Episode 79 - I Wanted Something Just for Me

I am so excited to share my story with you of how I and three of my travel companions and friends came to found Yapay Bolivia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to alleviating poverty through sustainable healthcare solutions. 

This isn’t your average story–it’s a tale of thrilling and sometimes frightening medical events, the kindness shown to me by some of the most inspiring and wonderful women I’ve ever met, and the profound transformation I underwent. It's a story of compassion for the previous version of myself that made all of this possible. 

I am incredibly proud of Yapay Bolivia's work and truly grateful that it’s a part of my life. The work I engage in through this organization exists outside of my roles as a mother, wife, and professional—it’s something just for me. I would love for every woman out there to have something like this, whether that means founding a nonprofit or taking small steps toward anything that brings joy and impact to her life. Even the smallest beginnings can lead to significant, positive ripple effects. My journey of wanting something just for me has turned into a meaningful organization that makes a tangible impact on the lives of women and children in Bolivia. I hope it inspires you to pursue something you genuinely want to do, and I can’t wait for you to listen. 

PS. If you’d like to donate to Yapay Bolivia, an organization where 100% of donations go directly to impactful projects, your support can help us expand our programs to reach a larger community. Please check out https://yapaybolivia.org/ to learn more and make a difference. 

Find Sara here:
https://sarafisk.coach
https://www.instagram.com/sarafiskcoach/
https://www.facebook.com/SaraFiskCoaching/
https://www.youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
https://www.tiktok.com/@sarafiskcoach
What happens inside the free Stop People Pleasing Facebook Community? Our goal is to provide help and guidance on your journey to eliminate people pleasing and perfectionism from your life. We heal best in a safe community where we can grow and learn together and celebrate and encourage each other. This group is for posting questions about or experiences with material learned in The Ex-Good Girl podcast, Sara Fisk Coaching social media posts or the free webinars and trainings provided by Sara Fisk Coaching. See you inside!
Book a Free Consult

Transcript

0:51

You are listening to the ex good girl podcast, episode 79, there was a time when I was a stay at home mom with five kids and I was homeschooling. It was wild. It was fun. It was hard. Some things I did not do a great job with other things I did, but it was a time of my life that. Just felt really busy. I was a teacher before getting, married and I actually taught school for four years before having children. And so I loved teaching and I love that my children were home. I also felt like I didn't have anything that was mine. I wanted something that was just for me. I didn't know that's what I really wanted, but at the time it just felt like I wanted an excuse to get out of the house. I wanted an excuse to, do something other than the mothering in the house, the homeschooling. And I always knew that I had a choice. But I wanted something just for me. And so I even signed up at one point for some like MLM thing, just to have something to do. And then of course, like most of those businesses, when you don't put in a lot of work, you don't see a lot of reward. And so this was kind of the mindset that I was in when I went on a trip. To Bolivia with a group of women whom I had all met when we were missionaries together for the LDS church in Bolivia, between the years of 1995 to 1997 or 98. And these women, we had all. Served our missions there together, and in 2015, we decided to go back now at this time, I was still an active believing practicing member of the LDS faith. And so it was an opportunity for us to go back and to visit the people that we had met the people who had been baptized when we had been visiting with them and teaching them. And for a lot of members of the LDS church, it is. A dream to kind of go back to the mission place where you served and it was for us. And honestly, I don't know that I would have done it without them because Bolivia is. A place that is difficult to kind of navigate, technologically, they're probably, I don't know, anywhere from 10 to 12 years kind of behind. They're a 3rd world country. It is difficult, especially when I live there. You only know the little areas that you serve in. And so I didn't know about where we might stay or what we might eat and do. And so it, it kind of was a group effort to get all of us to go back. And we had. The planned trip and then one of my friends going on the mission suggested that we do a service project like service projects are a big deal in Mormon land. Mormon land is how I describe my time and my affiliation really with a lot of affection because there were so many things that I really loved about being a member of the church, being a Mormon and service was one of them. So. We wanted to do a little service project and landed on an idea that kind of came out of my experience as a missionary. I arrived in Bolivia in August of 1995. And. Immediately, I was really overwhelmed by the poverty, by the living conditions, by the different culture, the food, the people, it was all really, really overwhelming for me. And there were not a lot of americans in the mission. In fact, I didn't know any other women. And I was with a Bolivian companion who, although we later learned