It’s been awhile…but this should keep you busy…

Well, when I started this blog I was thinking that I would have sooo much free time here in Ecuador that surely I would be able to blog once or twice a month.  Hasn’t quite worked out that way…real similar to that grand idea of exercising 3 or 4 times/week (most maybe can relate to how THAT good idea usually turns out).  So, sorry it’s been so long and I hope you haven’t forgotten about us already!  Here are some of the things we’ve been up to (some of the local pics are repeats on Facebook)…

We’ve really been enjoying the field service!  There is definitely a difference between the city territory and the ‘campo’ or rural territory.  The city territory that we have is harder to work in the sense that, while we place a lot of literature, it is harder to catch people home again and cultivate the interest into studies.  That said, there is a lot of initial interest!  It is a rare morning that we go out and don’t find people who are interested in at least reading the latest magazines.  Most in the city are busy but they respect the bible and will often consider the question you pose and let you read them a scripture.  Plus, the one good thing about our obvious bad Spanish is that the householders will be curious as to what the heck a couple of Americanos are doing there at their door when we can barely talk to them.  We get to explain (we’ve got those Spanish words down pat now) and that sometimes leads to a nice rapport and the opportunity to give a witness.  That approach also works really well with informal witnessing.  When we go to a store, take a taxi, or even just meet someone in passing, once we start sputtering out badly pronounced Spanish they want to know where we are from and why we are in Ecuador.  Informal witnessing like this is pretty easy! 

We’ve had some good experiences, too.  Awhile back, I had briefly placed a God’s Friend brochure in passing with one of the security guards in our neighborhood.  Later that evening someone rings our doorbell and sure enough, its the security guard at our front gate.  ‘Freddy’ had read the whole brochure that afternoon and then scribbled down about 10 questions on a sheet of paper that he wanted answers to!  We spent the next hour+ answering each of his questions from the bible.  He seemed satisfied with the answers and we sent him off with a Teach book and a Bible.  Sam ran into him a couple days later around the corner and he had another question for her – why did his Catholic bible have more books than our bible (the Apocryphal books)??  She gave him a brief answer and promised more research.  He came by later (right in the middle of dinner!) and we gave him a more detailed answer and some printed research.  He ends up telling us how he had been a pretty bad person earlier in life and realized that he needed to straighten things out.  He accepted a study and we made rough plans to start the next week.  Well, we’ll have to see what happens later because he disappeared after that!  We aren’t sure if he quit/got fired or what, but he doesn’t seem to work in our neighborhood anymore.  Unfortunately, I never got a phone number from him.  Someone commented that maybe he got fired because he was in our house talking to us instead of working – I sure hope not!  Although maybe that explains why he kept coming over right after dark (when no one could see him?)… 

Another experience we just had last month started when we had just come back from the Lima, Peru International Convention.  Sam’s sister/brother in law came back to Ecuador with us and we went to the Mindo cloud forest direct from the airport.  Well, by a plethora of weird circumstances (missed flights, power outages in Quito, husbands separated from wives, bus schedules – actually I guess that is pretty normal stuff here) we decided to cough up the $60 for private hotel transportation instead of the usual $2.50 bus ride.  At the airport a young 20 yr old picks us up and it ends up he can speak relatively decent English.  He has this super enthusiastic personality that had us cracking up right off at the start of the 2 hr ride to Mindo.  The good part started when we told him that we were Christians…he got all excited and proceeded to tell us how he was Christian, too, and that he reads his bible all the time and he just loves God!  So, we decided to test him out a little and ask him what God’s name was…well, of course, it is Jehovah, he says!  We were kind of shocked!  We couldn’t believe he knew that…turns out, he really does read his bible!  He commented though that the bible is hard to understand sometimes.  When we told him that we could give him the new brochure that we just got from the convention, he expressed so much appreciation.  So after we got to Mindo and settled in, I found the brochure in my luggage and took it down to him.  I was planning to keep the conversation short but he started to ask a bunch of questions.  I had my bible and got to show him how the bible’s theme was all about God’s kingdom and how God was fixing what had happened in the Garden of Eden.  We discussed Gen 3:15, Dan 2:44, John 17:3, Rev 21, Isa – all the usuals and a few more, and he was actually familiar with several of them from his own bible reading.  Every time I would say that I should probably let him go he would ask me another question or make another comment that would lead to another scripture.  He commented towards the end that he had been thanking God silently during our conversation for the things he was learning.  We talked about how Jesus spent his life on the earth preaching about God and His kingdom.  Then I asked him what our life purpose should be now if we are supposed to imitate Christ…he sat there for several minutes just thinking about it…finally he said, ‘wow, you just changed my whole life.  I know what I should be doing now.’  I’ve never personally experienced someone so young in the world with so much sincere zeal for God and the Bible!  Apparently a couple years ago at age 18 he had considered becoming a priest because he sincerely wanted to show God his appreciation for life.  Long story short, I’ve had the chance since then to go back to Quito (about 2 hours from where we live in Ibarra) a couple times and have some conversations with him on the Teach book.  He wants to study and hopefully we’ll get officially started this coming Saturday.  On a side note, his mother had also read that initial brochure and told him that it was a blessing from God.  I gave him a 2nd copy of the Teach book for her and she apparently has been regularly reading it along with her bible…

