My fiance and I met in March 2009. It was my spring break and went to Bolivia with my aunt who was a graduate student at my same university. She was doing research on human trafficking in South America. She had lived in Bolivia a few years back working as an english teacher, which is why she chose to center her research there. Well when she offered to take me as her "assistant", naturally I jumped on the opportunity, never guessing what I had in store for me. My whole family was teasing me that I was going to come home with a Jorge. It was scary how close to right they were, but I came home with a Jaime instead. Anyways, two weeks later I was in Santa Cruz. For the first few days we traveled around Santa Cruz going to women's shelters, children's homes and police stations, talking to various people. One night we were sitting in the room we had rented and she just looks at me and proclaims Santa Cruz is too much like San Juan (my family is Puerto Rican) and I need to experience something different. An hour later we were on a bus and 12 hours later we were sitting in the bus terminal in Cochabamba. When we arrived she called Jaime, my now fiance. She knew him and his family from when she lived there before. He came and picked us up at the terminal. I was completely caught off guard when I saw him, something about him intrigued me. He spent the rest of the day with us, taking us around the city, he took us to his family's home there at the university he was studying. That night we were all out and Jaime took me aside and asked me to be his girlfriend. Needless to say I was terrified. This crazy guy didn't know me. But for some reason I couldn't make myself to say no, so what I did was play dumb and pretend I couldn't understand him. Poor guy, he tried several times that night to make me understand. The next morning, to my slight dismay, my aunt decided she wanted to stay an extra day in Cochabamba. So we passed another day together. That night when we getting ready to take the bus to return to Santa Cruz, Jaime came in and gave me a note with his phone number and email address, asking me not to forget him. He looked so sad and my aunt (I think she enjoyed playing matchmaker) pipes in and invites him to come to Santa Cruz with us. He spent the rest of our stay in Bolivia with us, getting more and more under my skin at an alarming rate. After I left we were calling each other and writing each other almost everyday. (Thank God for webcams.) Never could imagine that I could miss a person so much that I only spend a few days with. In August, I returned to Bolivia for two weeks, this time I took my mom and my youngest sister with me. While we were there we went to Cusco and did the whole Macchu Picchu thing. It was an amazing trip. Our last day there, we were eating lunch at a restaurant in Santa Cruz. Jaime was talking with my mom, he kept bringing up how he wished he could speak with my dad. My mom tells him that he could call my dad. It was the funniest thing. He jumps up saying "REALLY!!", he turns to me and informs me he has a ring and that he is going to call my dad right now (he has no clue what my dad's number is). My mom, sister, and I sat there in the restaurant for awhile, completely stunned. We wait and we wait. We began to worry because the hotel we were staying at was not very far. We left the restaurant and were about to cross the street to the hotel, just in time to see him walking out wearing a suit. He hurried over to us and right there on the street corner he starts to drop to one knee. My mom and my sister both start yell at him that he cannot ask me with them standing two inches away. So he took me to this plaza in front of the hotel and there he asked me to marry him, August 22, 2009. We stopped traffic. People were whistling at us, hollering, and honking their horns. I wasn't aware of it at the moment, but my sister recorded the whole thing. Soon after, we went to call my dad, Jaime was shaking, but all went well. God has truly been with us through our journey, that year we were able to get him a tourist visa and Jaime got to pass three months here with me in the mid-west (quite a culture shock for him). In mid to late January 2010 we filed our I-129f petition and it was approved on March 3. April 13 he had is interview at the consulate and received his visa April 21.
