A Trip For The Heart
A year ago In Bolivia, Krista Hunt Ausland was living out a dream, serving the land and people that captured her heart. But all was lost one terrifying moment when a speeding bus carrying Ausland plunged over a remote mountain road. Her mother, Linda Lawrence Hunt, shares her family’s journey back to the site where her daughter’s dream ended.
It was the towering Illimani mountain that drew my husband, Jim, and me to the window as our airplane lifted off from La Paz, the last leg of a 7,000 mile journey to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
Much like on majestic Mount Rainier, which crowns our home state of Washington, ragged glacier crevasses give visual warning to the inherent dangers en route to the summit. Though enchanted by the stunning view, we were not tourists seeking a summit experience in an exotic land, but a mother and father ragged with grief over the death of our daughter deep in a Bolivian mountain ravine.
Our search was for a deeper peace to help heal the profound shock and break in our hearts.
In awe of the pilot’s need to fly so near the snow-covered peaks, our son-in-law Aaron remarked: “We’re so close we could see any climbers.” He looked in quiet fascination at the mountain’s challenge, reliving his own attempted ascent up Mount Rainier just days earlier. The climbing expedition, aborted when fatigue and altitude sickness endangered their lives, was an attempt by Aaron’s friends to help ease the avalanche of grief that also chilled his soul.
My thoughts ranged to another Bolivian mountain where our beloved 25-year-old daughter Krista lay dying in a remote Andean ravine. In one midnight moment— on May 20, 1998 — she and Aaron were resting peacefully in a microbus, holding hands as their puppy Choclo snuggled on their laps, wrapped in a blanket of young love.
In the next terror-filled moment, their speeding bus plunged over a high cliff, tossing passengers out the windows like rag dolls. When news reached our Spokane home, Jim and I also careened into a dark crevasse of pain. During the following weeks, we entered into the gates of Krista’s death with family and friends.
It was August when we began the pilgrimage to the land of our daughter’s last days on Earth. We went because it was a gift offered. Krista and Aaron had lived in Bolivia for just six months, part of a three-year commitment in community development with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a church organization that sends volunteers to work at the grass-roots level around the world.
After language studies in Santa Cruz, they moved eight hours away to the rural valley of Banado de la Cruz, where over 50 families farm along the Rio Comarapa. It was MCC that gave them a chance to live out their dreams of international service and invited us to see the land and people that captured Krista’s heart.
Some family and friends questioned whether we should go. Was it wise to embark on one more emotionally laden experience? We had just celebrated our daughter Susan’s wedding, two years in the planning, exactly one month after her sister’s death, taking our family on a roller coaster of immense sorrow and joy that added to our fatigue. Knowing we needed to travel the same dangerous mountain roads fueled our family’s fears.
But we knew if we didn’t do the journey that summer, parts of Krista’s story could be lost forever. So we took the journey. What follows are excerpts from “A Terrible Beauty,” a family memoir I wrote after our sojourn through love and loss in Bolivia.
Two crosses filled with gaudy plastic flowers mark the site. We knew the bus had recently been removed. Now a long swath clearing through the dense brush scarred the mountainside, looking much like a ski slope in summer.
Too steep to climb down, we start down a rugged path that zigzagged left of the scar. Cheerful high shrubs with sun-yellow daisy flowers give no hint of the May 20th night of violence when four persons lost their lives and dozens suffered injuries as the speeding microbus flew over a bank of trees before crashing down the mountain.
“There was an eerie silence after we crashed,” recalls Aaron as he describes scrambling through high dense foliage into the ravine and calling for Krista.
He, their puppy Choclo, and Krista’s shoe had been thrown out at the top of hill where he landed on his head, injuring his shoulder and neck.
“It was a cold, pitch black night with only a finger moon, almost a surreal scene. I could tell Choclo was injured, but I told him I was sorry, I had to leave to find his mom. I knew I’d never be able to find him again.”
When we were near the bottom where the bus landed, Aaron shows us the place he remembers first seeing Krista’s body. “She was the last thrown from the bus,” he says as he tries to reconstruct his last memories.
He describes falling to the ground, crying “Oh God, Oh God, NO,” trying to give Krista mouth-to-mouth, hearing her death gurgle, and feeling the first icy fear of living without the woman he loved since their first days of college.
