by Editor
March 2010 Issue
by Kate Jaramillo
Every so often in life, says Catholic theologian Doris Donnelly, we are beckoned to “make an outward journey which responds to our interior quest toward the center we lose in the clutter of everyday living.” There’s something about my turning fifty that made me want- no, need to be- as Thomas Merton said in his Asian journal, “jerked clean out of the habitual.” In my work as a hospital chaplain and living in an urban setting with all that that brings, my life has plenty of clutter. I discerned, from searching the countless websites I had surfed to find the right vacation, that “vacation” was not what I was searching for. This time, I knew I needed something deeper than that, something different. I needed something to get involved in and connected with.
A classified ad in the back of a Quaker magazine offered a trip that was part service and part educational tour of Quaker community development projects in the Bolivian Altiplano countryside. Quakers? Service? Community? That’s different. I don’t know why I decided to go there. I had no particular interest in the country or the continent, for that matter. I hadn’t traveled internationally since my college years, nor could I with certainty pick out Bolivia on a map. Is that it or is it Paraguay? Columbia maybe?
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