The Harvest is Great, but the Workers are Few...

This past week has been like night and day for us, compared to the first week and a half of setting up our living quarters.
We were starting to get a little bummed out because we were spending so much time just getting started! But, I’m happy to report, we are now active in service and are already starting to see some very wonderful results. We now can see why we came here, and we are so glad we did!

Of course, not everything is as we thought it would be. Things in life are usually like that, aren’t they? I mean, when you think of serving where the need is great, you don’t really imagine it raining nonstop so hard that you can barely open your front door, or having to watch every step you take so that you don’t step in a nice, fresh, steaming pile of horse poop. The field ministry, however, has really lived up to the hype. “Come to Nicaragua, and you’ll have studies coming out of your ears!” we were told. And we are pretty sure that it really is the case.

We have really been active in service for about a week, and Marlene already has two studies, one more possibly, and I have one. (Two of our studies will most likely be at the meeting this Sunday.) We both also have several VERY promising return visits. It is SO refreshing to actually be talking to someone where they don’t just nod their head and say “Uh huh, Uh huh, yes,” but actually THINK and ask questions, and give real answers from their hearts! My study, a man named Wilfredo, lives about three blocks from us, and during the first chapter of the “Qué Enseña” (Bible Teach) book, he put his book down and looked me straight in the face and said, “Why does God allow suffering? Doesn’t the Bible say he is a God of love? My family members help me when I have problems…why won’t God do the same thing, since he has so much more power than a human does?” I started smiling, rubbing my hands together for the nice Bible-based explanation that was to come.

On Monday we went to one of Marlene’s studies, a young woman named Carla. Her home is in a semi-rural area of our little town, and she has dirt floors and was cooking in a steel barrel that was cut in half and laid on its side in the corner of the home. I really wanted to take a picture so I could post it here, but I didn’t want to offend her. . . Marlene had promised to bring her a Bible and a book, and when she brought them out of her bag, Carla’s eyes lit up and said, “Finally! My very own Bible!” and immediately opened it and started looking through it. When we showed her how to find scriptures and pointed out the Table of Contents, she looked like she was listening to someone pointing out all the cool features in her brand new state-of-the-art Lexus. When we read to her in Isaiah how Jehovah will make blind ones see again in the new system, she asked, “Could that apply also in a spiritual sense? Could some people that don’t see spiritual things come to know God as he really is?” Just amazing.



Oh, and I forgot about another study that we have, together, with two little kids that used to study with a sister a long time ago in the Great Teacher book, but for some reason the sister stopped visiting. We think the sister was a foreigner who left. The boy, Beldin, was up to chapter 16, while the girl, Naomi, was up to chapter 11, when they stopped. It seems like they were studying separately, but I think we will do it together. They are cousins, aged 8 and 9, and are very excited to start their study up again. Naomi’s mother likes the Bible and wants to study, but she hasn’t taken the step yet because she likes to go to parties in the town, and when she used to attend meetings, people would point to her and say, “And she’s a Jehovah’s Witness, and going to parties!” So she stopped attending meetings. But several of her family members are Witnesses.

In Santa Teresa, Witnesses really ARE under the microscope. The brothers won’t even buy beer here, because they will totally be judged negatively by the local people. So whenever they want to get some nice rum or beer, they go to Jinotepe and bring it in secretly. It’s like the Prohibition all over again! I think I will start brewing it in our little patio and have some friends over for “secret” meetings, ha ha.

One good thing that we have going for us here is that the town, like most of Nicaragua, has a strong evangelical presence. How is that a good thing, you may ask? Well, the good thing about it is that the evangelicals are total hypocrites, and everyone sees it. They go to their church where they play really loud party music and have their pastor scream non-sensical things like “We are serving God with our music, yeah! Turn up the music, let’s serve God more!” and then they go to the bars and get totally smashed. We’ve had more than a few people tell us that they are sick of the evangelicals and that they are no different than anyone else in the town.

