All of the mission trips I participated before took place in orphanages, schools of the Blinds, elementary schools and public clinics in remote villages, Bolivia was the first trip where I served inmates in prisons.  Yet the whole time there I only felt a sense of community, peace, acceptance, forgiveness when I treated these patients, it felt normal like every patients I saw in my private practice or on mission trips, they are soft spoken, courteous, gentle, and grateful people.

On the first day our dental team was allow to set up clinic in a little church in the heart of the Obrajes prison.  It dawn on me later that evening that when I was a kid I was in a similar little church in a prison in Vietnam.  In 1975 as my family and I tried to escape South Vietnam by boat, we got caught on the beach and were put in a prison in a fishing village North of Saigon.  The prison has a small chapel, our group of women and children were kept in the chapel while all the men were in locked cells.  The chapel in Obrajes reminded me of my 3 weeks of prison as a kid some 40 years ago, and even though I never forget the lessons of that whole period, this past week in Bolivia renews my belief that freedom is the biggest blessing of all.  The day that the communists marched into Saigon and took away the freedom we took for granted, that was when I knew what freedom was really truly like.  And for the prisoners we served, I am sure there is nothing they wanted more than to be free again.

In a strange and completely unexpected way, working in the prisons is more meaningful to me as I reflect on the trip.  I have so much freedom now, I am free to vote, free to live wherever I wanted, free to travel the world, free to make as much money and work as hard as I wished, or free to work as little as I wanted ... it just makes sense that people like me who enjoys so much freedom would want to share a little of my blessings to those who have none.