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Published: November 12th 2014
Hellooooo Everybody!!! Today is 11/11/14 5:06pm! We have officially been here 2 weeks. =) Haven’t written much on our blog because I had been sick for a week. I’ll spare you the gruesome details … basically I was in the bathroom a lot, fever of 103, home for a week, couldn’t move too much. But sister Barrera fixed me up with some medicine, and thank goodness it cured me. I thought I might never see the sun again!
(Clayton: She’s going to talk about bad things first, but don’t worry. We’re having fun, prospering spiritually, and loving it here.)
So some funny things that have happened…while I was sick, we had to venture out to the store to try to find some medicine. So we took a taxi to the supercenter Machetazo (I called it Machetizmo in an earlier blog…it’s the same place I was just wrong😉 got some aleve and night time sleepy medicine, so we get a taxi to take us home….except we don’t know where home is. =O
We were pretty sure it was on the same street as Machetazo but as he kept driving, it was looking less and less familiar to
us. So he pulls over and I was afraid he was going to kick us out right there on the street.
But he asked me, “What is it near…the new mall, the University of Technology, the Police Station?”
… None of that rang a bell. All I knew was there was a pharmacist (there’s a pharmacist on every other corner, it’s like Starbucks in the States.) and a cross walk, and a Delta gas station (also one of each on every corner).
So he’s like, “Okay well if something looks familiar let me know.”
So he turns around and goes the other way. As we keep cruising it’s looking good, and we pass the mall, the police station, the University of Technology…and look! There’s our turn! So he takes us down the street to our house and he was just super nice, told us what the street name we live on is called (which I promptly forgot) and told us that our Spanish speaking made him happy. So that was a fun experience. Now I have memorized what to tell taxi drivers so that doesn’t happen again 😉
We didn’t have water for 3 days!
The first day we thought it was weird so I asked Teresa about it and she said they are just doing some repairs and that she didn’t have water either. So that was fine. But by the second and third day we were really starting to wonder what was going on …so they stopped by and were shocked to hear that we didn’t have water still! So they went outside…our neighbor had water, so they checked some faucet thing just outside our gate and for some reason ours was turned off! So I guess some random person just turned it off as they were walking by. Who knows why! Haha so we were soooo happy to get water back on. (Clayton: We will never take running water for granted again.) Now if we lose water again we will know what to do. 😉
FUN FACTS:
So you know how roosters are supposed to start crowing at dawn and wake everybody up for the day? Not so!!! They like to start howling at 1 and 2 in the morning here! One starts it (who knows why) and gets the entire neighbourhood riled up and then
you have 15 roosters cackling one after another for no reason!
Also the speed here is done in KMs not MPH.
So we got some more pictures at meeting…there’s the Barrera family. Juan is the daddy, Teresa is the Mommy, Rebeca is the daughter, and Juanito is the son. (Clayton: Amazing family team work captured in one picture! Juan is the Watchtower reader in Spanish, sitting on the right. Juanito is interpreting LSP for the conductor (on stage). And Rebeca (left) is interpreting LSP for Juan’s Watchtower reading. Teresa is sitting down right in front of us, but she had just finished interpreting the entire talk before the Watchtower.) They were in my congregation last time I was here in Panama. They work super hard here with the LSP group. They interpret the meetings and go out in service all the time. (Clayton: They’ve been so good to us from the beginning of our trip. They’ve earned their place as family to us.)
Clayton gave his first Spanish comment! Hopefully we can upload a video of it onto Youtube for y’all to see. The brothers said he didn’t even
have an accent, that he sounded real legit. He did a lot of studying for it, I’m so proud!
There’s two other sisters here who support the group as well, Maria and Hilaria. Also Hilaria’s grandson Jafir I think his name is. That’s the kid in the picture with Clay with swapped ties. He’s about 6, he’s really cute. =)
We went out in service with them, Saturday. There were 7 of us in a small 4 door sedan. Who needs a van, you can fit a ton of people and still get good gas mileage! If only we could do that in the States.