One brother told me that the evangelicals try to get you to come, because they baptize you in a week and get to fatten up their membership roll. After about a month, most stop going to their meetings, but are still technically evangelicals. So when we preach to them and show them what the Bible really teaches, and since we already have a good reputation in the town based on the excellent conduct of the brothers that have been here before us, we have a lot of weight with what we say and the people really listen and reason on the scriptures.

We sometimes have a zealous evangelical open up the door who doesn’t want to reason on anything and instead tries to impress us with how godly they are, but they get all twisted up and finally shut up after just a minute or two. They just keep repeating all the gibberish they get from their pastors. It really is sad, actually. These poor people think they are doing good, and some of them really are sincere, and all the while it’s Satan, with his finger in the world even way down here, in the middle of nowhere.

We are, however, having extremely good results so far. I have one return visit that REALLY wants to study; he actually asked me to come again soon so we could go over the Bible Teach book together, but he lives so far away, kind of the outskirts, on the border of the forests… Sumitaka said I could borrow his bike, which I might do. I’m trying to convince Marlene to let me buy a motorcycle, but after some senile lady hit me while I was riding up in New Mexico, that’s probably not going to happen. I tried telling her that instead of a motorcycle, a horse might be a good investment. It doesn’t really break down, and they don’t eat that much, do they?...... but the look she gave me pretty much shut that door. Oh well. I will figure something out.

This is our little group on the way to the little town where my interested return visit lives...



On Tuesday we went to the town of La Conquista, which is a charming little town a few kilometers away, where we are taking care of a little group. The preaching there is wonderful, as well, and it’s such a delight to have people invite us in and say, “I’ve always wanted to know this about the Bible”, and proceed to ask questions. It’s such a small town, and we split up, and it’s funny to be walking up and down the streets and seeing the brothers and sisters through the windows of the homes, sitting down for a discussion with the householder or conducting a study. We run into each other quite often, as it is so small, and we basically blanket the little village in just a few hours. Here are a few pictures of us in La Conquista...







All in all, it is a total preaching paradise down here and we love it! So, together, we have 4 studies, most likely 5 in a few days, and probably about 3 others that will study relatively soon. All in a week’s worth of preaching! And of course, it’s not due to our talents. We aren’t even that good at this point. We kind of feel that in the States, we would prepare these presentations, but we seldom got to use them, so we never got really polished as teachers. Now, we start off with the presentation, and we are amazed at the results we are getting! Applying all these things that the faithful and discreet slave teaches us in the Theocratic Ministry School is really paying off! We are now preparing more than we ever did, because we know that at almost every door we will have a good conversation. We also know that we really aren’t anything at all except tools in Jehovah’s hands, but what a privilege that really is!

On another note, my manliness took quite a hit on Monday night. In retrospect, I really should not have behaved like a little school girl while my wife rescued me from, what I thought, was certain doom, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain. Monday night, I’m sitting at the desk in our bedroom, doing some work for the office back in the States, and someone is at the door. It’s Silvia and her daughter, Emily, who are already pretty good friends of ours, and have helped us a ton to get adjusted to life here. (We’ve spent a lot of time with them in service and just associating, while the husband, Everet, who is one of the elders here, is in the States working for two months. Emily is the little girl with me in the last picture.) It’s a pleasant surprise, and we welcome them inside and we start chitchatting, you know how it goes. She brought us a George Foreman grill, which is an absolute treasure. . .now we can have cheeseburgers, grilled chicken, toast, etc. We are so happy with it! So we’re sitting down, shooting the breeze, and I’m sitting in a chair where I have a perfect view of the kitchen. As we’re talking about certain things regarding Nicaragua and places we want to visit, out of the corner of my eye I see movement over by the fridge. All I can tell, with my peripheral vision, is that it is large, dark, and moving. My first instinct is that it’s a cockroach. For a split second, I think, “Okay, don’t make a big deal out of it (Marlene hates cockroaches more than anything else and screams when she sees a baby one doing nothing but sitting and getting some sunshine. . .we don’t get many in the house but she practically has a heart attack, and yes, she does scream. I mean that quite literally).” I just plan on getting up out of my chair and silently murdering it. However, this is what I think when I am seeing this moving object out of the corner of my eye. When I turn my head a little and see what it actually it is, I see that it is a mouse. Yes, a mouse. But to me, in my warped phobia for rodents, it is a giant man-eating rat, running its disgusting stinky tongue over its sharp yellow teeth, eyes glistening for the man-flesh that it’s about to enjoy….so I, like the little school girl that I was, yell “Oh no! Oh no!” and jump up on my chair. Yes. Literally. I’m standing up on my chair, pointing at Mickey and screaming “Kill it! Kill it!” At this point Marlene is practically running out the front door, thinking I saw a giant roach. Silvia and Emily are freaking out, turning to look into the kitchen, at which point Emily starts screaming too and jumps on the other chair. At this point, I realize that I might be overreacting a little bit. I jump down and tell Marlene “It’s a mouse!” and ask Silvia (since she is the one that knows everything about Nicaragua and how to handle pests), “Should I spray it full of Raid? Should I kill it with Raid?” She doesn’t answer immediately, she’s trying to get a look at the poor thing, and I grab her by her shoulders, practically shaking her, and say, “Tell me, should I spray the thing with Raid? Will it kill it?” At this point she sees Mickey and proceeds to freak out, running over by Emily. She tells me to kill it with the broom. I say, “What? I can’t beat a mouse to death!”

