End of the Service Year

Well, for those of you that still may check this, and have been asking me to post, here we go. . .

It has been a little bit since I have said hi to you all, so I just wanted to let you know I'm fine. We are all wrapping up the service year here. Some of us down here finished a little easier then others :-)

Today we just had a little get-together with some pioneers to celebrate. And I figure we will continue celebrating tomorrow. . . only one day left. Ya know, its funny, down here the witnesses use a similar phrase to "get-together" instead of party. Nowhere in the world are Witnesses "party animals," we just "get together" a lot.

The last little bit here as been fun. Our special pioneers (and only elder) have been on vacation in the States. Actually, I hear that they were up in the area of y'all for a bit. But that means that we have had our work cut out for us - just the 3 musketeers to keep everything running. It has been a learning experience, I will say that. They will be back here on the 5th of September, so we are almost out of the woods.

Its odd, I am having a rather difficult time here typing this. This is the first thing I have written in english since, well, my last post - so a couple of months ago. I keep mixing up my vowel sounds, and things like "f"s for "ph"s. By this point, I think that a good chunk of my brain has been rewired to spanish. Not that this is a bad thing, I've done a lot of work to get it that way. But it is going to make things interesting surviving stateside. Speakin of which, I sort of have an announcement: I will be up stateside the beginning (wow, it took me awhile to figure out how to spell "beginning" ha!) of October. And unfortunately, I will be working this winter. It will be nice to see all of you, but is going to be tough being away from home for all that time.

Seeing as how I will be seeing all of you in person in 1 month, and my average time between posts nowadays seems to be over that, I think we can probably call this the last post. Its not that I don't want to keep in touch will all of you friendly people up north, it's just that, let's be honest, I'm not a very good blogger. Part of it is that I'm not really on an adventure anymore, I'm just living my daily life. It has been pointed out to me that this is a poor excuse, it's just that how many times can I talk about crossing the river or going to the beach? Anyways, I promise to have stories of some sort or another to share while I'm back stateside, so you can hear them then.

Oh, and to those of you that have sent me email - thanks! It's nice to hear from you, however, I can't send email back - it gets blocked, don't know why.

Also, a quick shout-out and congratulations to those that received an appointment in Lewistown! Awesome!

I hope that all of you reading this have had just as good of a service year as I have, and have a good September! See you soon!

only one thing left to do. . .

THE END

-Cory

Almost a Resident!

Having just got my email back, I just got an email from the DR branch office, letting me know that I am ready for the next step in the residency process! About another month and a half and I should no longer be an illegal alien!

Wooo hooo!

Back Up and Running

I have been out of commision here the last little bit due to some computer virus problems, but all that has been fixed now (I think. . .)

And on the positive side, we have our internet working a little better, so I should have more of a permenent presence on Skype whenever I am home. . . so feel free to call anytime!

A few things have passed while my computer has been out of commision, and I will post about them soon. There may be new pictures, but Mike doesn't seem to want to share the ones he took - the big grouch.

New Fotos

Some new pics are up, some of a pig roast picnic that we had last weekend, and some that I just found of the Memorial.

Follow the link on the side.

Enjoy!

Barracuda

If you have looked through my pictures, you probably have seen the picture of my study on the beach J

Not only is he doing very well in his study, he also is a very generous guy and insists that we eat with him every Tuesday for lunch when we go to have his study. These people don’t have much, but they are willing to share what they do have. Normally it is just some chicken and rice, but this last week he had a treat waiting for us. He was all excided when we got there, because one of his neighbors had caught a barracuda. He was cooking it over an open fire made of driftwood. Let me tell you, that was some of the best fish I have ever had in my life. He took the head for himself, because he knows its kind of odd for us gringos to eat the head, but to the Dominicans, that is the best part. So he is there knawin on this head that still has these big‘ole teeth in it. yummy

Foto Update

I put a bunch more pictures up as of today - some are the old ones I had on the blog before and some are new.

Whenever I put new pictures up, I will try and remember to make a note of it here on the blog to send you over that way to see them.

Also there is now a permanent bar on the side of the blog where there will allways be links to my pictures.  One link will take you to the sets where everything is organized, the other link just shows all the pictures starting with the newest ones, which is handy.

And as a side note, we just hit over 2000 visits to my blog - kinda cool.  I hope you all are still enjoying it.

Photos!!!!!!!!

