CO Week

I can't believe this week is over already, it went really fast. We have been really busy with this week with the CO visit which we've really enjoyed. And, this next week we have our 2 day assembly and the pioneer meeting to look forward to. There has been so much support this week for the service meetings between the CO visit and all the auxiliary pioneers. For March we have 31 auxiliary pioneers!(That means for March, more than 60% of the congregation is pioneering). Here is a quick video we took of everyone at the pioneer meeting with the CO (as promised)

They provided cookies and hot chocolate for everyone after the meeting. It was very sweet. There were so many people that we ran out of chairs. (also sorry for the bad lighting, one of the lights was broken so we all crowded in really close).

We've also been enjoying the start of the Memorial campaign. Its great here, not only are we able to handle the presentation in Spanish (its nice to get all the way through a presentation at a door by myself), but almost everyone accepts the invitation with enthusiasm. We've had lots of people tell us they will be there for sure. For the campaign the brothers here asked that we take not-at-homes (since they have a limited supply of invitations), something they don't usually ever do so we got to show them how to fill it out. They were so cute; They kept asking questions about how to do it or what to write. We are really loving our new congregation, everyone is so loving and accommodating. They will try to shield us from mean dogs (my partner almost got bit this morning!) or share an umbrella if the sun is really hot. They also help us with our Spanish, correcting our mistakes tactfully, speaking really slowly, or repeating things multiple times until we get it . We got really lost one day for service (we took the right bus but in the wrong direction and ended up on the other side of the city) and we were really late so now we've had a lot of people try to help us to figure out where the service meetings are. Its nice to have brothers and sisters looking out for us and since they aren't many other foreigners in our new congregation they are very happy that we are there and so are we.

                  Here's a picture from our territory this afternoon. Our territory is great here but the only downside is everything is uphill!! (you would think we would be used to it in Pullman but somehow its so much harder when you've been walking all day in the sun). One sister bought everyone Popsicles today because it was so hot and we walked so much. 

People also recognize us as witnesses everywhere. They will stop us and ask us if we are sisters and the talk to us. Today a woman stopped us asking if we were sisters and asked for the magazines, so Elena was able to give her the latest issues and the invitation which she was very happy to receive and thanked us repeatedly. Its not the first time that we've encountered that either. Also today, an older man stopped me and asked if he could ask a Bible questions. Of course! He said he was reading his Bible last night but had trouble with part of Romans. I was more than happy to try to answer his question until he revealed he was confused about the part on circumcision. That would of taken me off guard in English not to mention Spanish! I struggled to try and answer him semi coherently until, thankfully, a brother who was close by came to my rescue and was able help better answer his question. Still, its nice that so many people recognize the Witnesses and what we are doing and are eager to talk about the Bible.

Also this week (on a less spiritual note) we got a package from home! Which was very exciting (especially since everyone here kept telling us that it probably wouldn't make it here), we now have things to cook! (Thank you!!) We have learned how to successfully use a pressure cooker (did you know they can explode?! We were a bit apprehensive about it at first) so now our cooking is getting better and we also have spices!! I have never been so happy to see a pepper grinder or a box of mac and cheese. (Elena got jerky and bacon bits so she's pretty ecstatic too). We've been so thrilled to be able to season anything. Hopefully since we can cook halfway decent food, now we can try to have some of the friends over for dinner. 

Well that's all I can think to share tonight (we are pretty brain dead after a day of sun and Spanish). I'm sure we will have more after this weekend. 