to respect and love each other, I really annoyed her. I was an American. She didn't like Americans. I thought that I had chosen clothing that was, you know, pretty simple. And just to get the job done, but she kind of picked on the clothes that I had brought. And the information that we had been given was that we needed to bring a lot of the supplies that we wanted with us for the whole time we would be serving there. Women serve missions for 18 months. And so I knew I had a year and a half. And so I brought shampoo and tampons and, and she just looked at all of that with, I think a fair amount of ridicule, like what you didn't think we had these things here. And so I was kind of in a hard spot. I didn't speak Spanish very well. I wanted to be a missionary. I was very overwhelmed with the things that I just went through. My companion was not friendly, not exactly hostile. And, companions are just what, in Mormon land, you call the other missionary that you're assigned to work with. And I really was struggling. It was hot. It was dirty. We lived in our room was part of a bigger house that we shared with another family. It was made of cement and had a tin roof. I slept in a mosquito net on a mattress that was filled with hay and every night I would lay down on that. Hey, mattress and tuck in the mosquito net that kept any kind of like fresh air out and I would lay down on that. Hey, mattress. And for the 1st, good 4 or 5 weeks, I would cry quietly and I would think, how can I go home? How can I get sent home without embarrassing myself, without embarrassing my family missions and missionary service are a real sign of faith and faithfulness in the LDS tradition. And at that point to go home on from a mission would have been considered. Shameful. And frankly, in a lot of ways, it still is today. I think some of that is changing, but I would think about how I could go home and not compromise, you know, being seen as someone who didn't have enough faith to stay on their mission and not embarrass my parents for whom that would have been a troubling event for sure. And my companion. Would not let me sleep with the fan on because there are a lot of still, beliefs and Bolivian tradition and culture about what makes you sick and what doesn't. And and she believed that if you slept with the fan on that, I would get sick. And so she really was controlling about that. And so. Those were how I spent my 1st weeks in Bolivia. I really had trouble getting close to people because. There were a lot of cleanliness differences, and we were out in very, very poor areas where there wasn't a lot of the same level of hygiene that I was used to and smells that were troubling for me and conditions to be in all day long and food that I wasn't familiar with and a language That I was having trouble catching on quickly. And I spent a lot of the appointments that we would have as missionaries with people in, a lot of confusion about what was going on. And slowly I had to make a decision about whether or not was going to open myself up to that experience. I didn't know how it was going to work out, but I had to either stay and open myself up to the experience or go home because I was spending a lot of my days, just kind of guarded, not really wanting to touch people or interact with people. The places where we lived were. Very poor and I held a lot of babies that didn't wear diapers and I ended up being wet and dirty and confused for a lot of the days. But also over the course of those weeks, I had so many, you're going to hear emotion in my voice because I remember this, and it was such a lifeline to me. I had so many Bolivians show me so many small kindnesses. They tried to help me. They asked me what I wanted to eat when we visited them and they tried to make space for me. Me and the experience that I was having, they tried to be understanding and I felt finally, like, maybe I was going to be able to do it. Maybe I was going to be able to withstand really the difficulties and the rough living conditions because. Of this people that I really wanted to, I wanted to teach them about my church at the time. I felt like that was one of the best and right things that I could do. And I wanted to have the experience of being able to stay as a missionary. So I had just begun to open up to that experience when one day I began having pain in my abdomen. And In Bolivia, there was nothing to do except go out and meet people. We could stay in our room, but there was nothing in there. There was a fan and, you know, a place to keep clothes and a bed and that was it. And this was, you know, pre phones, pre really, um. And so even though I wasn't feeling well, we went out to work and working was knocking on doors and trying to meet people and seeing if they would be interested in hearing a message about Jesus Christ and hoping that people would allow us to come in to teach them about the church. And so, as the day is going on, this pain is getting worse and worse and worse. And I finally tell my companion about it. And she takes me to the doctor. Now, the doctor was the doctor for all of the missionaries in that particular area. And he was a brother of one of the missionaries that was in that mission area with us. And so we felt like he could be trusted and we felt like he would, take good care of me. So he examined me and he told my companion that I had appendicitis. And that if he didn't operate on me immediately, that I would die. My companion freaked out. And at the time, there was no way to get ahold of any of the other missionaries in the area who were leaders and helpers, and. Every mission