I have at long last put up the pictures that I have been promising for the last 6 months!  It has been quite a bit of work to do them all at once, but thats what I get for putting it off.

All of the pictures are stored on my Flicker photostream.  Just follow the link here and you can start looking through them all.

Click Here for Pictures

edit:  I changed the link to take you to the page where the pics are organized into diferent sets.  I think its a little more organized that way.

I guess I shouldn't complain about the rain. . .

It has still been raining down here on a regular basis.  Back stateside they say that April showers bring May flowers.  Down here April drought brings May's tropical downpours.  And it is a very tropical rain: every morning it is really nice out, and every afternoon the rain comes like clockwork.

But I guess that the rain really isn't that bad compared to what it could be: hail.  Thats right, the other day we had hail.  

As in half-inch hunks of ice falling from the sky.  

In the tropics.  

It is the first hail that anyone here remembers in over 20 years.  It was the most bizare storm that I have ever seen.  It was a really bad thunderstorm, but the sun will still out.  So while there is thunder and lighting and hail, the sun is shining so bright on the pavement that the rain and hail are steaming off.

Very cool.

Where am I?

Well, these rainy days have been so productive for me. . .

One of the things that I have been wanting to do for some time is show everyone where I live.  How to do that?  

Google Earth of course.

Untill recently, the pictures of our area were rather, well, bad.  But there are some updated images now, and you can actually see our house!  yay!

So here goes:

Our house:                                  19°48'57.15"N,  70°56'6.86"W

The El Ranchito Hall:              19°48'4.16"N,  70°56'51.35"W

Matt and Debora's Building :   19°53'31.75"N,  70°57'42.80"W

The Luperon Hall:                  19°53'15.86"N,  70°57'47.19"W

If you have Google Earth, there should be a box in the upper left of the program that says "Fly To."  Simply copy and past the numbers above into the little box, hit enter and watch the world spin, magically stopping above my house.  Cool huh.

If you don't yet have Google Earth, but know enough about computers to follow instructions, and wish to waste a bunch of time looking at my house from space (and finding yours too!) just search for "Google Earth" (on, I don't know, Google maybe?) and follow the instructions.

Happy hunting!

Rain Day

*Sigh*

I thought we were done with this rain stuff.

Maybe not.

So Eric and I are sitting here on our balcony waiting for the rain to stop.  All we are missing right now is some door to door, which is bad enough, but if this rain doesn't stop soon, we are going to miss all of our studies in the afternoon.  Even if it lets up right now, I doubt that I will be able to make it to one of my better studies at 4 (about 7 hours from now) because the rain has already deepened the not 1 but 2 rivers that we have to cross to get to it. 

But such is life. . .

Otherwise the month is going well.  Eric made cherry cobler with the cherries we picked the other day.  The fact that these Dominican cherries have 3 seeds each in them made things rather interesting.

Cherries!!

Today we had lunch with an older couple in the congragation that live on the other side of the river.  Cherries are comming into season, and this sister let us pick as much as we wanted off her trees.  Yummy

Mike has been gone for over a week now and we sure are busy without him.  Eric and I are taking care of all his studies, so between the two of us we are doing over 20-some studies a week.  Just in the last 4 days I put in over 24 hours in service.

Oh yeah, and it is starting to get hot down here - again.

I think I need a nap now. . .

Poll results

Well, 5 of you got it right. . . I'm going to have to put a harder one up next time.

Memorial Video - Part 1

Ok, so we had such a crazy time with our Memorial down here, that when we all got home, we sat around and told all of our stories so that we wouldn't forget anything.  So at midnight, we dig out the camera and the following is what comes out.

We sat there and talked for over 30 minutes, so I can't just put it all up at once, so here we have part 1.  Its not very fancy, but I hope you all enjoy it.

Some old video I found

We are working on a video where we talk about some of our memorial experiences, so that we can put it up here and all of you can see our lovely faces.  It is still a work in progress, but while working on it I came accross some old footage from the district convention down here last summer.  I never bothered to post it online, because, as you can see, there really isn't enough there to bother with.  It is only about 30 seconds long, because nobody wanted to say anything when the camera was around.  But here it is-  I thought that I owed you all something after letting the blog blank for so long.

It also works as a good test/teaser for the memorial video. :-)

We have internet at our house!!! Sorta. . .

