Jinotega

Our House and Our Street

So we've arrived in Jinotega and have been crazy busy for the last several days. With the visit of both the C.O. and the D.O. there have been meetings every night. I feel real compassion for our one elder in the congregation, he has to be stressing about the workload. I'll include more about our traveling overseers in the next post.

Field service has been our bread and butter up till today. 9 out of 10 doors that I've talked at I've had good calls. Most of the people are quite friendly about our terrible Spanish and help us along. We do lots of business witnessing. You just go into the store, ask for the owner, and then hit your presentation. This is not something that we do in Scottsville very often and so I was a bit hesitant at first but the territory is quite used to it. This morning I went with another brother into a clinic and we asked to speak to the doctor. We wound through the little compound into the doctors office, (by the way, the place was called something like “The New Day Christian Clinic”, I have no idea what religion they were, so I was thinking, “Yikes! What's going to happen here?”) when we arrived in her office the personnel of the entire office entered as well. This was in total 7 persons. The brother I was with spoke for about 5 minutes, using several scriptures, about the time when all doctors will be out of jobs. I'm not sure if that's taking personal interest or knocking the job of the poor doctor, but it went well enough and the brother didn't have enough literature for everyone in the office. He featured the brochure about God permitting suffering and it seemed to go over quite well. Wonderful huh? I can't wait until we're able to communicate effectively to the people in the field and start adapting our presentations.

I could go on with experiences but I thought you also might like to see our house. Our house is, I would say, average for the city of Jinotega. We have a garage in our kitchen. I know it sounds weird but it's the way it is, and it works great for us! Since we have no car, this means we have a large space in the front of our house. Andrew, the brother who lived in the place shortly before us, utilized this space for ping pong.

Thus, the large table in the front doubles as our kitchen table/study area and, when things get slow for us, a ping pong table. We could probably sit 12-15 people at the table at one time! I'm sure we'll make good use of it. The house has two rooms, and two bathrooms, only one has a hot shower so if you come to visit you we'll have to arm wrestle to see who gets that one! :)

Our street is quite nice and quiet by Nica standards. Most walls don't meet the ceiling in your house so you hear everything outside. Almost directly across the street we have a small Evangelical church. This is the equivalent to the Pentecostals in the U.S. So lots of singing takes place with regularity here. However, most of this takes place while we're away so it's not too bad. You have to put up with crazy barking dogs everywhere, someone behind our house has a goat and some roosters, and you hear all the conversations outside. Why, then, can we say it's quiet? Most noise comes from the traffic going down the street. You fail to realize how noisy vehicle are in the states since most times you're either in one, and even old cheap cars have some noise barrier, or you're inside a building and you see them passing by. Nearly everything is a diesel, and most vehicles have no exhaust, add these two together and you get, LOUD NOISE! We live on a side street and it seems most of our neighbors don't have vehicles either. So it's nice and quiet. For the ambient noise, (I.e. the aforementioned dogs, goats, roosters, neighbors with marital problems, etc.) we sleep with ear plugs and hope for the best. That's all for now, stay tuned I'll post some more on our C.O. And D.O. next week! These brothers are incredible!

written by

Shane Perry on August 14, 2008 from Jinotega, Nicaragua

from the travel blog: Shane and Vanessa's Nicaraguan Adventure

tagged House and Jinotega

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Jinotega, Nicaragua

Heading South?