Marlene comes closer and says, “What? It’s a mouse?” She then goes into the kitchen and says, “I’ll just shoo it outside with the broom.” So she walks in there, and I start yelling at her about all the diseases that mice have, and when she starts poking behind the fridge with a stick, I jump back up on the chair and hold one of the dogs while Emily has the other one.

I suppose the mouse did run outside, because it certainly didn’t run past us into the dining room, and we looked for it all over the place in the kitchen afterwards. The back door was open, and Marlene has the opinion that since we were all screaming and jumping up and down, the mouse probably got fed up with us and left. Later that night, however, I awoke in bed with the terrifying thought that the mouse didn’t run out, after all. That it just hid somewhere, biding its time until it could crawl up on top of us while we are sleeping and crawl in our mouths or something. I thought of going into the kitchen and checking it out, but the thought of having a frenzied, squealing fight with a giant rat, blood spraying the walls while he gnaws on my face, didn’t appeal to me, so I just tried to get back to sleep.

I’m not really ashamed to put my girlish fright on display here. One must be as modest as possible. I can kill a cockroach with no thought of his wife or children waiting for him in his hole, wondering why Daddy hasn’t come back from picking up some crumbs yet. I’ve seen big flying cockroaches as well, in the Kingdom Hall, and just laugh. We have little gecko lizards crawling on our walls and I want to pet them. But mice? No way. I just can’t deal with it. It’s actually pretty funny. Marlene acted like she wouldn’t mind keeping the plague-carrying rodent as a pet, put a little leash around it and take it out in service, but she wants to jump out of her skin when she sees a little insect peering up at her.

Anyway, that is all for now, but I will definitely be keeping you all up to date, next week at the latest.

We love you all very much, and please keep us in your prayers, just as we constantly ask Jehovah to take care of you back home.

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Some pictures...

A few more pictures for you to look over...
Well, I was really looking forward to trekking to the campo on a dirt-bike and crossing a river to visit that sister, but I have come down with a cold and, the rain being the way it is, decided against it. However, next time the brother goes, I will go too.

Anyway, the days here have been kind of stressful and lazy at the same time. Stressful, because we had some things for the house that we still had to take care of, but lazy because there was nothing we could do for the present. I will explain a little bit more after some of these pictures.

You might remember I told you that our house was a horrid Pepto-Bismol pink and a yucky crayon-blue that defied all human decency. Well, with the help of some brothers and also some long days by ourselves, we finally got it presentable. Here are some pictures:







This is what most Nicaraguans wash their clothes with. I remember Daniel back home telling us that we would need to use this, and laughed at us.



