Spin Cycle

Hello all!

It's been a long week (for me it has, Charley didn't seem to think so) of not being connected to the internet. Last Tuesday we went and signed up for a permanent connection, but I didn't realize it was going to take a whole week for it to be set up! So, since I kept thinking that "manana" we'll have internet, I didn't bother buying an hour. 

Today the technician came and when he called to say he was on his way I turned the computer and modem on, and what do you know, we had internet! So when he got here I felt like we'd wasted his time!! But he said he saw another fellow employee leaving when he arrived, and that he'd done something here in the area to fix the internet lines, so he just got online to confirm that it was all set up and off he went! He seemed glad that his job only took 2 minutes and he got a nice cold glass of water out of it!

So, productivity after he left went rapidly downhill. Mondays are our housework and shopping day. The internet has caused a bit of a stir at home, and it's now 5pm and we're just now finishing the housework (which we had all done by 2pm last week!), and we haven't gone grocery shopping yet! But we were able to listen to NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me online while we worked so that was a nice treat!

It's been a good week in the ministry. Charley has 3 studies now that I started for him in the territory. Now it's time to find some for myself! I do have one with the niece of a brother in the congregation. She started coming to the meetings, and he had her sit with me. She's about 11 and a very serious little girl, but a very good student I discovered on Saturday when we had her first study. Apparently, she had a double-yoke egg at home that her chicken laid that she was saving for us. Her uncle told us that she got home Saturday to discover that her mother had eaten it. She cried and cried and cried about it because she was saving it for us! She has very intense emotions it seems!

Our landlord's niece also finally arrived to her dad's house two doors down so we'll be getting her study going again tomorrow. She came for it today but since she hadn't prepared, and we hadn't finished housework, we rescheduled it for tomorrow afternoon. So it'll be nice to have her study again. She's the one that I studied with here last time, then in the States because she came for a few months, and now we're back here together again!

We've spent some longer days out in the ministry, taking our lunch with us so that we don't have to drive back and forth since it's quite a distance and gas is over $4 a gallon. It's been a challenge coming up with lunches to take with us though. We don't have a cooler yet (something else to search for down here) so we had to think of something non-perishable. We thought maybe we could leave our food in someone's fridge, but people down here live very simply and many of them don't have a fridge. Some don't own a stove either. Things we take for granted as basic necessities are just out of people's reach financially down here. And obviously if they don't have those things, they don't have a microwave either, so we've eaten cold rice and beans, tortillas, and boiled eggs as our lunch! 

On Saturday we were invited to eat lunch at someone's house, so we had our lunch that we had taken for dinner later in the day. We have discovered that frozen bottles of water in a plastic bag, tied up, and put in another bag works well as a fridge in the truck!

Now to the title of the blog - Spin Cycle. I was thinking yesterday how most people in the developed world probably do appreciate their washing machine. And when it breaks you appreciate it even more because you have to go wash it somewhere else. But I don't think I'd ever appreciated the spin cycle of a washing machine, until I started washing towels by hand.  It took a whole day just to dry the towels on the line, because they were so full of water when I hung them up. Even though I squeezed and twisted until my hands cramped up, I still couldn't seem to get the water out of them! Very few people down here have washing machines. Just another "necessity" that perhaps isn't as essential as we always think.

On Sunday we worked in the invitation campaign in the morning, and then went to do some calls. One of them was one of the studies I started for Charley. He's studied before, and Sunday they were going to have their first formal bible study. Well, he lives one block behind the Kingdom Hall. Sounds easy enough. I mean, we've already been about three times, it takes less than 5 minutes to walk there from the Hall. 25 minutes after we left the Kingdom Hall we arrived at his house to find out that he'd been waiting for us but he had to go out. We were already going to arrive about 20 minutes later than we'd told him because I got delayed on a study with someone, and then we got so lost and went in the wrong direction about three times that we were super late! However, his niece was there, and we had a great chat with her, and I'm going to start a study with her the weekend after the District Convention, so it was a blessing in disguise!

So, this week we'll be in the ministry tomorrow and Wednesday, and maybe Thursday too. And then Friday the District Convention begins. It's so exciting to get to go for the third time! I'll make sure I take the camera and take lots of pictures. Sorry that I don't have any pictures for this blog, but I just haven't taken any! I guess since it's our third time down here things don't seem quite so foreign, but I must get better about carrying the camera around and using it!

Well, I think that's the latest from our end. Time to reheat the yummy soup I made yesterday and then go grocery shopping since the last of everything went into the soup! 

Hope you're all doing well. See you later!