Sisters in South America

Hola! The brothers and sisters here have told us a lot cute stories and experiences while we've been here so we decided to pass on a few favorites.
     The sister I worked with this morning told me about how her family came in to the truth. Her fleshly sister was the first one to begin studying. She studied with a foreigner who had moved here to help out but who, of course, spoke very limited Spanish so the entire study was done through a little hand held translator. They would read in their respective languages then the foreign sister would type in the translator and pass it to the Bolivian sister who would type back her answer in Spanish and translate it back to the sister's language.
That's how they conducted the entire study and the woman ended up coming in to the truth and bringing lots of her family in to the truth as well. She jokes that their family came into the truth through a machine. The sister was so sweet and encouraged us that even if we don't speak the language very well (we're working on it!) earnest hearted people can still learn the truth and we can still be useful to Jehovah regardless of how well we speak!
     Another experience was about a blind sister who was never missing from the meetings. She had a seeing eye dog who came with her everywhere and when this sister died, her dog (because it was government supplied) was given to another blind woman. Well, when Tuesday night came the dog was frantic to go but this woman had no clue why. She decided to follow the dog wherever it led and, sure enough, he took her to the Kingdom Hall. This woman, being blind, had no clue where she was but the dog led her inside and then sat and refused to go. When the meeting started the woman finally realized where she was. The dog brought her to meetings every Sunday and Tuesday and now she is one of our sisters. Isn't that a cool experience?!
       We also learned that our congregation has only three elders currently (normally four but one is on vacation for a while), and all of them are foreign (French speaking to be exact-either from Canada or France). They give so many talks since there are only three! (They told us that the lack of Bolivian elders is because many of them are afraid of having so much responsibility but we have a lot of Bolivian servants so hopefully that will change). Our congregation isn't small though. We have 16 pioneers and two missionaries and the meeting attendance is around 80 for Tuesday and 120 on Sundays (a lot of the difference is all the studies that come on Sunday).  The two missionaries are two fleshly sisters from Mexico, the Acuna sisters*(with a tilde over the N, I couldn't find it). They have been here 30 years, look almost identical (but aren't twins) and they are a hoot! They are loud and zealous and break in to places to witness and yell things they've picked up in French.  There is also a couple that's been here for two years that sold everything thing they had and just moved to Bolivia. There is also a blind man who comes to the meetings. He can't read anything but he listens and comments on what he hears. (All of the above was related to us in Spanish and translated to English so we can't vouch for the accuracy of everything but we did our best)
        Here is a picture of some of our congregation's territory:

And a bumper sticker I saw today (if you can't tell it says "Me and my house will serve Jehovah"). Lots of non-witness people here know and use Jehovah's name.

       As for us, we've done pretty well this week too. We have studied with the daycare a few more times and we even were able to print off activities for the children off the website (which helped to hold their attention better). One exciting thing is Elena placed a Teach book with the aide who sits in to help with the kids and we are going to schedule a day to meet her to study. She was so grateful for the book and seemed really interested! We are hoping it turns out well. Also, we've done almost every type of service you can think of! We  have done door-to-door, studies, return visits, business territory, street and plaza witnessing, informal, we observed phone witnessing (there's no way our Spanish skills were up to that much of a challenge yet-maybe later), and letter writing-Whew! Bolivia is definitely forcing us to be adventurous and try    everything.  This weekend is the Zone Visit and we are really excited so hopefully we have more stories to share after that!

Comments

Hello all. So, we've been told by a few people that they've tried to leave comments on the blog but were unable (sorry about that guys). We don't really know what the problem is so we've tried to change the settings in the hope that it will fix the problem. If you still can't leave a comment let us know and we will try to figure how to fix it because we really enjoy hearing from everyone. Thanks!

This post looked really empty so here is a bonus picture of the market. I was pretty thrilled by the variety and number of potatoes available.

"Out of the Mouth of Babes"

 We've finally made it past carnival and can leave our house. Now that we have our  freedom we can finally try to establish a good schedule of service. We have one Bible study so far with the daycare we mentioned earlier. So far its going really well. The kids are all three or four years old on average. We were prepared to do the Bible story book and Learn from the Great Teacher but the Bible Story book seemed to be more their level so we've been sticking to that. We hope to get the Learn from God brochure (once they get more at the Hall) because everyone uses it here with kids and also to find a way to use the videos or the activities from the website. We've only been twice but the owner wants us to come four times a week! There is an aide who sits in to help manage the kids and she adores the stories; She even follows along and helps the children to answer our questions or helps us with our Spanish. We reward them with stickers and candy when they answer questions to try and help prolong their attention spans. 

