Saturday, April 4, 2015

MEMORIAL 2015

I hope everyone had a great Memorial and campaign this year.  It's so much work and preparation getting ready for this most important event, and I just wanted to share some Nindirí activities with you.

Thanks to Jehovah we were able to finish our territory this year with the invitations.  And it seems like it paid off because we had a larger attendance this year than last.  Nindirí had 252 in attendance and our rural group had 80; grand total of 332!!  Not bad for 100 publishers!  We're especially excited about our group (San Francisco's) potential considering only about 20 publishers are assigned there.
Since our cleaning is all manual and we're always open to the elements, it's an all-week activity.  We had cleaning days Monday and Thursday afternoons and Friday morning.  What you're seeing here is over 100 rental chairs being washed by hand.  Then each one had rough parts sanded down (by yours truly) and a final wipe down.  Then, as usual, we flooded our hall to get a good scrub done.
These are some of my students who attended.  There's one young girl missing from the picture.  Also, three of my former students attended so maybe there's still hope there?!  Let me tell you about the young lady on the far right, Erania (she brought her friend with her standing on my other side).  We've been studying over a year and this is her first KH visit!  When I invited her to the Memorial, she said she had a school activity planned on the same night that counted for half her class grade.  We read Matthew 6:33 together and had a long talk about faith and putting Jehovah to the test.  When I checked in with her again last Sunday she told me, "Yeah, I'm coming!"  I asked her if she had worked things out with her teachers, and she waved me off with her hands and said, "Jehovah first."  Do you know how much it warms my heart to hear expressions like that from my students?!  

 Just a sampling of Nindirí's beautiful youth.
 My baby Samir's 1st Memorial with his matchy-matchy parents.
One of my elders and fellow pioneer, Alexis, and his wife, Carla, and I.

So my takeaway this year?  We're still growing and there's still so much work to do here which makes me feel REALLY excited.  Also, don't give up on my students.  Sometimes it's like Jesus´ parable from WT study from a few weeks ago....it just takes a while to see the growth because it's been underground until now.