to pay the lawyer a visit in person. My return flight was the following day. On Monday, I visited her office with no success, and used the time to crisscross the city checking items off my shopping list (spare parts, building supplies, etc.). At 9:15 am on Tuesday, the day of departure, I was finally sitting at the computer with her and we were able to finish the first draft by 10:30. Then I had to hurry to the street, grab a taxi back to the hotel, pack my suitcase, and rush back to the waiting taxi—to check in at the airport just in time! At 11:35 am, I was on the plane back to Riberalta. The Lord Jesus has helped so much!
“Miss, where would you rather live? With your father or your sister?”
By Maria, volunteer
Ana (name changed) asked this question out of the blue while I was combing her hair. After asking her a lot of questions,
I found out that this 10-year-old’s family had asked her exactly this question. Ana’s mother had died from Covid [in 2021]. Her new stepmother, who is very young herself, now has a new baby of her own.
Ana’s father works a lot, so she spends most of her time with her stepmother and the baby. Her father also drinks a lot on weekends, so he’s often angry. Her 22-year-old sister lives with her grandfather and cares for a cousin’s children during the day, so she doesn’t really want Ana with her. With such a large burden weighing on her, Ana can hardly concentrate at school and is genuinely afraid of the Fridays she can go home: she is often picked up very late or not at all.
I’ve asked myself how she is supposed to understand or trust God’s love, when she experiences so little love and feels so unwanted. My prayer is that not only Ana, but also all the other girls, despite their broken families, will know the love of God and receive the Lord Jesus into their hearts, and that His love will overflow in them.
Midnight Call - 04/2023
