Last few months in a nutshell

  The last few months have been incredibly jammed packed.  We had our special assembly day in June.  Then, Stephanie, Amanda and I went with our friend Jenny to a jungle town 5 hours from Cuenca.  Her family has a cacao plantation there and we went to help harvest!  Fifteen of us stayed in her grandparents’ house, without water, for three days.  It was quite the experience J  To harvest, we had to snip each pod from the tree, collect them all, and cut them open to take out each of the seeds with the flesh around them.  

I had never tried the fruity flesh before and it was so delicious.  In the end, we harvested over 500 pounds of cacao seeds and baba (the fruity flesh, which also means drool in Spanish!).  After harvesting, we went to the pool to play around and wash off a bit. 

  On their land, they can pretty much grow anything.  Seriously, if you just toss a seed on the ground, the plants grow…  it’s crazy!  So, we went to pick some fresh papayas and sugar cane.  We also got natural sponges from one of the trees and tried some other fruits.  It really made me excited for life in the paradise when we will just walk outside and pick our fruits and veggies!  So cool!

  Also, in Mendez, the congregation is super tiny.  They meet in a brother’s house and just use stackable plastic chairs as the seats.  There were a ton of cute kids that answered multiple times… when the group is small, they get used to answering every paragraph!

  In July, my mom and sister came to visit for a few weeks.  We did some travelling and they got to see a bit of my everyday life.  They got to meet some of the people I always talk about and really got to see first hand how the brothers really take care of me here. 

 

  The last weekend in July, we travelled to Guayaquil for the “Let God’s Kingdom Come” English District Convention.  This is, I believe, the only English District Convention in all of South America, so people travel from all over the continent to attend.  Normally, the only baptisms at that convention, since it is rather small and is mainly all missionaries and need-greaters, are the children of the need-greaters.  This year, we had two people from the field get baptized!  One man was from Nigeria and one was from California.  Even in the small groups here, there is growth!

  We returned from the convention on Monday, August 1, and left Tuesday at 3:30AM for Peru to Peru to invite the Chinese people there to the Chinese District Convention that will be in Lima at the end of the month.  BUSY!  Our supposedly 14 hour drive ended up taking 29 hours.  That is with 12 people in a 12 passenger van with only a luggage rack and no cargo space in the back.  It was a first for me in many capacities…  sleeping in a Peruvian gas station, 

spending 29 consecutive hours in a van, being pulled over by the police 20 times in a few days, busking at a Peruvian mall, etc.  

On the way, we heard a noise.  An hour later, when we stopped, we realized that the noise must have been my luggage falling off the luggage rack.  Oh the joys of South American travel J  So, we drove the hour backwards to look for it at 1:00AM and, thankfully, we found it.  It was so late that probably not many people had passed it and nothing had been stolen.  Still, the bag and anything breakable, including my camera, makeup, etc., that was inside, was broken and my clothes were scattered across the road.  At least I had 

clothes though!

  While in Peru, we traveled to a few different areas to invite the Chinese to the district convention and had some really good response. 

There isn’t actually a Chinese group or congregation anywhere nearby, so the Chinese haven’t really received much of a witness.  It was crazy because we didn't even have an invitation for the convention, so Damaris and Ivan worked to create one!

A few young people in the city have recently started learning Chinese and preaching on their own, so they got to join us and help us locate all of the Chinese restaurants in the area.  I think that our trip really helped encourage them to continue with confidence.  Overall, we placed 229 magazines, 12 brochures,  and 18 books. 

  The friends in Peru were AMAZING and cared for our every need.  We got to taste typical Peruvian dishes and... man…  they’re good!  They also had a few parties for us.  At one of the parties, we played guitars and sang.  We ended up singing many of the kingdom songs and it was incredible.  It felt like a mini-paradise.  Since we were quite a mix of people, we even sang a few songs switching languages for each verse from English to Chinese and last Spanish.  So cool!

  After preaching for several days, we took our last afternoon to play at the beach and enjoy time with the friends there. 

It was really an amazing experience overall and one that I will never forget!  Jehovah has blessed me immensely with the opportunity to participate in this work!

Lost Sheep – Another Update

 Last week, I was studying with the “lost sheep” family that I’ve been studying with since January and I asked at the end of the study if they had any questions.  To my surprise, the 20 year old girl asked, “What do I need to do to get baptized?”  So I brought back some articles to consider this week.  We discussed setting goals and steps like attending all of the meetings and working toward preaching.  The family has currently been attending Sunday meetings and Vanessa and Jonathan even pre-study the Watchtower article.  They have not been attending our Thursday night meetings, so Vanessa asked, “So, I need to attend both meetings every week if I want to get baptized?...  What time is the meeting Thursday?”  Awesome!  We’ll see how it goes.  She is an awesome student… she’s read the Daniel, Isaiah, Revelation, Jeremiah and Young People Ask books on her own time for fun!  They’re a real joy J