Day 72 – Guaguayme, San Juan & Guaguame Alto

As nice as yesterday was  is as terrible as today is. Seriously, we woke up to overcast, rainy skies. You can imagine what that does to congestion and sinus pressure.  But Erik was determined to go out. But on the way to the service group when it started pouring, he may have been second-guessing himself. By the time everyone got there and we met for service it was raining pretty hard-did I mention I lost my umbrella in service Wednesday?-argggh. But there was a large group of us huddled under the overhang of an empty house. The friends seemed undeterred by the rain (17 of us). So, Ryan made the groups and then he & Shawn took the sisters up first to the town, Guaguayme. I decided to leave my backpack in the car and only take my invitations so everything wouldn’t get soaked. But, of course, the one day I leave my camera in the car, I regret it. Lots of good photo ops, not to mention the rain stopped after about ½ hour and the sun came out. Unfortunately, I didn’t see Shawn or the car again for the next 2.5 hours. So, sorry but I have no pics. But it was a quaint little town, up the mountain, with a cute little central park (like they all have). When we finished there we walked to another very small “town”-a group of about 10 houses and then walked back. It was a beautiful walk and by now the sun was out;  no clouds and little breeze. It turned out to be a beautiful morning.

Ryan and Shawn went back to get the brothers and then they went up past us to Guaguame Alto to pass out invitations.

We got back around noonish and I tried a new recipe I had found for lentils and rice. It was an Indian recipe; I was just missing Greek yogurt and pine nuts but everyone agreed to let me try it. It turned out pretty good but definitely would be better with the missing ingredients.

We had a bigger chunk of time before the meeting because Erik had the talk in Yanzatza (about 35 minutes away in the opposite direction from Loja) and their meeting didn’t start until 7.  We sat outside and had Kauffee. The drive was really beautiful (of course right?) in a direction we hadn’t gone yet so it was all new. This was a pretty big congregation (attendance 120) with a ton of young people/kids. Erik knew that ahead of time so he gave the talk on “Looking at youths from Jehovah’s standpoint”. Quite a few after the meeting mentioned that they appreciated the talk.

They had these pics on there territory map.

This is the congregation that goes preaching in the canoe. Hopefully we’ll be able to arrange something with them for next week. Recently they’ve had quite a few brothers be assigned/move in so they have 5 elders now (Ryan is a little jealous).  We met a sister and her husband who are from Quebec but she has been in Ecuador 21 years (since she was 6). They have been serving along the coast but were just asked to move to this congregation a month ago.

After meeting we were starving & conveniently enough, the brother from Zamora who has the street cart with food, has a cousin in Yanzatza who also has a street cart with delicious food. The three guys at our table were joking in Spanish about being stuck with the gringos and talking about us, thinking we couldn’t understand. So we started speaking in Spanish and I heard them talking about us again.  I think it really surprised them. Turns out, they’re from Colombia and are working here in Ecuador. We got a chance to preach a little to the one guy and he asked about where and what times we had meetings.

Street cart with yummy food in the town center

We got home at about 10:00pm and Erik checked the final score from the Syracuse game-season over. Ricky dvr’d it but I don’t think he’ll care to watch it.