June 2013
Well as you can see San Juan del Sur is greening up. The rainy season is in full swing although it hasn't been too bad, it mostly rains at night and we've only been caught out in the rain a couple of times.
Although with the rain the rubbish is still coming down the river and being washed out to sea. Thankfully the alcaldía (council) seems pretty pro-active with picking up the rubbish and each day teams of men sweep the streets (by hand) and pick up the rubbish from the streets and sometimes from the beach.
Last weekend we had our assembly so we were up bright and early meeting at the park at 5.50am to catch the bus to Ticuantepe, about 2.5 hours from SJDS.
Zac had organized a minibus for us all that worked out really well.
As you can see, a few of us are not really morning people :)
Three of our Bible students came with us which was awesome, here is our lovely bike mechanic friend Jesus. The assembly was in English so he was soooo excited as he understood most of it. We've been studying with him and his brother in English and Spanish and helping him out with an English course that he's been doing so his English is really improving.
Here we are with Jesus and Juan. Now Juan has quite a story. I hope he won't mind me sharing it with you - he's homeless and lives on the streets or on the beach here in San Juan. Up until recently he was drunk most days and was living a very sad life. He was born in Nicaragua but during the civil war, when he was young his family moved to Los Angeles. I'm not sure what happened with his dad, I think he left them and came back to Managua, Nicaragua but his Mum was an alcoholic and Juan ended up being shuffled through the foster care system. His head is covered with the scars inflicted on him by one of his foster dads. :(
Juan grew up very angry with life and things didn't go well with him. He ended up spending 10 years in a maximum security prison and reliant on alcohol. Finally he was deported back to Nicaragua, unable to speak Spanish, unwanted by his family because of the way he was living and without any papers to be able to work or travel legally even here in his land of birth.
Anyway he met a few witnesses and started coming to the odd meeting, usually inebriated but liking what he heard decided to make some changes. He has now not had a drink for over three weeks, has been coming to our house each week to study the Bible with us and has been coming to all the English meetings. When Jovany left he gave us a bag of clothes to help someone out in need so Juan was wrapped to get some nice dress shirts, ties and long pants.
Sadly SJDS is a small community and although he's looking for work I think everyone's waiting to see if the good changes he's made are here to stay. He makes a few cords each day collecting cans and trying to help tourists for tips. He's also saving for some proper shoes to wear to the meeting. Every other day or so he gives Porl a few cords and Porl has a little bank book going to keep track of how much he's saved. He's so excited watching it grow. We're tempted to just give him what he needs but I think it's going to be such an accomplishment for him to do on his own that we'll just keep encouraging him and giving him a some good square meals and our company and friendship.
As he doesn't have anywhere to stay he often sleeps on the beach or in some deserted lot which he says isn't too bad but the worst thing is that the crabs come up from the beach and bite him and they sometimes have a really good go at him and he comes round covered with pincer bites. Who would have thought that crabs would be so vicious!
Juan is really good company with lots of stories and often pops in for dinner or to get dressed for the meeting and we've taught him how to play Skip-Bo so he loves coming round for a game of cards. We really hope he'll stay off the alcohol and he can get his life back together.
Now, back to the assembly .... Why is it that so many people have to make funny faces when the camera gets pointed at them? jeje
and no, we're not pulling funny faces, they are our regular ones :P
We met some lovely young bro's from Blue Fields and as we're hopefully heading up there next month we might meet up with them.
After the assembly we were all a little more awake, the lady with the grey hair, front and centre, is my lovely Bible student Arlene and she thoroughly enjoyed her day out with us. She's the legend that travels a couple of hours each way from Cardenas each week to come to the English meetings.
Porl was interviewed but I was too busy listening to take a picture :( Here's our friend Franscisco (Pancho) from Granada being interviewed. Chase and I are going to stay with him and his parents in August when we attend the pioneer school in Granada for two weeks.
While we were at the assembly, unbeknownst to us Renee (the coconut seller) and his wife Liz had come into San Juan and came to our house looking for us because they wanted to attend the Spanish meeting with us. As were weren't there they headed up to the hall by themselves. We caught up with them later and they were so happy and excited, they said that they had enjoyed the meeting so much that they wanted to move into SJDS (at the moment they live about half an hour away by bus) and they have decided that they want to become Jehovah's Witnesses - them and all their family. I don't know if their family knows about this yet lol but it was lovely to hear that the brothers and sisters had welcomed them so warmly and that they had appreciated the Bible based information so much that that was how they felt.
This week saw Kieran back at the dentists getting his second wisdom tooth pulled out, such fun :)
He wasn't too keen on the papparazi recording the event for posterity so the best I could do was take a picture of the dental "clinic" jeje.
Chase and I had a nice day out doing one or six studies. Porl lent Chase his bike which was great as we go from one end of San Juan to the other.
Chase did great with his Spanish but I think I tired him out because when we walked in the door that night he just fell straight into bed without dinner or anything and fell straight to sleep. Reappearing a few hours later with hat hair and red eyes, poor wee thing.
Here's one of the creatures that we came across during the day. This one and its mate were racing around the tree above us while we were studying with a young lady called Vanessa - not very distracting (well for me anyway) lol.
As usual Tuesday saw us in Rivas and here's Porl and Joel Diliegros (visiting from Mexico).
... and a few of us girls, a mix of Americans, Aussies and a Kiwi with another Aussie and a Mexican in the background.
Porl was dying for an apple so splurged on a Granny Smith that we came across in the market for $1.50 - it was a goodie though, crunchy and delicious.
This month has been crazy in SJDS being the month of the patron saint, John the Baptist.
A few times a day they have parades where everyone follows the music and there are a few people bearing a statue of Jesus that they make dance around to the beat of the music. The procession often passes right by our front door.
This week was Vanitas last week :( - we'll miss her a lot, she's a lovely young lady who has worked really hard in the ministry here in Nicaragua. She's the beauty in the centre. We often used to spend all Thursday together and had great fun riding our bicycles around from Bible student to Bible student - we sure clocked up some miles!
Of course when someone leaves that's a great opportunity for a partaaaay so that was what we did. Shayla and Scott put on a farewell at their place ...
Joel didn't seem too impressed by some of the dance moves that the Aussies brought to the floor.
but they told him not to knock it until he'd tried it ...
We made the most of having Jonathon visiting from New York and Joel from Mexico by getting them to give us a few Meringue and Salsa lessons.
It was a great night, we finished up by putting together a harlem shake featuring Vanita which turned out pretty good :) If I can get a copy I'll post it later.
Until next time .... adióooooooos
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