has a mission president who is an adult man, usually in the 50s, 60s, who is in charge of all of those missionaries who would do something like, okay, a surgery on one of the missionaries. And she was so rattled by, the doctor's dire prediction of what was going to happen that We just made the decision that. He was going to perform this surgery. I remember feeling totally terrified. I didn't speak Spanish very well yet at all. And I went into the operating room of a very, very tiny clinic that had a bunch of rooms that kind of opened up to an outdoor courtyard. And I undressed and put on this teeny tiny little gown that barely covered what it was supposed to be covering. And I just waited not speaking Spanish, not understanding what happened. I looked around this little room and I can clearly as I close my eyes. Now, I can remember really what it seemed to me at the time, very poor assortment of medical supplies and. Things in the room, some of them seem to be in jars that once were for other things like food and there were, you know, swabs and tongue depressors and, and things that they would use in the surgery. It did not seem to me at the time. Like a very clean place, but I felt like I had no choice for doctors came into the room. And because they knew that I didn't speak Spanish. They just started doing things without explaining themselves to me. And remember, I am at, my most people pleaser itself. I didn't ask any questions. I just accepted whatever happened to me. I am a 22 year old woman sitting in this little teeny tiny, hospital gown that barely covers what it's supposed to cover and I'm terrified and I don't resist when one doctor holds my left arm down one holds my right arm down a third doctor puts his hand on the top of my head and pulls me forward. I didn't know that I was getting an epidural. So the 4th doctor goes around to the back and all of a sudden I feel this needle in my back. They were holding me down so that I didn't flinch and damage my spine with the epidural needle going in where it needed to go. But as I look back on that now, I just want to take a minute to acknowledge how scared I was, how completely out of control I felt. And some of that was definitely because I was not trained that I could ask questions that I could get second opinions that I could demand explanations that I could say, no, we are not doing anything until I fully understand what is going to be happening to me and to my body. And I have a lot of love and understanding for that 22 year old young woman who felt like she was stuck between a rock and a hard place in so many different ways. Who was trying to do her best, who had a definition of faithfulness. That really meant submission and that's all she knew. And as I retell the story now, it's not something I talk about in this kind of detail a lot. But I'm sharing it here for 2 important reasons. Number 1, because I think it's important to look back on past versions of ourselves. That did not make the decisions that we would make now that did not stand up for ourselves in the way we would now that did not demand answers and demand to take up space in the way we would now with so much compassion that past version of me had a very different. Idea of what it was like to be faithful and what it was like to prove her love to God and to look at her with generosity and with graciousness and with love, I think, is such an important practice. And 2nd of all, that event set up. What has become one of the great loves of my life. And I'll tell you about that in a second. So I had the surgery and in Bolivia, there are not pharmacies, inside of hospitals or clinics. And so. You have to bring all of the medication with you that you need, or you have to go buy it. And that's still the case today in a lot of the hospitals that serve the very, very poor. And so I just remember being wheeled out of the operating room, and there were 6 missionaries who had by now gotten the message that I was having surgery who had all come to the clinic. And they were aghast. I just remember being wheeled out on this little gurney and I was seeing all these faces of elders. The elders were the male missionaries. The sisters were the female missionaries of all these elders just looking at me like, holy shit, this is bad. And I, they wheeled me into my room and laid me down on the bed. I, was, fine ish. And one of the American elders leaned down and he whispered in my ear, sister, you know, you can go home for this if you want to. And it was such a moment of clarity for me because I didn't want to, it was so incredible to have been through a surgery. In a very, Spartan little clinic and to not want to go home to actually want to stay. And it was that moment that I knew that something big had changed and that not only did I want to say, but that I felt like I could, that I was strong enough to do it. So as I mentioned, you have to bring all your medication with you and in this little clinic, they didn't have another place for my companion to sleep. And so she left. And I was there alone. And when the epidural started to wear off, I started to vomit. And if you've ever had anesthesia wear off, you know, that sometimes it's a lot of vomiting, even if there's nothing in the stomach to come up. And so I spent the evening just dry heaving over and over and over again. And again, we didn't have any telephones. In the homes where we lived, in fact, at that time, if you wanted to get a message to another set of missionaries, you had to go to a little corner store where they might have a phone where you could pay to use it to call the phone number