The Southern Cross
Every year I have the privilege of traveling to South America to assist with a construction project in the small rainforest village of Ixiamas, Bolivia. It's getting close...a little over two months away and I find myself thinking more and more about the people there that I've grown to know and love. There's something amazing about rolling into town in the back of a truck after being away for a year and having children run to the road, point, wave, and then call out your name, "Hola Guillermo! Hola Guillermo!"
This year we'll be building the third floor of a boarding house we've been working on for about five years now. On my first trip, it was just a shell of a one-story building. I helped lay the flooring. Now there are over 40 students from distant villages living here and getting an education.
Something about this trip that I will remember as long as I live is the sky at night. What you see of the universe from the darkness of the rainforest is breathtaking; billions and billions of stars that you've never seen before. Being in the southern hemisphere, the sky is totally different from what we're accustomed to seeing here. All new constellations, the most striking of which is
the Southern Cross. It's an arrangement of stars that looks like a cross and every night as we walk back from town down to where we sleep, the arrangement of the constellation places the cross right over the boarding house we've been building. Always a poignant moment.