Imports.

Bolivia has a good deal of American imports.  I appreciate this, at times.  Especially when it comes to food.  La Paz, being the capitol, is getting an impressive amount of American food items and British, too.  We also have what I would consider more and more American-style restaurants, coffee shops and clothing stores.  Some of them I ignore because they are United Colors of Benetton, and I can't afford them.  However, I appreciate Magic Time's Krispy Rice cereal, even though it's an X-brand, so that I can make rice krispy treats from time to time.  However, having just passed Halloween, I can say that that is an import I do not appreciate.  A decade ago, Halloween wasn't a word people knew around here.  It's an American import, but Bolivia only got the nastiest side of it.  It's all witches, goblins, dead guys, blood and guts all the time.  You won't see cute little princesses or doctors or toy story characters or cans of soup (my brother dressed up like Campbell's cream of tomato one year) around here.  But, you will see a lot of nastiness and stuff that scares Natty and keeps her from wanting to even enter the grocery store.  Not cool.  Another import I saw today that will be arriving...Hooters.  Seriously?  We don't have a Starbucks or McDonalds but we'll have a Hooters??  I suppose for the country that downloads more porn than any other Latin American country, this should not surprise me.  But, I don't have to like it.

Did I mention we started work on our property?  There is finally movement up there after 6 years of owning and dreaming.  However, because our land and house paperwork has not been processed yet (after 3 years in the government offices), we can't actually build our house.  What we're working on are retaining walls, leveling of ground, etc...  It's enough to keep a team of builders busy for a while and get the money starting to flow out of our pockets.  But, since rainy season started early, I don't think we'll see activity on a foundation until March.  However, we're excited to see something going on and incredibly thankful for God's amazing generosity in allowing us to do this.