On a mission

Most people packing for a two-year job assignment in Argentina don’t have much trouble deciding how many cake decorating pans or how many cameras to take along. The cake pan tally is generally somewhere around zero, and they’re lucky if they remember a camera at all. Bonnie Hudlet is not most people. After considering all eventualities, she’s decided to pack only four of her 30 pans and only her five favorite cameras.

Hudlet is leaving for Cordoba, Argentina, where she’ll work with Centro de Entrenamiento Cristiano, a youth missions training center run by Argentinians. Her job as missions photojournalist includes work as a photographer and videographer in the multimedia department, Spanish language study, and eventually Spanish-English translation, as she will be the only native English speaker on the team. She will assume the role of an “auntie” to short-term missionary women in need of advice and support, and hopes to have a room of refuge in her apartment for those women who need a place of solitude to rest and reflect.

And, of course, she hopes that her cake-decorating expertise will be in high demand for special celebrations.

Five years as Coeur d’Alene Fire Department’s volunteer photographer, and six years as photojournalist for the Coeur d’Alene Press have given Hudlet the training and experience to fulfill this mission.

“In photographing people, I’m affirming them,” Hudlet said. “I’m saying ‘You exist.’ People are drawn to photos. Photos bring a face or an area or the reality of a hardship to the viewer. There wouldn’t have been the response to the tsunami (in South Asia), for example, without video.”

A veteran of mission trips to Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and China, Hudlet is familiar with culture shock, but she is not expecting to suffer much from the cultural changes.

“There are, of course, adjustments to new jobs, neighborhoods, and living accommodations,” she says. “I’d be worried if I didn’t notice a bit of culture shock, but my Spanish is passable and the food in Argentina is very European, lots of beef, bread, and salad, so changes will be minimal.”

Dr. Connie Befus, a psychiatrist and counselor with Latin America Mission, Hudlet’s sponsoring agency, warns new missionaries who are heading out into the field that culture shock is cumulative, that it builds up like a steaming tea kettle until one fairly insignificant event can put a person over the edge. She herself recalls losing all sense of proportion when she realized that someone had polished off her last tablespoon of raspberry jam from home.

When Hudlet was working in Peru in 1989, she remembers coming unglued when the strap of a shoe that her brother-in-law had given her broke. “Although,” she adds, “I have to say that it happened on the day our car broke down, my mother called from Coeur d’Alene to tell me our family dog had died, and I burned my thumb badly while decorating a cake by candlelight during one of countless power failures.”

One goal in the mission statement of CEC is to motivate young people and to train them in their personal gifts and talents so that they will be able to reach out to their own communities.

“Serving in the missions field is all about building relationships,” Hudlet said. “I’m wary of the term ‘missionary’ because it conjures up stereotypes, but I know that through this work I can matter to someone and can help bridge the gaps between people and cultures.”