Um, well, we are not THAT into self-sacrificing, so we got this:



This was one of the things, though, that wouldn’t work for a while, and so we could not wash clothes until just very recently. That definitely added a lot to the stress, but it’s now working. Unfortunately, because of the high humidity, our clothes don’t really dry, so we have to bring them in the house and put the fans on them.

This picture is just a taste of what it’s like outside when it rains. Our street turns into a miniature river.



And, finally, this is our new Kingdom Hall, which is actually quite beautiful and it’s only about 3 years old. There is usually a nice cross-breeze and with the fans going, it’s not bad.



Well, that’s all for now, but we will write again next week and share some nice experiences and pictures of our time in the ministry.

We love you guys a ton and your e-mails and comments have been very encouraging. Even after only a short time here, we have had a few occasional bouts of homesickness and near hysteria, but we have been told that it is a normal part of moving to a new land. And we are really enjoying this new avenue of service opened up to us, and we pray to Jehovah that we can be useful here and help others to draw close to our wonderful God.

Hasta luego!!

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Blood and Ice

This week has been pretty much a blur..
We have been so busy just trying to get settled into our new little house that we haven’t had much time for anything else. We have been out in service exactly one time, before we rented our house, and that’s it. Why, you ask? Well, part of the reason is because we have been up to our neck in paint and have been going to the markets in nearby Jinotepe practically every day to stock up on appliances, tables, chairs, soap, etc. Now, you may be thinking that we are idiots and that we should just cruise up to the local WalMart and buy whatever we need, right? Unfortunately, WalMart doesn’t exist here. Or fortunately, depending on what your point of view is regarding a behemoth corporation swallowing up the mom-and-pop shops and taking over suburbs. Personally, I love the giant behemoth corporation.

It’s kind of pathetic, really. You get an idea in your head regarding something you want to buy and you think it will mean maybe an hour of time and you’ll be fine. For example, today we went to Jinotepe to get a simple plastic table and four plastic chairs (you can get beautiful hand-carved wooden tables here for about $300 american, which is a steal….but in Nicaragua, it seems that the best way to go is to just get something that works. Plastic works beautifully!) We went to Palí, which is a grocery store/goods store actually owned by Wal-Mart. We asked, “Hey, do you sell plastic tables?” They laughed at us like we were idiots and told us to try the store next to the book store which is directly across from the Super Santiago, which is a store similar to Palí. So, we made our way through market stalls reminiscent of downtown Bangladesh, people hawking their wares, yelling across the narrow, puddle-filled corridors, dodging men pulling about 500 pounds of bananas and pineapples on wooden carts and dogs that generally avoid crossing your way unless they need to relieve themselves, and finally find the store. “Do you have any plastic tables?” we ask. Immediately comes a frown and the shake of the head. “No,” they tell us. “No one in all of Jinotepe has plastic tables. The prices went up suddenly, and they stopped coming. You might find some in Managua”. (Managua, by the way, is a superheated no-man’s land to people of the smaller towns. It’s a long, tedious trip and very frustrating.) We decide to try one more store and get the same response. As we wind our way back through the Bangladesh market stalls, Marlene stops at a stall that sells plastic bowls where a sister from the Jinotepe congregation works. “Why are you stopping?” I say, tired, wet, and wanting to go home (oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that by this time it had been raining all afternoon. Thankfully this time I expected it and brought my hooded poncho). “Let’s just see if they sell some here,” she says. I roll my eyes. “Didn’t you hear everyone at the stores we went to? They don’t sell them in Jinotepe anymore! Let’s just go home and try another town tomorrow!” She approaches the stall keeper anyway and asks if they have any tables. “Of course we do,” she answers, as if we are morons for thinking anything different. So, we were able to get the tables and chairs, and now we have somewhere to eat at home and when we have company!

Another example of strange Nicaraguan “logic” is the simple quest we had the other day for hangers. Now, the Spanish word for hangers is “ganchos”, right? Everyone knows this. So when we decide to get some ganchos, we ask someone at the Palí once again. “Ganchos?” they ask. “What do you mean?” “You know,” I say. “Where you put your clothes on and hang them up?” “Oh, you mean ‘perchas’”. “Perchas?” I ask. “Perchas,” I’m told. I roll my eyes at Marlene and give her a look that says, “What a retard, right?”. She, of course, nods in agreement with the store clerk. “Yeah,” she says. “That makes sense. It’s like when a bird perches on a stick. Perches, Perchas. Very similar.”