of the other corner store by where the other missionaries lived and leave a message for them. So the only way that we kind of could keep up with each other was by. Stopping by these little corner stores and asking for any messages. That's how the elders knew the missionaries knew that I had had surgeries because they stopped by the corner store. And lo and behold, there was a message. So. After everyone left me at the clinic, I didn't have a way to let my companion know that I needed the anti nausea medication. So I spent that whole night in a lot of distress, vomiting, dry heaving, and there was a nurse who took care of me during the night who felt really, really bad for me. She could see the distress that I was in and I don't know if it was to make me feel better or what, but she brought me my appendix in a little bottle of formaldehyde as a gift and she gave me this little appendix and I put it in my bag and side note, they used some kind of lime scented cleaning solution in the hospital and I could not even smell limes. For a good five to seven years, like I hated anything with Lyme because of that night of dry heaving and vomiting. Anyway, so she gives me my appendix. I go home. Like I said, there's nothing to do. So I go out to work pretty much the day after I was sore, but I was fine. And I have this appendix. Now in my stuff in my room, and I'm noticing that I'm still in pain. And as we're going throughout the day, the pain is getting worse and it's getting worse. And so I go to sleep that night and the next day I'm like, I just am not feeling good. And now because of the surgery, I felt like I needed to pay a little bit more attention to what was going on. So I called the other set of. Elders in our area told them what was going on and they said, okay, we're going to take you to a different doctor. So they came over, we piled into a taxi, we went to a different doctor. I took my appendix with me. And when he looked at it, he said, that is a perfectly healthy appendix. You did not have appendicitis. So he gave me an antibiotic. And it cleared up the intestinal infection that I had. It was never appendicitis. Can you believe it? And I would like to think that that doctor made an honest mistake. I don't know. He also might've just wanted to make some money doing a surgery. That part is neither here nor there. I took my appendix home with me and it sat on my parents bookshelf. For a while until my mom made me throw it away. Otherwise I'd still have my appendix. How cool would that be? Anyway, that. Incident in my mission set up the conditions for the little service project that we wanted to do when we went back in 2015, because one of my companions suggested, Hey, I know what we'll do. Let's gather a bunch of hospital supplies and let's take them back to that little clinic as a thank you for not killing Sarah. And so with kind of a tongue in cheek, but also, a very real desire to be of help. We gathered up a bunch of hospital supplies, took them down in our suitcases and tried to find the clinic. But of course, so much had changed in. The nearly, 20 years, more than that, I came home in 1997 and we went back in 2016. So we couldn't find the clinic, but we had a bunch of hospital supplies. And so we decided they needed to go somewhere and another of my friends had a different contact at. A hospital and this hospital served. The very, very poor of Bolivia and we went to the hospital to make the donation and it was heartbreaking. It was the kind of heartbreak that really is difficult to bear because there are people who are in such need. And remember all of my, like for me, the best things about being a Mormon was how I was taught to love. For And care for vulnerable or people and not even just vulnerable and poor in terms of like, earthly wealth and riches, but the vulnerable and poor of soul and of spirit. And so it was incredibly haunting for us to be in that hospital. And what we noticed is that the, the Nick, you. The place where they put the neonatal intensive unit babies who were really struggling just did not have the equipment that it needed. We saw babies on adult size beds who really needed to be in cribs or incubators. And so we decided to raise money to buy One cradle that could also be serve as an incubator for the neonatal ward of this very poor hospital. We came home. We decided to talk to people about this little fundraiser that we were doing, and we raised the money to buy that unit. And we were, hooked on being a part of the solution for a country that we loved so much, even though our offering was in the grand scheme of the scale of poverty. Very, very, very small, right? I mean, it was only going to help like one baby at a time. But if you know one thing about me, it should be this. I believe. In really small incremental steps as progress. That's my practice as a coach. That is my practice of how I love myself and my kids. And so, even though this was just 1 little teeny tiny drop in this ocean of need. I felt like it was amazing and I wanted to do more and so we talked among the 4 of us and we decided to start a charitable foundation that would do work in Bolivia. We chose the name YAPI Bolivia because YAPA Is a word is an indigenous language that is spoken by a lot of the people that we met and worked with, and it means to give a little more. And it was perfect because at the time, the 4 of us were all mothers. And 1 of us was working. She is an attorney. And we didn't have a whole lot of time. We had probably less in terms of resources, but we just thought if we can just give a little bit and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, that