Well, after a month-long battle with the phone company, we are signed up for 3G internet service and are good to go. . . mas o menos.  There have been a couple of snags already, mostly that the signal that we can get at our house is rather finicky.  We know that it is possible to get really good fast internet with what we have here, because we have done it at least twice here today messing around,  but unfortunetly it is a little less then reliable.  We have some more equipment comming in to hopefully fix that.  The other little problem is that my computer doesn't see to want to play nice with the internet, so once again I am stuck making this little blog post from a friends computer.

This is not like back stateside, where you can just call up any one of  a dozen different companies and have your service hooked up by next week.  We really only have one option, because of the area in which we live.  Getting to the point that we are at required 4 trips to the city, and collectivly almost 10 hours of waiting in line and dealing with the company.  But at least we are on our way.

So if you are waiting to see the pictures and video that I have, sorry again.  I just wanted to let you all know that we are working on it.

If Anyone Is Still Out There. . .

OK, so let me start off with a very overdue apology. It has been over two months since my last blog post, and for that I am sorry. It has been made clear to me that I have been missed, so I will do my best to get this blog back on track.

It’s not like I have been neglecting the blog on purpose for the last while, I just haven’t been able to get to it. I even tried several times to post some things, even the pictures that I promised two months ago, but the internet was never cooperating when I needed it. Over the last two months, we have had some serious power problems, which we still haven’t resolved completely. Also, the satellite internet only works with clear skies, which we haven’t seen very much recently. So whenever I did get a free moment, that still doesn’t mean that I can get online, or that the internet is working well enough to send anything. And those free moments have been few and far between. In addition to being up to my eyeballs is stuff for the congregation and trying to make my service time, we have been to the capital and to the branch to take care of our residency here in this country, we have had the campaign and the memorial, we had our CO visit, and I have had 4 talks out, 3 of them 3 weeks in a row. But all is well, at least I have been getting a lot done. . . I think anyways.

I do have some stories out of all of that, and I hope I can get them up here soon. Especially about the memorial. We have been trying to get some type of internet in our house, but that has proven to be very very difficult. Right now I am using a friends laptop and internet in the city, so I don’t even have any pictures right now. But anyways, if anyone is still checking my blog here, hopefully we can still resurrect this thing one way or another.

A Little Game the Brothers Down Here Play

So the last few days have gone pretty well.

Jason seems to be really get a real taste of what the Dominican is like. Today he got to cross the river for the first time, and then got to cross another river on a donkey (don't worry, I will get some pictures up soon), then coming home the raft guy had to give him a piggyback ride to shore.

We also had our special assembly day Sunday, which was a very nice program. When we got there, Brother Abad, the elder in our hall, tells me that from here on out I am going to be the talk coordinator. Ok, that sounds easy. Then he explains that it all has to be done with the other coordinators right here at the assembly. I don't know how they do things in the states, but I have an idea that this system is pure Dominican. Basically, it consits of all the coordinators from the halls in our circut standing around in a specified area playing a game something like "Pit". If you get the mental image of these brothers yelling "two speakers two speakers, who can trade me two speakers" you wont be far from the reality. It was like getting thrown into a shark tank. Going in, I get the advice to be very carefull because the other brothers will try to take advantage of me, taking all I have and not giving me any speakers in return. But seeing as how we only have two speakers in our congregation, I am at the same time getting advice to do the exact same thing to every brother that I can. All and all I came out pretty well: at least we should have speakers for awhile.

Then on Monday we went to the beach with a big group, but more on that some other time, because where I am connecting to the internet is on an outside balcony, and I am actually getting rather cold. The sun went down and it has dropped below 70. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr

I can see clearly now. . .

That's right, the rain is finally gone! At least for today. This is about the first time in a week that we have seen the sun. Actually, it cleared up the end of yesterday, but today is actually clear blue sky with not a cloud in sight.

For the 3 people that actually check this blog on a regular basis, I will admit that I cheated. The 2 posts before this one were actually just posted today, irregardless of what the date stamps say. The internet that we use here is based on satellite, so with all this heavy rain I havn't been able to post anything. So I had these posts that I wrote, but couldn't get up, so here they are.