Sam has had some good experiences, too.  I don’t have all the details, though, so we will have to get her to write some of these blogs and relate them!  One experience she did have awhile back was at a small English school in the congregation territory.  After talking to the owner she got permission for us to come back and talk to the teenage students.  Apparently he thought it would be great idea for his students to converse with native English speakers and we thought it was a great idea to tell the kids about what we were doing here and worldwide with the preaching work!  We did have a nice round table discussion with at least a dozen maybe 15 students a couple weeks later. 

We also get to preach up in the campo territory (in the mountains).  This is fun stuff!  When I was a kid I used to think it would be sooo cool if I could ride a horse or a motorcycle or go four wheeling in field service.  Apparently, some childhood dreams do come true – apparently, you just have to come to South America for it to happen.  There is a family from New York living about an hour south of us that use horses to get up to their campo territory.  They even camp out up there!  In the campo territory our cong has we typically use a couple trucks one day a week to haul a bunch of brothers up to the little mountain towns and then we spread out from there on foot to preach.  A couple brothers here then take their motorcycles back up to the territory later in the week to call back on the RV’s…pretty sweet!  I’m looking for a bike now so I can get in on this action!  Some pics:

 

 

Picking up people at the first stop

 

 

 

Where we have the service mtg

 

 

 

 

 

Heading into the territory…

 

 

 

 

Breathtaking country up here

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four wheelin territory! Unfortunately didn’t get a call up this road..then again, it was a not-at-home…

 

 

 

Horses & donkeys everywhere…watch where you step

 

 

 

 

A sweet little ol’ lady who listened intently but said she just couldn’t believe it, even if it was in the bible…oh well, at least she got a good witness

 

 

 

Having lunch in downtown San Francisco (yeah, this is the OTHER San Francisco you’ve probably heard about)

 

 

     

Seriously, we haven’t gone country cowboy or anything, the sun is just so darn strong up here we need hats!  I hear in WA right now y’all need hats b/c its so cold…hehehe…

 

 

 

Instead of a coffee break, we took a blackberry picking break

 

 

Speaking of trucks and bikes – we finally fired the buses and taxis and bought our own truck! (the white one in the last two pics above). Its a used little 4WD 4-door Chevy DMax – pretty common here.  These Chevy’s are assembled in Ecuador so we’ll see how reliable it is.  Right now we are still in the euphoric stage where every time we get in the truck we grin at not having to ride the stinky buses with the chickens and being squished and jostled between sweaty women with hairy armpits.  Doing return visits is a lot easier, too, since you can drive to them instead of walking.  The benefits of having your own wheels are so nice down here it is difficult to describe to you in words.  If you’ve lived in a 3rd world country I know you understand.

