DING DING ROUND THREE

After a month in the States and another month settling in back in Nicaragua I'm blogging again!  Yeah!  Sorry for the delay, but it's been so crazy since I've come back.  Three days after my return I had a group of friends come visit for two weeks.  Near the end of their trip and during my circuit overseer's visit I ended up seriously sick (bacterial infection in respiratory tract), and it took me a good two weeks to really start feeling like I was out of the woods.  Now that my energy levels are up I've been running like a crazy woman trying to finish up the service year with a bang and get all my students back on track.

Dragonfruit. They call it pitahaya here.  The color is so beautiful and makes a great fresco.

Let me introduce a friend of mine and our new brother Melvin from Nindiri!!!  Congrats on your baptism, Melvin!  Just look at that great smile.

Bro.Tallet translating talk from French in Las Isletas Cong 

So I came back to so much huge news.  We're forming a new congregation!  Yep, between us and our sister congregation we have about 200 publishers, and during the circuit overseer's visit we each had about 165 in attendance each--standing room only!  So we're taking a few publishers from each cong and forming a new one.  I feel both excited and nervous.  I think a new territory will be refreshing, but I'm really nervous thinking about possibly leaving my current students.  I feel really attached to a few of them :(  The other big news is that we have a missionary couple assigned to our cong--Frederic and Maud Tallet.  He's French and she's from the island of Guadeloupe, and we're they're 3rd assignment.  They were in Guadeloupe, then St.Barth's in the Caribbean, now Nicaragua.  I truly feel that Jehovah has answered two years worth of prayers in sending an experienced brother to our congregation.

So much news I'm not sure it'll all fit!  Ok, so something else new is that we're starting public preaching here in Granada (like mentioned in the KM 2 weeks ago with the tables and carts; Manhattan project).  English Cong has been doing it for a while but they only offer literature in English, so Spanish is finally starting to meet that need.  I'm participating!  Yep, tomorrow I'll man the booth with my partner from 6-8pm, and I'm so excited to see what the response will be from the community.

Also, I'm going to the English convention at the end of the month in San Salvador, El Salvador.  English Cong rented a big bus and are letting English speakers from other congregations join the trip thankfully.  I'm excited to hear the conv in English, and more excited to see a new country and meet new friends.  Supposedly all English congregations in Central America will be there.  Wow!

Next thing....well, I need a favor from you guys!  We all know about the power of prayer especially when many of us are praying for the same thing....so I need you guys to pray for me on two specific items.
     1.  to sell my car in the U.S. so I can use the money down here and
     2.  to give my roommate and I direction on if we should move to cut down on our expenses.  Granada is the most expensive city in Nicaragua, and we'd like to be living cheaper, but we can't find anything lower than what we have staying in Granada.  There's a possibility to rent in Nindiri and go to Masaya congregations.  I'm checking out a house on Monday and a territory on Tuesday, but I'd love to see divine direction in the decision.  Thanks for your help!

Sorry for this Frankenblog but there was so much to talk about!  I'll blog more regularly now so they'll be smaller :)