Out & about

What have we been up to the past few days......

We had game night with Freddy, Ericka & Fernando. 

Dice anyone????



 



This is Chad & Michele's Hall.  They got new chairs since we were there last year! It seems like the standard in this area is now plastic chairs. They remind us of a normal lawn chair in the USA. We attended our second meeting this week. Our first meeting was on Sunday. We did prepare fairly well but only had simple comments that we translated which seemed like it would be a good start to commenting at the time. The problem was that when we were actually at the meeting those were basic comments like young ones would prepare. So we realized that we better let the kids have the easy ones. But while we were there it was a good reminder of what a privilege it is to be able to give praise to Jehovah at our meetings!  You really take that for granted until you can't speak well enough to say what you want to say! So we prepared much harder for our mid week meeting. We also used an app on the internet called google translate. What a gift! All you need to do is type in what you want to say in English and it translates it into Spanish! It also speaks it for you so that you know how to pronounce the words! And we were able to comment again! What a relief!

 Here we all are!

 

We went for lunch later in the week to the Chill & Grill which is a hamburger place.

 

Everyones food was so YUMMY! We all finished the food on our plates!

 

On a side note.......we are beginning to see how the Ecuadorian culture is.  We have come to the conclusion that if anything takes 1 day & is seemingly easy, there is a pretty good chance that somehow it will become a much bigger ordeal than you could ever first imagine!  A brief example is our efforts to try to begin the process to get our visas here. We were told that we need a bank account for numerous reasons. The main one is that it is required for the type of visa we are getting. So we went to the bank with Chad to open accounts. The bank then proceeded to tell us that we needed a Visa to open a bank account????  Another stipulation for a bank account is that you need to be registered in this country where the people vote for public figures. You pay a fee and even though we obviously don't vote we were told we had to pay the fee and just state that we are neutral. Then when we tried to do this the places we were sent seemed to keep changing the information and we were getting no where fast. The old catch 22 in these scenarios.  In the end we found what seems to be the equivalent of a credit union that was willing to open some accounts without a visa. These accounts will be sufficient for our needs. And it only took us a few days until we got to the bottom of this situation!

And now for our best news! We have traveled to Guachapala a few times now to look for housing. We spent a lot of time searching and speaking to the locals about any available options. It is a small town and clearly a modest area. We looked at a few places that were just not going to work. We don't want to be picky but one example is that there were apparently chickens living in the living room at one of the houses we looked at! Yikes! The feed was still in the room, and so was the smell! Chad had spoken to the coordinator of that Congregation last week and he informed some of the congregation members of our need. We just found out this morning that they found a two bedroom apartment that is brand new for $120.00 a month! It certainly makes us feel good to know that Jehovah and his people, our friends, are already helping us and we have not even met these brothers yet. What a privilege to be a part of an organization like this one!  We are going to look at it tomorrow. We will post some pictures later in the week!
Speaking of studying, we now have to begin our 4 hour study for the watchtower tomorrow!
Hasta Luego!