National Volunteer Month Profile: Lynn in Bolivia

Today we highlight the other half of our couple serving in Bolivia: Lynn Myrick.

Lynn was a college English professor for 28 years until she felt called to serve God in a new and different way. After earning her Masters in Theology from Vanderbilt Divinity School, she served as a college chaplain until May 2009 when she and her husband Joel Vaughn accepted the invitation to serve as lay missioners with FMS.

Lynn and Joel have been teaching English in a variety of venues in Bolivia including universities, prisons, libraries and private homes. But the recent start of the new school year marked the beginning of a new ministry for Lynn: teaching high school English and catechism at San Francisco and Santa Clara Colegio.

The school’s tuition is only $3 a month which provides affordable, excellent technical arts education for people of little means. The parents work together, almost as a co-operative, to keep the school going by working on the school grounds and in the large beautiful garden between the buildings and the walls that surround and protect the school.

In December, Lynn attended the school’s promotion, or graduation. While she had come to merely observe the ceremony, she suddenly found herself being introduced as the new English instructor and applauded by the crowd of parents, relatives, and friends in the auditorium.

“I had not done anything worthy yet; I had merely agreed to try to do something worthy,” Lynn said. “So I was surprised by the show of appreciation, or rather, the welcoming applause of the people whose children I was teach.”

At the pastoral juvenil, or campus ministry, of San Simon University, Lynn and Joel Vaughn also help promote and facilitate a film series called Filmania. The ministry screens films and leads discussions about the moral, social, and political dilemmas that emerged in the films — such as the theme of racism in the classic To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Please support Lynn’s work in Bolivia by making a donation to Franciscan Mission Service.