We had a super fun time at the Barrera’s house Sunday night. (Clayton: We had brothers from Colombia, Spain, Costa Rica, Panama, and the United States dancing and singing Karaoke in one house. Talk about a worldwide brotherhood.) We did karaoke all night, danced, and ate delicious food and drank delicious coffee. (Clayton: A lot of the Karaoke was in English, surprisingly. Little Rebeca is the culprit behind most of it. It turns out she’s a Coldplay fan!) They know how to party! And
the great part is everybody was completely sober in all these videos. Who needs alcohol!
Our internet is very slow, but we’ll try to upload our video compilation of Karaoke Panama’ onto Youtube!
So on Mondays we support the Spanish congregation in service. This past Monday we went to a place about 30 minutes away from here by car called La Mesa (the table).
There’s a picture of their tiny cute Kingdom Hall. =)
Usually the brothers go all day long, bring a lunch and keep going. But we didn’t have a lunch with us so we just went till about 12. There was about 20 there at the meeting for service! They just have a lot of territory to cover I guess. So I got 10 bug bites and a sunburn. Clay surprisingly has none and is only a little red in the face. We had stayed the night at the Barrera’s so we forgot bug spray, sunscreen, and our umbrellas. Lame! So I’m paying the consequences of that today but it’s totally fine. Compared with what I’ve already gone through ‘feeling-wise’ here, it’s aaaall
good.
We did have some really nice experiences in service though! There were 4 of us, we walked a really long country road and took every other house. Me and Clay went together and the other 2 sisters went together. We just presented the “will the dead live again” tract and pretty much read the whole thing to the house holder. They were all so nice! Invited us to sit down and actually thanked us for coming.
There was an older couple who invited us back to their patio, and the man said he didn’t know if he thought the dead would ever live again, that he didn’t know anything about the Bible. So I asked him ‘do you have a Bible in your house?’ and he said ‘well it’s a Catholic Bible…I don’t know if that will work…’ and I told him all Bibles are the same and yes that would work. So he actually went and got it, was gone in his house for a couple minutes and came out with a huuuge gold embossed Catholic Bible. It was as heavy as a small child! So I asked him if he wanted me to help him
find the scripture that would answer the question if the dead will live again. And again he said he knew nothing of the scriptures so yes to please help him. (Clayton: No one in the States would ever give such a humble answer to that question.) So I flipped to Acts 24:15 and read it to him. He thought it was interesting that it said there would be a resurrection. So I gave him the tract and Clay gave him the recent magazines and I told him to look up the scriptures with his bible as he read the literature. He said ‘to make sure it’s true with the bible?’ and I told him yes exactly. It was cute.
The dogs here are interesting. There was a ton of dogs just randomly everywhere, big ones too…but in the states if we went to a neighborhood we would all be scared and nobody would get out of the car (and rightly so) but here the dogs just do their thing and they don’t bark, don’t pester you…its interesting to see.
There are a lot of toads here! I haven’t yet seen a live one…but plenty of dead
ones! Some are run over by cars, some are bitten by snakes. I guess they have snakes here. (Clayton: In La Mesa, not Santiago. Don’t worry, Mom.) Mostly we just see lizards and grasshoppers. We did have a spider the size of a half dollar coin in the shower the other day. (Clayton: I don’t remember that.) I wasn’t scared till it started jumping! I’ve never seen a big spider jump. (Clayton: Oh yeah, I remember now.) Just the tiny itty bitty ones. Haha it was crazy!
We have really super been enjoying our time here. Especially now that we are knowing more how things work, getting around easier, getting more confident with stuff. It’s all about serving Jehovah. (Clayton: Amen.) Even with the hiccups we have come across, it’s totally all worth it. Seeing Jehovah’s organization on a worldwide scale is super amazing. People we have never met/seen/heard of are just sooo helpful to us and sweet, it just really shows they apply the Bible’s wisdom and is beautiful to experience. =)
We hope everybody is doing good back home! Comment on here and let us know how y’all are doing.
We love you!
-Claychael
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Seester
non-member comment
Yay!
I love your blog so much! Still can't believe you guys are there, so proud of you! Can't wait to join youuuuuuu! Thanks so much for posting! I could read these all day! And the pics are great :) haha in the pic of the chicken and the pretty palm-y tree things, is that roadkill? Or like an old sweater?