Our Kingdom Hall

Some have been asking about pictures of our KH and so we thought we would oblige. (I included the icecream man in this one, evidently people buy ice cream at 8:30 on a Sunday morning? :)This is a picture of our Sunday meeting. This day we had around 140 in attendance, again this is with 65ish publishers. The Kingdom Halls down here are all owned by the branch. Which is news to me because in the states aren't the majority of the halls there owned by each congregation? Interesting isn't it? There are 2 likely reasons for this. The first and probably the one that your thinking of right now is that many congregations do no have the means to pay for a hall. Which is probably true. The upper end of housing (I.e. the ones that most need greaters are in) are somewhere between $100 and $150 a month. The majority of the friends do not live in a place like that. A building like the kingdom hall would probably go for around $35000 - $50000. Needless to say that it out of the realm for many congregations to afford here.

A second reason is likely due to the legal system here in Nicaragua. Perhaps there is some advantage to this. Did I mention that about five minutes in to the meeting we lost power? We had no power for the rest of the meeting. The brother who gave the talk was from Spain. The poor guy was sweating the whole time and did a large section on the kingdom of the son of his love. Tough huh? (Are you happy Ryan? There is a picture of you here front and center!)

There are currently two congregations that meet in our hall. Ours has, as I've mentioned before, one elder and about 6 servants counting me. The other has around 80 publishers one elder and one servant. We managed to go to a dinner gathering with some friends with the elder from the other hall visiting. Luis, the elder there, was really trying to draft us over there. There is such a need down here! We'll see how that goes.

It seems the standard here to have an apartment with each hall. If we end up staying here for several months, likely we would end up moving to the apartment. The apartment is about 500 sq feet with a bathroom and a ¾ wall that divides the room. All the chairs here are plastic and cost something like $7 a piece. Does anyone remember how much a chair costs in the states? I do have to admit that the chairs in the states are a bit more comfortable.

We've also had the privilege of hosting a large group of friends from Spain. It's really nice to be a destination that people want to visit. We're having a whole bunch of them over for dinner. It's been nice to have them here because, unlike the local friends, they actually listen to what were saying at the door and help out. I

t can get hard when the householder asks a question and we have no idea what they said. The likely situation here develops while your talking the second witness wanders off, sometimes sitting on the curb, sometimes going off for a drink, most times just staring off into space. We keep thinking that it's just that they don't understand us but when we talk to others it's just the culture here. Take care everyone! If anyone wants to come down here we would be happy to have you. Just send us an email! By the way, Ryan says that there are fire breathing llamas in the mountains here. And it's not safe to go outside after 5 because the llamas try and sell you used trapper keepers. .... I'm not sure what that means.

Jinotega, Nicaragua