When we read the story about the Garden of Eden we had all the kids act like animals so "Adam" could name them.

 Santiago (there are two) just wanted to be in a picture but wasn't very good at being an animal. Your guess is as good as ours as to what he is being here besides adorable (he was super tired and fell asleep halfway through).

This is Monica being an elephant. She was super eager to answer all of the questions.

 This is the other Santiago, Elena's new boyfriend, being a giraffe. He is such a sweetheart, he would just stare until he couldn't contain himself and had to kiss her.

We usually have around eight kids per class but it was the end of the lesson and lots of them had run off by this point.

Our new goal is commenting at meetings, its so hard in another language. It really makes us appreciate the efforts of ones in our hall like Rosa, Gosia, and Hyon-Ju (sorry if we spelled their names wrong we just had meeting and we are a little brain dead). I also got my first talk assignment tonight. In a month I have a talk (not a householder! AHH!) about the Memorial emblems. Yikes! We have early morning service tomorrow so we better head to bed. Talk to you all later.

Dos Foreign Females

      Hello everyone! We are finally starting to get settled in to life here in Sucre. On Sunday we we went to meeting, which thankfully is only a couple blocks away  (or a 10 minute walk). We met lots of brothers and sisters in the Congregation America . It's brand new but has so many people, in fact, Sucre has started two new congregations in the last two years so its really growing here. There is a couple from Switzerland, France, a couple from California and Mexico (the wife didn't speak much Spanish but had seven studies which gives us hope) and a very sweet sister who talked really slow so we could understand and kept reassuring us that we will learn really fast. Jimmy,the Ecuadorian elder who showed us around our first day, gave the talk (which we followed pretty well). He always asks us if we've been eating and wants to make sure its enough so we don't get sick (its nice to have brothers and sisters here to look out for us). 

        After meeting we tried to go in service but it started raining like crazy so one of the elders texted us and said service was cancelled (we were dressed and on our way to the plaza to meet already). So, we decided to go to the market and splurge and buy dulce de leche cookies and peach soda. Both of us were pretty worn out so we just curled up on the very uncomfortable couch in our apartment and watched the Superbowl in Spanish (Go Ravens!) and ate our snacks.

        Mondays they don't have service here; Since Monday is usually a missionary day off, the congregations have adapted to fit their schedules. Since we didn't have service, we decided to take a tourist day and just go explore the city. First we met up with a sister from Colorado in a Dutch cafe who has been here three years (we brought her an English yearbook from Bethel). We chatted over good coffee (our first in way too long), cheesecake, and crepes. She filled us in our where we could find the cheapest food and told us that a sister coming in April is looking for a place to stay so we might have a roommate for a while. 

After that we still needed to find some things for our apartment like towels, an iron, and coat hangers so we decided to go the large markets that were pretty far from our house. 

This is the first market we went to. It was mostly clothes and shoes so we didn't end up buying anything.

This is the next market we went to, El Mercado Campesino. It was huge! You could find almost anything there and thankfully, we did find an iron and coat hangers after an extensive search and checking the prices with lots of venders to make sure we weren't getting taken advantage of for being tourists. After that we had a long walk back and stopped for lunch at another Dutch place (there's a lot of Dutch places here and we haven't figured out why) to cool off for a while. We are still a little wary of the local food and how it's prepared so we are sticking places that we know don't use the tap water. After that we that we decided check out some of the museums around the city. They didn't allow cameras so we don't have any pictures but we went to an archaeological museum and saw mummies and also went to a art museum. The art museum had the original pieces of art but they were not protected at all, so we could reach out and touch them (not that we did) and no one would care. 

Afterwards we walked back home to drop of our stuff and get our second bed moved in. Yay! Now we have a bed in each room and even cable in each room. 

Since we still had daylight to burn we decided to go to El Parque Bolivar. Here are some pictures:

Isn't it pretty?