I fail to see what a bird perching on a stick and me hanging up my pants have anything to do with each other, but I just shrug my shoulders. “Okay,” I say. “Where are your perchas?”

“Oh, no,” the clerk says, shaking her head. “We don’t have any.”

“Ah, of course,” I say. So we hit the market stalls again. I go up to a fine looking gentleman and ask, “Do you have any ganchos?”

“Ganchos?” he says. “What are ganchos?”

“Oh, I mean Penchas.”

“Penchas?”

Marlene steps forward. “It’s Perchas!”

“Oh, perchas, yes, right over there.” He points at a bunch sitting in little bundles in a bucket. I walk over and pick one of the packages up. And what does it say? “Ganchos.”

We have also noticed, throughout our almost daily walks through Bangladesh lately, that Nicaraguans will give you an answer to any question you ask, even if they have no idea what the correct answer is. I think it’s because they don’t want to say “I don’t know” and look stupid. So they just make something up and say it with all the sincerity in the world. For example, today we had to get some money out of the ATM. Unfortunately, the banks were closed since it’s Saturday and they all close at 12:30pm. We actually came upon a bank whose “walk-up” teller was still open for another hour. “Do you have an ATM?” we ask her. She shakes her head no. “Do you know where we can find one?” She thinks for a moment and says, “What kind of card is it?” “Bank of America, from the US” we answer. She shakes her head again. “No, you won’t be able to use that one anyway.” This doesn’t really make sense to me, so I ask her again where the nearest ATM is. “Well, if you want to try, you will have to go to a gas station. That’s the only place you will find an ATM.” The idea of going to a gas station, with who knows who hanging around, and getting out hundreds of dollars, definitely does not appeal to me. We thank her and leave. “Well, what are we going to do?” we wonder. Because this particular evening we have invited the Japanese couple, Sumitaka and Akiko, to a nice dinner in Jinotepe as a thank-you for letting us stay in their house, even though they don’t like dogs and even though both of our dogs literally decided to defecate 2 feet away from them on their nice floor. (That’s another story for another time. It’s enough just to say that Sumitaka and Akiko have been well trained by Jehovah in the art of patience and a nice smile to smooth things over). So we find another bank literally right next door to the one where the lady told us there are no ATMS except for at a gas station. It’s closed, but the guard is locking up and we ask him if he knows of an ATM nearby. He says, “Of course, it’s just around the corner.”

So our adventures in shopping for basic household goods has been pretty much just like that.

We are slowly getting accustomed to being in such a small town. Santa Teresa is by no means jungle territory, but it has beautiful heavy forests and we are up in the highlands, so the air is much cooler than in Managua. October happens to be the most rainy part of the year, and we get huge torrential rains at night, around 9pm, like clockwork. We’ve never seen or heard such rains! It’s still deafening even though we actually have a paneled ceiling. A lot of the friends here have no ceiling, but instead have a corrugated metal roof and that’s it. That’s what they see when they look up. When it rains, it’s so loud you need to yell at each other just to be heard, even if you are in the same room!

The town itself is a sleepy little place with very friendly people. In the morning, Savannah (our older dog) likes to sit in front of the door and watch the kids walk by on their way to school, and the other less fortunate dogs scrounge around for forgotten or thrown away food. When one of the dogs gets too close to the house, she’ll give a ferocious bark and scare it away, and then settles down to watch the local life walk by again. The only things she doesn’t like, for some reason, are the horses. There are a few that go by regularly, some with riders and some without, and she just goes nuts when that happens, for some reason.

When we are out and about, we constantly pass people by, who are either sitting on their front porches doing the same thing Savannah does in the morning, or are doing some kind of work. When we pass by, the proper greeting is “Adios!” instead of “good morning”, for some reason. It was a little strange at first, but it’s easy to get used to.