Exercise has been a little scarce for us since we got here aside from walking in field service.  I tried to keep my regular tennis schedule going but the courts here are awful, the tennis balls ridiculously expensive, and I haven’t been able to find anyone that plays regularly in the afternoons after service.  So, I just eat and get fat, then get sick from some bad food and lose the weight…this system has worked well the first couple months.  But now we don’t get sick very often so it’s not working so good anymore (good and bad I suppose?).  So, in our quest to exercise and play some kind of sport, we’ve been able to get some of our cong into ultimate frisbee!  Now we play on most Sundays after the meeting in the afternoon.  It was kind of funny to watch these guys throw a frisbee for the first time in their lives – but they caught on pretty quick and we have some good games.  Well that covers one day per week.  To get another exercise day in we’ve started to become regulars at the Friday night soccer (futbol!) games.  I have a whole new respect for the game of soccer now.  Fun game!  But I’m always so sore the couple days after…not sure if it’s from all that running or perhaps my big-wind-up kicks at the ball that completely miss and land me backside on the field looking up at the stars.  Its one or the other…  Then there’s Sam.  She’s the only girl who plays and it was kind of comical the first time or two because it was almost like the guys didn’t know what to think of having a girl there.  The first game they hardly passed her the ball and then when she would do something good they would rib the guy pretty hard who let it happen.  But now they seem to be getting used to her and both of us are getting a little better each time.

No blog entry would be complete without an update on our Spanish.  At this point, we have been here 5 months (as of the 14th) – wow, time flies.  In reality, I thought I would be further along by now.  We can hold rough conversations, but we still have to ask people to repeat themselves all the time and I am continuously at a loss for words to finish sentences that I’ve started.  Sam understands people much better than I do although I have a slight advantage of being able to read pretty well.  My brain just doesn’t process fast enough to keep up with a normal paced conversation yet.  Definitely not thinking in Spanish yet although I did dream in some basic Spanish recently (I’ve heard this is some kind of magical milestone when learning a new language…well, I don’t feel any different, am I supposed to?). 

Having bad Spanish apparently is no excuse for getting out of theocratic responsibilities here.  Sam has her 2nd talk coming up next week.  So far, I’ve given a bible reading, a part on the service meeting, and I have the bible highlights, announcements, and a chairman part coming up in the next couple weeks…I feel so bad for our congregation.  I did get to give the public talk for the English group a couple weeks ago – ah! it was so nice to express myself without effort up there!  Things are getting slighter easier lately but I remember the first time I was asked to give a prayer in Spanish when a family had us over for lunch a few months ago – it came as a surprise and I had never even tried practicing a prayer in Spanish before.  Those were the longest few minutes…not to mention the sweatiest.  I absolutely butchered the thing.  Nobody asked me to say prayer again for about two months, the word must have gotten out.

Yesterday we finished a 3 month Spanish class that a sister was providing for 7 of us gringos.  Now we have to stay disciplined to keep studying on our own…we’ll see how that goes.  The class has been really nice – some of the games and competitions we’ve had in the class have solidified words and important rules for us.  For our final class yesterday, each family was assigned a drama.  The family of 3 did Joseph, Mary, and Jesus when Jesus was left at the temple; the other couple did Isaac and Rebecca, which was absolutely hilarious; and we did Ruth and Boaz.  Here are some pics of Blaid & Sonya’s skit and one of the group:

 

Blaid and Sonya - from Australia, they live about an hour away and have been here over 6 months now

 

 

 

Blaid says this is the first time in his life he’s had muscles…their skit was so funny.

 

 

 

 

All of us together with Monica, our ‘maestra’ in the middle

 

 

Some other things we’ve been up to the last couple months:

The International Convention in Lima, Peru:

 

 

Part of the welcoming committee at the airport

 

 

 

My trusty Starbucks mug was perfect for sipping coffee on the bus ride to the stadium…mmm…

 

 

 

 

We ran into Eden in Peru!!

 

 

 

 

 

Bolivian brothers have cool socks.