                         I wish we could have spent more time here but we fled pretty quickly after we discovered that there we lots of groups of teenage boys who far far too eager for a chance to soak the gringas.  We will have to come back sometime when its not the week before Carnival; We are pretty sick of being targets for water balloons and water guns although we have been able to dissuade some boys in our limited Spanish (at one point Elena was able to grab a rogue balloon and yelled at the boys "Que paso?!"-the most threatening thing she could think of in Spanish at the time, much to the amusement of locals who laughed to see white people try to defend themselves ).

                       In total today we must have walked at least seven miles, lots of it uphill in the sun, so we are pretty tired and a little burnt. Tomorrow hopefully will be our first day of service here (finally) so we are looking forward to that and will have to tell you all how it goes. (Sorry for the over abundance of commas. Elena was proof-reading and told me I "over comma-sate" and was pretty thrilled by the pun).  We will post pictures of our apartment later, now that we have all of our furniture moved in and most of our stuff put away/

 

               

A Quick Thank You

Thank you everyone! We just read all the sweet scriptures you imparted to us. We really liked the one in llama language so we decided to share an example of it below.

• e
• l
• e
• n
• a

• a
• n
• d

• e
• l
• i
• s
• e

• i
• n

• b
• o
• l
• i
• v
• i
• a
• !
• !

I have a feeling we're not in Pullman anymore

During our layover in Chicago we made Jacob Bergman and Garland come up with names for our blog. All of their rejected ideas (which were all of their ideas) will be the titles of  our entries. Enjoy and feel free to mock the boys.

This is the sunset over South America from our plane

The final leg of Panama to Bolivia was probably our least favorite. It started with Elise and I being separated on the plane so we sat with strangers who mostly stared at us for 5 hours. We also had to fill out a lot of paperwork on the plane separately which was also difficult. Getting our visas was relatively easy, we were ready with all the required paperwork and ended up not needing most of it. The fellow passengers and airport staff enjoyed staring at us while we got everything worked out. Customs in Bolivia is a lottery system. When it is your turn, you push a green button on what looks like a metal detector and if it flashes red the officers go through all your stuff. We were the only two white girls on the plane- of course we were chosen to have our bags looked through. 3 customs officers had a fun time going through all our bags, giggling at what they saw as they went along. They weren't happy to see the camera I was carrying for Bethel but eventually they let us go.

Bob and Kathy Golden were waiting for us outside of the airport and helped us get all of our bags into the van and drove us to Bethel. By this time it was after 11pm so they hesitantly invited us to Morning Worship but understood we couldn’t make it-after all we were going on 50 hours total of travel- but of course we said yes. So we rushed into our room, unpacked what we needed for the next day and slept. The temperature at night was still 70 degrees and humid but thankfully we have an air conditioner in our room.

Our room! The towels were wrapped in the shape of flowers. We had a welcome letter and folder filled with info we need to know like rules and passwords. There were Atalayas and Yearbooks on the table for us. They just got their Yearbooks this week so everyone is excited about it.

We have cute kitchenette and a stocked fridge with snacks! We were tempted to try a Bolivian beer but not enough that we actually opened it

Our cute bathroom. Faucets says F and C instead of H and C. A little confusing at first because you dont want 'caliente' when you are expecting 'cold'.. There are also directions everywhere of how to clean it.

We woke up around 6am which is 2am back home <--- be impressed!! Morning worship was very sweet. There were more people there than we expected (we'll give you an actual number of how many volunteers serve at the branch after our tour in a little while but we guessed around 100). Everything was in Spanish so we followed along in our Spanish daily texts and Bibles. We ate a corn and cheese pudding casserole thing. A couple at our table was learning English so they enjoyed practicing on us. Everyone told us that the weather in Sucre is very nice and the town is very colonial.

Tours start after 8:30 so with this free time we are taking turns using the internet (no wifi) and updating this blog because we didn't have time back in Panama (that is why we uploaded our Panama entry this morning). Panama is beautiful by the way, we hope on the way back we can see more of it. We also assume our blog entrees will get less and less the farther into our trip we get so we might as well do what we can now so expect another one later today.

This is the little friend Elise found while I was writing this. After taking a picture neither of us had the guts to kill it or get near it. We had a maid come kill it and she laughed at us in spanish.

 

Toodles!!!