As I mentioned above, we’ve only been out in service once so far, but it was a nice experience nonetheless. The first door we went to we were invited in and sat down on old worn sofas sitting atop a rocky, dirt floor. The old woman listened respectfully and agreed with everything we read to her from the Bible, and a teenager who had been working outside came in to listen. It was a little hard, however, to know whether they were really interested or whether they were just being polite. I’m sure that with time we will be able to tell the difference. The friends here have told us that they don’t offer studies to everyone who appears to be interested; otherwise they would have 20 studies or more each and would have no time for door to door work (in spite of this, many of the pioneers have 10 to 15 studies. Sumitaka and Akiko have 11 together, and they are trying to get more, since they are in the low end. To their credit, they don’t speak Spanish very well yet, but they are progressing nicely. They are teaching me Japanese words little by little. One that I use often with Sumitaka is “Kiótsketé!” which means “Careful!”). Instead, they gauge the interest in their return visits, and observe to see whether the householder asks questions or gives any real input during the study. In the rural areas, we are told, the people are genuinely interested and will typically read the 4 or 5 magazines, brochures, and/or tracts that the friends leave with them by the time the next return visit comes around. It’s difficult to get to them more than once a month, I’m told, and even more difficult during the rainy season, because of the rivers. One man, however, walks about an hour and crosses three rivers to get to the meetings for the group in La Conquista, a small town very close to Santa Teresa. This is particularly amazing given the fact that he is about 65 years old and makes the trek by himself.

Now, the house that we rented, as you saw in the last post, looks like a charming little Barbie house from the outside. We have been really blessed by Jehovah because there is a bakery across the street that sells fresh bread and pastries, there is a hardware store next door to us (which is not that great because the owner is an evangelical who I ran into the first day here…he was talking about the Bible with another man, and was actually using a New World Translation with references, and in the conversation I overheard him say that all religions lead to God. Of course, my spirit was so roused within me that I had to use scriptures and Biblical examples on why this was not the case, and basically shut him up, and then later found out he was the owner of the place. He’s not hostile or anything, but rips me off any chance he gets. I’ve decided to stop shopping there and just take the 10 minute bus to Jinotepe and shop in the hardware stores there). There is also a pharmacy right around the corner and a restaurant next door as well. (The restaurant is pretty sleepy until the weekend, when they decide to turn it into a cool hangout and blast Los Bukis at an ear-piercing level. Thankfully at night it sometimes rains so hard you can barely hear yourself think, so it drowns it out nicely.) The cyber café is about 3 blocks from our house. The only thing, unfortunately, is that it’s far from the Kingdom Hall. But far in Santa Teresa terms is not far in American terms. It takes about 10 minutes walking to get there. Anyway, the house is great from the outside, but on the inside it was just horrible. The walls were a Pepto Bismol pink, and the kitchen was a horrid dark blue. The brothers helped us paint and we had to put about three coats of heavy oil-based paint because the lady before us decided to get the heaviest oil paint she could find in this disgusting color. So we finally got that done and Marlene made some nice curtains and screens for the mosquitos and it looks a bit more presentable.

Also, the neat thing is that the owner of the house is paying a very nice man who lives around the corner named Willy to take care of the house. This means basically watching it while we are not there and standing out in the street throughout the day in case we need anything. Some of you may think that this is a security risk and he will know when we aren’t home so he can break in or tell someone else to break in. My answer to this is simply that we really trust him. He is well known to the local witnesses here and the community in general. Plus, we also bought a new lock to the house.

Thankfully, the place was actually pretty clean because it hadn’t been lived in, really. Also, another blessing (and this is a HUGE one), is that we have AIR CONDITIONING in the bedroom! You have no idea how wonderful it is. It’s a unit that you usually hang in a window, but the lady that owns the house decided to just break a hole in the wall and so the back end is sticking out in the bathroom. Which actually is an added bonus because it gets so hot in there when the air conditioner is on that it feels like a sauna, so when you take a shower (which is always cold, of course), it actually feels refreshing and not “Oh Momma that’s Cold!”. Well, you do get the “Oh Momma it’s cold!” right when you step into the stream of cold water, and it actually makes you cry a little, but you get used to it and then it’s really refreshing.