 

 

 

Juan Carlos & Brigitte from Columbia Bethel – met them when they stayed with us on their way to Peru a couple weeks before the conv. JC plays some very mean ping pong

 

 

This is us a few weeks prior trying on JC’s & Brigitte’s Columbian outfits

 

 

 

Downtown Lima

 

 

 

 

 

Unofficial counts of about 78k on Sunday (unofficial because they couldn’t announce it when the capacity is only 60k)

 

Papallacta: A couple weeks ago we went to a hot springs resort in the mountains called Papallacta with Sam’s cousin Brian and his girlfriend Lisa (visiting from Seattle area).  It sits at almost 11,000 feet.  This is one of the most relaxing places we’ve ever been to.

 

 

Hot spring pools right outside your door…ah…

 

 

 

 

I had a funny experience awhile back when I went to get some butter for the french toast Sam was making for breakfast.  Sam had already started making them when we realized we needed the butter so I figured I would try the little mom & pop store around the corner instead of going to the grocery store.  I asked the owner-lady in the little store if she had butter and she said yes.  She grabbed a block of unrefrigerated butter off of the shelf and showed it to me.  It was wrapped in plastic with no writing on it at all so I had to ask her whether it was salted or not.  ‘Well’, she said, ‘I don’t know.  Let’s see.’  She then proceeded to open one side of the package, stick her finger in the butter and then put it in her mouth!  ‘Yep, it’s salted’, she said.  Needless to say, I found a lame excuse to not need this particular butter at this particular moment and I beat feet out of there to the grocery store…yikes.  But, its a good metaphor if you’re thinking of serving where the need is greater…don’t wonder how good it is, stick your finger in and try it. :)

We love and miss you all.  Please email us and tell us how you’re doing.  Until next time…

Keith visit, FS exp’s, Mindo, Zoo, etc..

Sorry its been awhile since the last update – its been pretty crazy since we moved from Atuntaqui to Ibarra.  We moved in just a few days before Keith Myers, our first visitor from back home, was showing up, so we had to settle in quick and then hop on the 2 1/2 hour bus ride down to Quito to pick him up at the airport.  It was great to see someone from back home.  It is especially great when that person is bearing gifts!  Yup, Keith brought down two of the suitcases we had left back home because the embargo wouldn’t allow us more than two bags each when we came down.  We weren’t really sure exactly what was in the cases so it was exciting to go through them.  Sam’s mom, Jane, had done some rearranging of the contents and decided to give me a little surprise – you probably cannot imagine how excited I was to find a jar of Adam’s Crunchy Natural peanut butter in there!!  You don’t understand – you see there is NO, NONE, NADA, good peanut butter here, period.  Maybe there are places to find some in the big cities of Quito and Guayaquil – but I doubt it.  I’ve already checked some of the big malls in those cities, even going into the specialty import stores, and there is nothing.  The few brands of peanut butter that I can find here are all pretty much some version of Jiffy – really sweet with sugar added, not natural, not the kind of flavor like Adam’s.  Maybe peanut butter is not as big of a deal in your life as it is mine..but for me, I go through a Costco size tub of it every 4-6 weeks or so back home.  Its the fallback food for every occasion, whether for a snack or a fullblown meal – I need the stuff!!  Ahem, but I’m not addicted or anything, really.  Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, I’m pretty much out of it (hint, hint, Jane…)  Those bags also had some extra clothes we needed (and some we didn’t), along with some pots and kitchen stuff that Sam had been sorely missing.  Anyway, we were really grateful to Keith for lugging it all down with him.

