Day 56 – Pigs and Tilapia

It is drizzly and overcast this morning but fortunately we had appointments set up for studies so…up-and-Adam (never quite sure where that expression came from).
It was just the three of us this morning (Shawn, Erik & I) in Santa Rosa. Leah had a really good study with Maribel, the third one in the “Would You Like to Know the Truth?” tract. Next week she will transition to the “Teach” book.  I had another study with Merci (not the same as Leah’s study). We are studying the last chapter of the “Family Happiness” book. It was our third study with her. Her brother is a Ministerial Servant in the congregation and he has a farm where they raise-you guessed it-pigs and tilapia! And you all thought I was referring to dinner…shame, shame, shame. We went from there to study with the other Merci and it was excellent. Then we returned to Timbara and studied with Jessica.

This place looks like an imaginary land, even more
with all the fog

We normally just go out in the morning on Thursday’s but this day we decided to stay out in the afternoon and visit an isolated town, Tunanza Alto, up the mountain outside Timbara. It was pouring “a cantaros “and as we kept driving it was getting more & more “jungly”. It is beautiful up there. When we finally reached the town we had good conversations with everyone we met. One girl named Janina studied 5 paragraphs with us in the “Teach” book &was anxious for us to come back. Leah spoke to a shy, mother of 3 young kids & placed the special magazine on raising kids from October. On the way back by the house she was reading it w/her oldest daughter

These orchids grow wild everywhere up there.
We must have passed 100 of them!

On the way back down we stopped at Wilmer’s house and he gave us a tour of the pig and tilapia farm. You couldn’t imagine a more serene place; that is until the pigs got hungry. They squealed up a storm.

He and his brother have 70 pigs right now and sometimes over a hundred. We went down and saw them during feeding time. They were eating like a bunch of-you guessed it. The babies are 2 weeks old. The tilapia, on the other hand, were much better mannered. They have several pools and move them to different ones as they grow. Most of them were only a couple of weeks old, all 8,500 of them. They sell the fish and the pigs. If you remember, one of our previous blogs mentioned the tilapia dish we prepared. The fish came from Wilmer’s farm.

Someone forgot to wipe. This is the new "stud". He's 8.5 months old.
Wilmer says he's not as "pretty" as the other one who died so they
have to see how the kids come out.

Wilmer's moms house and the ponds

The ponds and Wilmers house. You can see the 8500 babies
he's gonna separate into 2 other ponds soon.

When we got home Ryan and Veronica had arrived, along with Veronica’s sister, Zuli. Leah and I made Ann Marie’s delectable, succulent, tasty, scrumptious, delightful, yummy beet and potato salad. Thanks go to Amber Pena for being the only one who responded with synonyms for delicious. I figured I’d use ‘em all. We also made Monte Cristo sandwiches with maple syrup. Potato salad and Monte Cristos-simply because I wanted to.

We Skyped Leigh King and when we finished we realized someone had called our home phone number (in NY-we use Magic Jack) 5 times in 2 minutes. When I called back she was speaking Spanish and wondered if I did. Her name is Leticia and she lives in Half Moon Bay, California. After  5 minutes of confusion, we figured out that Edie had given her our number. She worked at a hotel in Half Moon Bay and had seen my Edie's daily text , Bible and books in English and recognized them while she was cleaning the room. She couldn’t communicate very well but somehow she understood that we spoke Spanish. She is from Guerrero, Mexico and got baptized in 2010. Her husband got baptized before her and they have 2 little girls and a baby boy. As some of you know, Jim and Edie are in California right now, but we knew they hadn’t passed through Half Moon Bay yet, so Erik asked when she met Edie. She said it was a year ago last March and she was going through some papers and found our number. She was pregnant with her third child then and struggling spiritually and remembered how nice she had been and decided to call (by the way, she also called Edie who kept saying it was the wrong number). We told her Jim and Edie were actually in California right now and driving up the coast, staying in Half Moon Bay Sunday and Monday night and maybe they could meet up. She no longer works at the same hotel but is going to go over Monday morning to see them (and we r gonna help translate). Because there are only 15 or so Spanish-speaking witnesses in the Half Moon Bay area, they only have a public talk/WT the 3^rd Sunday of every month. The other weeks they attend a congregation about 1.5 hours away. Bizarre huh? As you can imagine, it was very emotional for Edie and Leticia. So, there is a need for people in the Half Moon Bay, Cali for those who speak Spanish, huh? Hmmmm.