Where are we going and what are we doing?

Bienvenidos al blog de Angela y Jake Rapp! We're very excited about our upcoming adventure and would like to start by providing some links to where we are going and the program that we are working with.

In brief, Angela and I will be spending the next year in service to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Iglesia Evangelica Luterana Unida through mission and service work in Resistencia, Argentina. Resistencia is a 400,000 person city in the northern province of El Chaco, about a 13 hour bus ride from Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. We will be working there for about 11 months (we arrive on the 26th of August, after some training in Chicago). At the moment our assignments are still a little vague, but we know that we're going to be working with a youth-oriented mission outreach program as well as a human rights organization. Angela will spend most of her time at the Maria Magdalena Mission with their after-school programs, environmental awareness activities, as well as language and catechism workshops. Jake will be working with the Mission as well as with the Centro Nelson Mandela, which works to denounce human rights violations related to environmentalism, globalization, and the indigenous population of the El Chaco province.

The ELCA's program site can be found here:

http://archive.elca.org/globalserve/youngadults/argentina.asp

For those of that can read Spanish, here is the city's website:

http://www.mr.gov.ar/

And a tourism website that describes Resistencia in English: http://www.welcomeargentina.com/resistencia/index_i.html