Latin America Trip Part III - Venezuela

Arrival at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Caracas.

(photo by Bethany Furkin of PNS)

Our last stop on the Latin America trip was to Venezuela to visit the Iglesia Presbiteriana de Venezuela (IPV). Our Avianca airline plane landed right over the water onto Simon Bolivar International Airport and the sight was beautiful! Upon our arrival we were met by a delegation of church leaders including Rev. Elisa Munoz de Bulmes, Moderator of the IPV and Zulema Garcia de Rojas, Executive Secretary of the Western Presbytery. Caracas is the capital of Venezuela and has a population of approximately 5 million. The whole city is in the ravine of a valley of mountains and is very modern. We were taken to the Hotel Milenio which was our home for the next few days. We met for lunch in the hotel restaurant La Fonda del Milenio by Rev. Maria Jimenez de Ramirez, Executive Secretary of the Central Presbytery; her husband Uriel; and who I call the "life of the party" Elder Loida de Valera, Executive Secretary of the IPV. We had a great conversation and even better food! Afterward we drove to the town of Santa Barbara to visit the Jubilee Center, a Presbyterian Camp and Conference center and talk with the director and a local pastor about its mission and ministry. From there we drove to the town of Ocumare de Tuy to visit Jacob's Ladder Presbyterian Church. We visited an after-school tutorial program that is run by the church and were hosted for dinner and a evening church service that featured youth participation. It was a great night and we were tired on the drive back to the hotel and had a good night's sleep.

Entrance gate to the Jubilee Center

Youth participation in evening church service

(Both pictures courtesy of Bethany Furkin of PNS)

The next morning we woke up early and traveled to the cities of Guarenas and Guatire to visit Presbyterian schools that served low income students in elementary and secondary grades. The secondary school in Guarenas, Unidad Educative Colegio Presbiteriano El Buen Pastor was a huge school of 600 students and the building was five stories high. We talked with the administration about the offerings of the school and the progress of the students.

The elementary school in Guatire had cute and smart kids that greeted us in English. In between we visited a Presbyterian community center that had a large auditorium and a dental clinic. Traveling back to Caracas, we had a great lunch at the beautiful campus of the Colegio Americano de Caracas with staff of the school and synod. Both Presbyteries (Western and Central) gave a presentation on their mission and ministries and then we entered into a discussion about the Presbyterian presence in the world especially in regards to the United States. It was a very frank discussion that I will talk about in a future post. Our night ended with our attendance at a ecumenical prayer service for National Week of Prayer at a Lutheran Church in Caracas where we were all introduced by Loida. Early the next morning we boarded our plane and returned to the States.

To say I had a great time on this trip would be a major understatement. I was blessed to be invited to share in the lives of the Presbyterian Church and its partners and I learned so much. I will always treasure the people that I met and experiences encountered. In a future post I will give reflections of the top things I learned on the Presbyterian Church in Latin America. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for that blogpost!