Before I tell you about Mindo and some other stuff, I wanted to share a pretty cool experience in the ministry last week.  Wasn’t my ‘door’ (it actually wasn’t even a door, it was a small tienda/store for DVD’s (yep totally ‘legit’ DVD’s for only $1.25, but I digress)), it was actually Fernando’s turn – an MS in our hall that I was working with.  It’s pretty late in the morning and we’re getting close to wrapping up.  We have one more block to do and we agree that we’ll call it after that.  Two ‘doors’ into it, Fernando runs into this man who is just opening up for business (the DVD store).  Fernando, in his quiet spoken manner, dutifully starts going through the Bible Teach book presentation word for word that had been suggested at the field service meeting earlier that morning – it was the one based on Rev 12:9 where you can then show how ch. 10 answers from the bible who/what wicked spirits are, etc, and you demonstrate a study.  The man’s response was amazing.  He stopped what he was doing and listened intently to Fernando’s textbook intro.  He answered thoughtfully on the question posed.  Fernando then showed him the suggested paragraph in the book, read it to him, showed him the scriptures it cited (even having him read them directly from the bible), and asked him the question.  The man responded based on what he just read in the bible.  It was like a perfectly done presentation in a service meeting demo!!  He ends up inviting us into his shop, grabbing two chairs for us, and we sit down to continue the discussion.  Fernando ends up going through about 4 paragraphs, including the man reading every cited scripture (including the entire account of King Saul seeing the spirit medium).  He answers all the questions from what he’s learning.  We had only one or two interruptions from customers coming in, after which he would sit right back down and pick up where we left off.  The sad part for me was that me and Sam had a Spanish class to go to and I had to leave early!  I haven’t had a chance to ask Fernando how much longer he stayed but it really was a thrill to see someone so sincerely reason on the scriptures and learn something from them right off the bat on the first visit – but that just isn’t really uncommon here!  It pumped me up big time to hurry up and learn this language and have a fuller share in teaching all these sincere people here who are willing to listen to the bible’s truths!

Even with our limited Spanish, the ministry has been a lot of fun for us.  I think I enjoy it the most when Samantha and I go out together without anyone to help us with the language.  Like I mentioned in the last post, we are forced to fumble through conversations with people but we ALWAYS seem to get them (conversations).  Maybe these folks are simply entertained by these gringos who can barely speak or they just feel sorry for us.  Either way, we’re having a good time sharing something scriptural with them and it improves our Spanish bit by bit!  I have to admit, though…at times it can be very, very humbling…yes, very, very, very humbling.  A couple weeks ago, I was offering a brochure to an older woman who owned a little tienda/corner store.  For whatever reason, I was tripping up pretty bad on my Spanish (ok, worse than usual), but eventually I got through a presentation.  The whole time this dear woman was looking at me with that sweet motherly look that kind older women give to little children who are offering boy or girl scout cookies.  AW, OF COURSE she will take my cookies, I mean brochure…and how much is it?  Sadly, I didn’t even understand that question, so my daddy, er, the Spanish brother with me, had to respond for me and tell her that the literature is free but she is welcome to donate to our work, which we could forward on for her, etc.  So, she says ok, and so sweetly goes to her cash drawer, pulls out 50 cents, comes back and gives it to me…all with that sweet, sweet smile of ‘awww, how cute!’.  Yeah, pretty much wanted to shoot myself at that point.  If she would have said something like ‘you did such a good job’ or similar at the end, I’m pretty sure I would have just stepped out in front of the next speeding bus passing by.  Thankfully she didn’t (as far as I could understand) and I’m still here to talk about it.  More importantly, I’m trying to learn some more humility from it and it makes me even more consumed with trying to learn this language ASAP!  Oh, and I hope she reads the brochure :)  it will do a lot more for her than cookies would.

