11th Posting
Autor: Buster Hale | Publicado: 2011-06-28T10:46:00-04:00

Traveling by air in Bolivia. I have been hesitate to write about this because I did not want to alarm the people coming from the US in June on a mission trip. But as soon as I got here in April, our friends were saying that the the flights on Monday and Friday have not been coming from Santa Cruz to Puerto Suarez for over three months. The word typically used by the Brazilians to describe travel in Bolivia is enrolado, which means something like convoluted. Although the computer system shows the flight and the airline continues to sell tickets, the flights are cancelled at the last minute and passengers are just offered their money back. Of course, with 34 people and all their luggage, this solution is not acceptable. TAM, a domestic airline owned by the Bolivian military using a smaller plane, comes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from the domestic airport in Santa Cruz, not the international airport. This means that if the flight is cancelled on Friday, the team must spend the night in Santa Cruz, change airports, and try to catch the other flight on Saturday. With a large group, this would be a challenge and we continued to pray that the Friday flight would come.

After much prodding by GEM's travel agent and Carl King in Nashville, the Bolivian company's representative in Miami finally admitted that the flight was probably not coming. In deed, that is what happened. The team arrived in Santa Cruz on a Friday and had to go a hotel to wait until the next day to catch the flight to Santa Cruz. But they got here and immediately started to work. The team left on Saturday to spend two days in Santa Cruz to wait on the Monday night flight to Miami. The Bolivian airline took care of the hotel, food, and transportation. It was a great week for them (except for a stolen passport--another story) and a lot was accomplished on the missionary residence.

I write about this to illustrate a very common occurrence in the Latin culture: the refusal to admit something is wrong or is not going to happen in a certain time period. The basic premise is that it is better to ask forgiveness than to admit there is a problem.  This is very frustrating to Americans and Europeans who are used to directness. South Americans are not necessarily being dishonest or deceptive, but are trying not to offend someone. In dealing with the people here, I am always skeptical when they promise things that seem unrealistic under the circumstances. I always pin them down to exactly when something will happen and usually add a day or week to it.

Life on the border. I have written about my experience in getting a Bolivian visa. I decided to use the visa since I was going to the airport in Puerto Suarez to meet the Americans. The first time I could not get my passport stamped because I had no exit stamp from Brazil. Of course, I was in Bolivia at the time, had driven over there and gone shopping, and was parked at the police station. So I made another trip to the Brazilian Police to ask about leaving and entering on the same day; after standing in the line for 20 minutes, the guy said that with my visa there was no problem. But it was almost lunch and everything was closing. A few days later I drove to the frontier and parked, walked to the immigration building, stood in line for 30 minutes, got my exit stamp from Brazil after explaining again what I wanted to do and listening to the officer telling me I could come and go in Brazil as I wanted, walked across a little bridge into Bolivia, filled out a form at the Bolivian Immigration post, got my entry stamp into Bolivia, walked back across the bridge to the Brazil Immigration post, got my entrance stamp into Brazil stamped by the same officer who actually was very nice and helpful, walked back to the truck, and left. But consegui ("I got it.").

But despite getting my visa, the Brazilians have encouraged me not to take our truck into Bolivia because it could be stolen; apparently the model is very popular with Bolivian thieves. I did not really think about it because the shopping area in Bolivia is just right across the border and there are guards in the shopping area. But when the team went back to the airport in Bolivia (about 10 miles from the border), it was more efficient to use cars and vans than take a bus. So the cars and vans went in groups of two or three. As soon as the airline called the flight, the Brazilian drivers, composed of pastors and people from the local Baptist churches, left immediately. I wanted to stay to watch the plane takeoff and went back along with Roberto in his truck. Later I found out that the road was very dangerous to drive alone and that "spotters" would see a car and call another car to intercept the car on the road at gunpoint to steal it. I will not be making any more trips to that airport unless in the company of other Brazilian cars.

More later.