is something we want to be a part of. And so we started out organizing this charitable foundation, and then. We had gotten connected with a lot of our former Bolivian companions and friends on that trip, and we decided to use the resources of the people that we knew to find projects where we could help. Turned out that that was Not only a brilliant move, but also a move that would define our work as a foundation, because we deeply believed that Bolivians were smart, that they were resourceful, that they were creative, and that they knew the needs of their communities and the solutions that those communities needed in a way that we didn't know, even though we lived there for a year and a half, even though we had been participants in In their culture for that time, they were still absolutely the experts and the most qualified. And so we asked our friends to introduce us to those kinds of people. And very quickly, we met a woman named Mercedes Cortez. Y'all, if I could nominate someone for the Nobel Peace Prize, it would be Mercedes. And our first project was being introduced to her as the, she's an attorney and as the director of an orphanage that housed kids who didn't have parents in Bolivia. They had been given this property by the city in which the orphanage was located, but it didn't have a fence. And They had had some close calls where people had, come onto the property where kids had left. And so our 1st project was to build a fence. Like I said, a little bit, a little bit more little tiny in the scope of things, little tiny projects that were kind of too small for bigger. Nonprofits to really even take on. So we built the fence and then the orphanage wanted. Chickens to provide chickens for the children who live there for provide eggs and for the kids to be able to sell in the neighborhood. So we built a chicken coop and we added some chickens and we just went forward slowly. Doing fundraisers every year and then taking that money and investing it in small projects that we knew would make a difference for the very, very poor, vulnerable population of women and children in Bolivia. And from that project, we went on to others. We now have projects in four different cities, five different cities, at two different orphanages, at two different after school programs. We support a Catholic nurse in Potosi, which is one of the highest cities in the world. It's like 13, 14, 000 feet above sea level. And she just collects supplies for the very, very poor. And, and that includes medical supplies. We send her some money. Every month so that she can do that. And all of our projects, that one is not entirely, sustainable per what we want. But we just love her so much. We love the work that she's doing. We know how hard it is for people to be able to afford the medicine that they need. but every single one of the other projects that we have are Aimed at making a sustainable difference in the lives of poor children and women in Bolivia. We are working with community health workers and expanding into other projects. And I'm telling you this for two reasons. Number one, because it is one of the great loves of my life. I. Just got back from Bolivia 2 days ago, we try to go every year. I wasn't able to go last year, but to go back and to see how our little desire to just make a little bit of a difference has now grown into. A really incredible program that benefits so many women and children and the men that they live with. I'm so proud. I'm so proud of what we have done. And it all came out of a desire to have something for myself. Something of my own. I felt at the time like Being a part of Yapay Bolivia reinvented me, it gave me a purpose outside of being a mom, which I loved, being a teacher, which I did love, and being a homemaker, which at the time, I would have told you I mostly loved, and it gave me a focus, it gave me a place to To put my compassion, it gave me a place to be curious about solutions and how we might help. It helped me remain connected to service in a really, a really valuable, very real way. It gave me a lot of confidence to have this be a part of my life. And it was really amazing for me. And I know so many of you, so many women who are listening to this podcast want the same thing. And so I'm telling you because I love it and I'm telling you because I hope you check it out. And if you are looking for a place to make a donation where a hundred percent of the money that you give is going to go to these projects, this is it. But also if you are yearning for something for yourself. Yes, that's right. It makes sense. I understand it so much and it might not be starting a nonprofit. It might be sitting down and just reading a book, right? That you choose on your own time where you don't feel guilty. Like you should be doing something else. It might be some new venture, some new hobby. I talked to so many women and they have a list of hobbies that they'd like to try. Yeah. A list of things that they are curious about and no time on their calendar for them. I also talked to other women who don't know what they want, who haven't had the opportunity to be curious about themselves, curious about the kind of impact they would like to make, whether that impact is just in their home, in their community, in their state, in their country, in the world. If that is you, I'm telling you this story. Because the little tiny steps that you take in the direction of discovering that really matter. They really, really, really, really matter. The little tiny steps that we took in the beginning of Yapay Bolivia have created what