More than any part of this trip, it is their valley home in Banado de la Cruz and their community of friends I most long to see. I recall Krista’s disappointment when she first saw the one-room adobe home connected to the community center.
“We romanticize adobe in America,” she wrote, admitting to her “borderline depression” at the sight.
“In fact I live in a mud and straw house with a little cement which has been baked in the sun and looks like it’s going to disintegrate in the first rain. It looks like crap.”
Without electricity or plumbing, Krista and Aaron needed to use a dry latrine and outdoor bucket for showers, gathering water from a distant spring and the river. They had to spray often for scorpions and tarantulas.
However, within days she grew to love her new home as she and Aaron looked forward to giving it their own touches. I knew she especially liked the spacious windows overlooking the bucolic view of farmlands and mountains and listening to the sounds of the river from the porch hammock.
“I love it here and am increasingly content and happy with my new home,” she wrote to us.
For our 30th wedding anniversary, Krista had made a tape recording, which we find among her papers in the house. “A creation from your creation,” she wrote in the note to us. Her buoyant voice permeates the room as we listen closely to her tales of the first few weeks.
She tells stories of hosting their first work project, building 11 dry latrines with a group of high school students visiting from Canada.
On the tape, her voice is filled with pleasure. “The families fed them and were incredibly generous. To see 20 North Americans working on latrines with the Bolivian families, building relationships and learning about another culture was wonderful. For a 15-year-old to realize not everyone has MTV really can be life shaping.”
She ends her hour-long tape by saying: “I’m in awe of the beauty here. I love life and am thankful you gave it to me.”
We walk down the lane to the nearby schoolhouse where members of the Women’s Cooperative have gathered to welcome us with a country feast of chicken, rice, lettuce and tomato salad.
Several of the mothers, with babies slung on their backs, look younger than Krista. It was these women who initiated the latrine project for their families and treated Krista with such kindness.
“We will never forget her,” they say, tears flowing freely.
I tell them through an interpreter: “We’ve built a small waterfall and pond in our back yard. We want to have words engraved on rocks which friends feel describe her. Do you have any you want us to add?”
Each woman eagerly joins in words of remembrance:
Una amiga buena, a good friend.
Muy amable, so kind.
Simpatica, caring.
Muy divertida, very funny.
Hermosa, beautiful.
Amante de ninos y animales, a lover of children and animals.
Una trabajadora, a dedicated worker.
One woman tells of this dream she’s had of Krista.
“In my dream I met Krista one day at the river,” says Nikolasia, a young mother nursing a baby. I said, “Krista, I thought you were dead.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“But how can you be fine, you’re dead?”
“They took my heart in a box to the north and fixed it,” explained Krista. “I’m fine. But Aaron’s not doing well.”
How true, I thought, knowing Aaron’s searing loneliness.
Later, while visiting in Cochabamba, Aaron shows us special places in the market where he and Krista found her sister Susan’s wedding present. For more than an hour, we look at dozens of old ahuayo weavings. They often were used to carry babies or market supplies. Each one has been patiently woven by a woman committed to creating a beautiful family item essential for their simple existence.
As I hold these antique weavings, something in their texture connects me to Krista’s story. For the past two weeks, we have been seeing the final months in a beautifully textured life of a daughter whose actions lived out her belief in a “holistic faith, in God’s love to all creation.”
And as she showed this love of all God’s land and peoples, her spirit touched Bolivians from all walks of life — Banado peasant women, educated Andean Network activists, MCC community volunteers, teachers, farmers, and children, even the neighbor dogs.
With the wind in her hair, and a beloved husband at her side, she flew with zest on a motorbike across high mountain terrain to serve three communities.
She worked alongside others for basic things: a decent latrine, libraries and literacy for children, a sense of worth and community for women, a home where love dwelled.
These were simple acts, done with great devotion, in an unknown river valley. Yet because she was never burdened by a false sense of her own importance, she kept the joy. Like the beautiful weavings, she came from one particular family, but cast her spirit into the broader world she loved.
And we are among the most blessed of parents to have seen — and heard — the ways she did this at home and abroad. These treasured stories of Krista’s life offer hope for healing, a gift to our broken hearts.