So we finally have our things set up. Now for the reason for the title of this post. Blood and Ice. Blood, as in Marlene got her blood sprayed all over our bedroom, and ice because we finally got a fridge and we can have ice and cold drinks finally! Oh, wait. You don’t really care about the fridge? You want to know how Marlene lost a pint of blood? Okay, okay. I’m standing in the kitchen, painting it yellow. (Man, I hated that blue color! It was horrible!!!)

Oh wait, yeah. About Marlene. So I’m painting in the kitchen, and I hear her scream. I run into the dining room and she’s running in from the bedroom, and her hand is full of blood. I start freaking out, of course, thinking she’s going to die now and how in the world am I going to paint over the blood on the walls since now I’m out of white paint?

“What happened?!” I ask. She proceeds to explain to me that she picked up the fan in the room with the METAL BLADES and accidentally stuck her finger inside and the thing nearly chopped off her finger! (Thank goodness we got Tetanus shots in the US before we left!) I take a look and she’s got two really deep cuts and they are bleeding like crazy. I did NOT faint, I swear. But I did get a little queezy, you know, like when you want to throw up but you don’t? I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to explain. I suppose you can say it’s a mixture between light-headedness and nausea, but—Oh yeah, back to Marlene. So she’s a little bit panicked, too, and runs to get a towel to wrap around her finger. We put a little bit of an alcohol wipe on it, to clean it, and she starts cringing in pain. At this point, I swear I didn’t faint, either, but she did say something about me looking more in pain than she did. I ran across the street to the bakery to see if they had ice to put on it, but they didn’t. The owner’s wife, however, was very nice and took me across the street to a restaurant owner, made her open up the kitchen, and get me some ice. I took it back to Marlene, who by this time was sitting in the living room in one of the rocking chairs. I’m not sure if she thought she was going to die and was just peacefully awaiting the cold cold grasp of death while rocking in her chair, petting one of the dogs.

Anyway, her finger looks horrible and the next morning we went to the pharmacy to get some sterile gauze and some antibiotic ointment, and the owner seemed to be very knowledgeable and gave us an antiseptic rinse to clean the wound with. She did say, though, that Marlene should have gotten a couple of stitches.

Now, for the last part of this post. Today’s meeting (it was on Saturday this week because the elders have a meeting at Bethel tomorrow and so it was rescheduled) was pretty nice, and I was put to work! We had only 41 today because the other half decided to support the meeting at La Conquista, which is the group that we are taking care of, and of those 41, only three of us were brothers. So I read the Watchtower and did the sound. It was a nice lesson, which reminded us of the wonderful spiritual protection that we receive from Jehovah, but that we need to be able to preach fearlessly and efficiently. I think it’s even more important here to be well prepared for field service, because many people, I’ve noticed, can quote scriptures and even tell you where to find them in the Bible. But they still are being misled by Babylon the Great, have many questions and are very eager to learn.

On Tuesday, I have been invited to accompany a brother to visit a sister who lives out in the countryside (el campo), who cannot, for some reason, attend meetings. So the brothers visit her every once in a while to offer encouragement. I’m not sure exactly what her situation is, but I will post the experience afterwards. It is a pretty long way from here and we have to cross a river to get there, which should be quite interesting as there are no bridges or boats. Unfortunately, I won’t be taking the camera because I don’t want to get it wet. Akiko and another sister, Phoebe, just got back from preaching in an isolated territory and had to cross a river that was up to their shoulders by pulling themselves across it on a rope tied to two trees on either side (this river had been quite easy to cross on their way to the study, but it rained pretty heavily during the study and the river swelled to about 5 feet deep or so). I just hope I don’t have to deal with leaches, yuck! I do hope, however, that I get to see some howler monkeys, as they are pretty plentiful in the area.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, there were a bunch of pictures I was going to upload to this post, but it will have to wait til Wednesday since the internet is especially slow today because of the weather...

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