is now an organization that is having a real impact. I want to tell you about my favorite project. So I mentioned Mercedes. She is a tireless fighter, a tireless fighter. Woman, and she has dedicated herself to ending family violence in Bolivia. Bolivia is a country in which femicide, the killing of women is still a huge problem in the Northern hemisphere. Bolivia's rates of femicide are among the very highest. And many of the children that are in the orphanage that Mercedes runs are victims of femicide. Their father has killed their mother. And he is incarcerated and there's no one else to take care of them. Mercedes herself was an orphan in that orphanage. And so she knows intimately how family violence impacts generations of people. She works in her practice as a lawyer, defending women, trying to get men held accountable for these crimes. And she has advocated for laws to be changed for, it to make it easier for these men to be prosecuted with not a lot of. Success, frankly, Bolivia is still a country that is steeped in patriarchy and where a lot of the social norms are created by patriarchy to defend and to protect men. And so she came to us with an idea. There were 2 kind of problems that she wanted to address. Number 1, this problem of femicide and family violence. And number 2, there were a lot of these children who were now aging out of. The orphanage, they were 18 years old female, and they didn't have a lot of really great prospects. And so she wanted to start a program whereby. Young women who were either aging out of the orphanage or who had been affected by family violence and femicide could become the very people with the very professions that would change this problem from the inside because she had not had a lot of luck changing it and advocating for change from the outside. So she identified a group of women who wanted to become psychologists. Social workers, police officers, lawyers, and judges who would reshape femicide and family violence and how little, prosecutions and actual sentencings and serving of sentences there were in Bolivia to a much higher rate, both. For themselves, for their families and for future victims of this really, really devastating problem. And she came to Yapay Bolivia asking for help. We identified donors and they gave so much money that we were able to fund scholarships for four years of school for these women to become The very professions that are going to have an impact, not only on their, their own lives, but on the lives of their children and the victims that they will help. Some of the girls that were identified in this group had been victims of sexual violence. In their homes and they had been forced to live with the perpetrator who often went without punishment and that was just their life of living with the person who had sexually violated them with the donations that we raised, we were able to buy a home where they could live in a dormitory style setting, helping each other with their studies, cooking and learning and working together with the perpetrator. People to help them to pass their classes so that they could leave the living situation where they had to live with the person who had abused them. I got a chance to spend the day part of the day with 3 of these women. I can tell you, I have never met women of such strength and all the time we force women to be strong by letting these things happen to them. And, yeah, they rise to the occasion. They do. But for me, it's always a mixture of respect and admiration and sadness that we live in a world in which there are attitudes toward women, that they are lesser, that their bodies are not their own, that they are to be used and abused as men want. That always makes me sad. But when I met with them and got to spend some time with them. The way that they described their confidence, the way that they described the changes that had happened in their life since they had. been able to take part in this program was really, really amazing. And so again, I tell you, if you have the desire to do something in your home, in your community, in your state, follow those little nudges, even if they don't pan out in the beginning, even if they don't lead somewhere that you think they're going to, there will be more nudges. That's what one of the things that I don't think I understood about. Intuition is that I have to follow the little steps and sometimes they mean something and sometimes they don't, but as I have really learned to connect to what that feeling of wanting or longing is, it has always steered me in the right direction in a direction of intense satisfaction and intense learning and growth. And everyone has that, by the way, the name of this program. I love it. Every time I hear it. It's called the program and in English, that translates to vigilantes. So, like, could there be anything better? I don't think so. Yeah. By Bolivia exists to serve. The extremely poor in Bolivia, and it came out of little nudges and a desire to have something for myself. And so I offer this story to you, like I said, for two reasons. If you want an incredible organization to support, there's a link in the show notes, and I would love for you to check us out. And second of all, I would just love for every woman out there to have something near and dear to her heart that is just hers. Just for you, something that brings you intense joy and satisfaction and pleasure and that fills that need. I think that all of us have to know who we are and to be of value, not just to ourselves, but in some way outside of us as well. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.