Well, back to Keith’s visit.  While Keith was here, time went by pretty fast.  We hung out in Ibarra just for two nights after he arrived before jumping back on the buses again (this time for almost 5 hours) for a place called Mindo.  I’ll segue here to mention that I’ve posted a lot of the pictures of stuff we did with Keith on Facebook already.  If you saw it there, this might be a little redundant.  I just started using FB, and posting stuff there on the fly with a quick blurb is a little faster to share before I can get a chance to blog about it.  Anyway, I digress…  Mindo, in the Cloud Forest, is absolutely amazing!  In some ways, it reminds me of the interior of the island of Kauai.  It is a lush thick jungle at around 5000’ – still up in the Andes but not as high as the area we live in.  The town is pretty small and quaint, and everything is laid back (ok, that’s pretty much everywhere in Ecuador outside of the big cities).  Laid back = just because the town bus station posts it’s hours out front doesn’t mean that you should actually expect someone to be there during those hours – really now, c’mon.  It took 2 or 3 tries to buy our return bus tickets.  Anyway, it’s pretty much what you would expect of a little jungle town in South America – dirt streets (which turn muddy in the rain), friendly people, cheap food, and beautiful sights.  Mindo is a butterfly mecca, a bird-watchers paradise (literally, I read somewhere that little ol’ Ecuador has 10% of the bird species found on the entire planet!), and a nature-lover’s must-see.  In the 4 days we spent there we went to a butterfly conservatory, a frog concert in the evening, rode a ridiculous maybe-Chevy-powered cable car across a 500’ canyon, hiked to some waterfalls, did zip lines until it hurt, and rode 4-wheelers.  We’ll have to do the river rafting and bird watching next time.  Although we did see some Toucans in the wild while zip lining - that was amazing!  Some pics:

  

 

That is just spooky…

 

 

 

 

Some funny Cuban dude who had a knack for getting the butterflies to land on him…

 

 

 

In the States, they pretty much have to idiot-proof this type of thing for liability protection. Here, if you are idiot enough to not hang on and you fall out..well, enough said.

 

 

 

I keep wondering what type of car/truck the cable car engine/tranny was pulled out of…and automatic or stick?

 

 

 

About 500' up in the cable car

 

 

 

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Zip lines!  Absolute blast and must-do in Mindo!

 

 

 

 

Sam coming in on the final zip (we did 12 – there were 14 but we ran out of time..)

 

 

While Keith was here we also went to the Otavalo market, the leather places in Cotacachi, and one of the other great highlights was the Guayabillas animal reserve, which is on the outskirts of Ibarra where we live.  Who knew something so cool was so close that we didn’t even need to get an another !$%@ bus to see it??  (really I love buses.)  Want monkeys?  They got ‘em…want 90 yr old turtles? Them too…how about lions??  YEP!  Although it’s kind of odd that you have to hike on foot about a mile or so up and over this hill to get to the entrance (maybe they don’t want paying visitors..?  or only visitors in good enough shape to run if the lions get out of their pen..?).  And the rules were pretty lax – basically be careful that the monkeys don’t grab your sunglasses off your head – maybe there were more rules and I just didn’t understand them because I barely speak español.  Anyway, we spent the next couple hours checking out turtles, noisy birds, bobcats (probably called something else but they looked bobcatty to me), playing with monkeys, and…watching the LIONS.  THAT was the highlight…a full grown male and female lion.  The size of just one of the male’s paws was almost unbelievable (maybe the size of my head??).  The sheer power that this animal has was obvious in the way he moved and awe-inspiring to experience so closely in person.  Every inch of these things exudes power.  Its at that point of thought that you come to this realization that the cage that these magnificent beasts are in isn’t all that high or sturdy looking.  I mean its a pit but the concrete wall is only about 10-12’ high.  There is a wire fence that goes up another 6 or 8’ but it don’t look strong enough to stop no mad lion.  Is there a lion out there that can’t jump 10 or 12’ AND not strong enough to knock over a wire fence above it?  Yeah, it made me nervous.  But the show was rather unique so we kept watching.  Apparently, the female was in heat and it seems the pair were trying to mate.  It was a slow process where the male would follow the female around and she would seem really annoyed whenever he tried anything.  Maybe they actually meant that the male was in heat, not the female.  Poor guy seemed frustrated.  In fact, at one point, I was hollering a little too loud and I made him mad – he turned towards me, snarled, and bolted towards me for a few steps.  That was enough to give me a minor coronary.  I immediately flashed back on the San Francisco Zoo case where the Siberian tiger got mad, leapt out of her pen, and killed a 17 yr old kid who was taunting it.  Lesson learned – don’t tease big male lions that are, uh, in heat.  In any case, it was pretty amazing to see something like this in person and not on a nature TV channel.  Who woulda thunk that you could go to a little Ecuador animal shelter (that you have to hike to) instead of like Africa to see this?  At the end of the day, just watching these two powerful cats walk around the cage and then stretch out full length on the wood platform from massive paw to tip of tail was something I won’t forget. 

 

 

 

When he gave me this look I should have known to shut up..

 

 

 

 

Time to run!

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pretty sure this is the guy you had to watch your sunglasses around…

 

 

 

Sure, its easy to moon someone when you can swing from a tail…

 

 

 

Making fast friends with crackers

 

 

 

 

Its interesting when you’re in a foreign country surrounded 24/7 by a different culture, different food, different looking people, different landscapes, different way of doing things, etc..I find that when I do see something or someone that looks familiar, I immediately gravitate towards it/them.  It is clearer to me now than ever before why foreign language/culture groups in the US are such tight knit communities.  When someone there who is in business for themselves can get ‘in’ with a foreign community, usually they have a goldmine of opportunity to service that community as the word spreads very quickly that you can be trusted and you understand those people and what they need. It is pretty similar here, too.  If one of the gringos here tells me where I can find something that I’m looking for, I have an immediate trust of that place and feel no need to really shop around (and not just because it is so painful when you barely speak the language).  And when I’m walking around and I hear someone speaking English or see someone who is clearly American, I have this impulse to want to go over and start talking to them – about what?  Well, about anything, anything familiar – heck, given my current lack of ability to casually converse in Spanish, I’ll talk about anything UNfamiliar too – just talk to me!  I’ve noticed one problem that I have in this respect, though: While I can immediately spot the obvious fair-skinned, floppy hatted, backpack-toting traveling gringo – they never recognize ME for an American!  My Pacific Islander heritage has me blending right into the surroundings.  I spot the gringos, I get all queued up to be like, ‘hey, what’s happening! whatcha doin’ down here, where you from’ and all that, and alas, I don’t even get the needed eye contact to get a chance to say anything at all!  It’s like I’m not there…they glance right over me – apparently I just blend right in with the rest of the short, brown Ecuadorians in the crowd…figures. 

After moving to Ibarra a little over a month ago, we’re starting to get settled in.  We’re learning some names, hanging out with some of the friends, making arrangements to work with them in the ministry, etc.  One thing we might not have minded taking a little longer, though, was our entrance into the School.  Yep, just one week after being announced as part of the cong, we get school assignments!  I have a reading this coming Wed night (of all things, Numbers…for a first talk in a foreign language?!? really now that is just mean…) and Sam has a talk next week.  Even though its Numbers, I’m pretty sure I’m still getting off easier between the two of us this time, but I’m sure she’ll be doing plenty of laughing soon enough when they start throwing actual talks at me.  In the meantime, I am all over the assignment board for Attendant and Mics for next month.  Not sure how I’m supposed to perform these duties with my pitiful Spanish and I don’t know hardly anyone in the hall yet…but hey, I’m here for the adventure too, right?…should be interesting…

Well, that’s it for now.  Below are few more random pics.  We’re missing everyone quite a bit lately, and missing some of the comforts and conveniences of home, but we’re having an amazaing and challenging adventure here and the best part is that we’re getting to serve Jehovah more fully.  Love and miss you all…

 

At the shop where they make leather goods for JW books, etc – something tells me they’re not supposed to use that logo..but hey, its Ecuador..

 

 

 

Had a weak moment and went cowboy at the Otavalo market…been threatening to wear it in service but haven’t quite gotten there yet…

 

 

 

This is one of our most adorable service buddies, 3yr old Israel – in a ‘longest eye-lashes’ contest, I would be all-in on him (what if they grow more as he gets older???  he’ll need a comb to untangle them every time he blinks)

 

Going away party for Trevor:

 

Trouble… :)

 

 

 

 

Night falls pretty fast at the equator…next two pics were from the rooftop deck of the Elam’s new place in Atuntaqui

 

 

 

Jeff and another bro talking some serious business on the couch…while licking suckers

 

 

 

 

More trouble…

 

 

 

 

 

Jeff & Robin Elam