Jason is down here visiting with us now, he arrived Monday. He seems to be having fun, even though it has been raining, the power has been bad, and there has been no water since he got here. He did try and kill us all last night though with some crazy chile. It was tasty, but he used some hot sauce Eric had brought down from the States. The recommended serving size is less then a drop, and he put a big 'ole spoonfull in. It litterally laid you out on the floor. So in addition to seeing clearly, we can all breath clearly as well.

Back on Track

So I have been home for a bit here now, and things finally seem to be settling into a groove.  I think that from here on out we should have things a little more organized and less hectic.  Of course, we have more company coming tomorrow, Eric is talking about heading back to the states after that, and we are making arrangements for an assembly next week.  But for now, we have a good groove.

It's been kinda rough weather these last few weeks since we all came back down from the states.  The rainy season has been in full swing, although it has not been as cold, which was nice.  January was basically a complete write-off by the time it was all said and done.  As if being back stateside didn't wreck my month enough, we then spent basically a whole week moving Joe to his new place in Santiago. (Joe would be our old roommate who went to MTS and then got himself assigned away)  It took so long because of the weather, and the fact the we had to go shopping for so many different things: we had our whole house put together combining everyone's stuff, so we had to replace all the stuff that Joe took with him, and Joe had to replace all of our stuff that got left behind.  That left about the last 5 days of the month to go out in field service.  Like I said, January was a write-off.

The good news is that when we do get out, the studies are amazing.  Down here, we find a lot of people that aren't very well educated.  That doesn't mean they are stupid, they just have never had a chance.  I have a study right now with a woman way out in the hills that is a good example.  The 'main' road to the house is so bad, when it rains it is basically impassable because of the mud.  The kids that live out that way don't even try to go to school.  Of course, when I say impassable, I just mean more fun.  But anyway, this study has had hardly any education.  Her reading and vocab are very poor, and she has little other knowledge, but she is one of the smartest studies I have ever had.  She grasps the points and answers in here own words with ease.  When I first started studying with her, I was afraid to cover to much information at a shot because of her limited reading, but now she is one of my fastest moving studies.  Another one of my studies is a police officer who, because of his crazy schedule (and mine), hasn't had his study in a while.  Today, however, he chased down Mike on his bike to tell him that I should come by the police station and we can study there.  Cool.

Super Sunday

We had sort of a crazy day this past Sunday.  To start the day off right, we were surprised by some nice rain.  The rain of course makes the river so much more fun.  The same river that takes us about 5 minutes to cross when it is dry out delayed us for more than an hour.  For starters, the current is so much stronger, therefore the raft guys can't reach the normal spots.  To make things worse, when it floods a little bit, you get about 6 inches of water that you have to drive or walk through before you can even get to the rafts.  So there we are in our suits, Mike and I on bikes, and about 10 other witnesses on foot.  The special pioneer brother has a pickup truck, which he takes as far as the river and then leaves it there.  He gets the bright idea to see if he could back the truck out into this shallow flooded section to at least ferry the people on foot out to where the rafts can pick them up.  Of course, that ended badly, with us having to wade out into the river to push him out.  Not that it made much of a difference in how wet we got: Mike and I still had to drive our bikes out into the river, then stand in it to lift the bikes up onto a raft.  When we finally did get to the other side, I find out that my good buddy Eric, who had been so kindly holding onto my shoes for me, had in fact dropped one into the river getting of the raft, and then chased it down stream.  Don't worry, he had gotten it back, just soaking wet.  But wait, the adventure continues, because now we have to cross the bikes through all this loose sand on the other bank that the changing river had left behind.  Not a real problem for me, but poor Mike has only had his bike for about 6 days at this point, and down he went.  Not a big deal (he was moving about a half a mile an hour), the only thing hurt was his pride (I guess posting it on the internet doesn't help. . .sorry Mikey).  So now, we are a half hour late for the meeting (not that they would start without us, we had all the brothers, including the speaker), it is still raining, and I get to spend the next 15 minutes shuttling people the rest of the way to the hall on the back of my moto.

The meeting itself went rather well, with the exception that it continued raining the entire time.  As we are sitting there listening to the talk, we are all thinking the same thing:  getting home is going to be interesting.  Sure enough, by the time meeting is over, the river has swelled even more.  The trip home is always harder for the raft guys anyways, simply because of the way the river flows.  On the Kingdom Hall side, there is a second little river that flows into the main river just above where we cross.  This means that starting from that side, the water is deeper and faster.  Because of the rain, this little river had flooded over a section of the bank, creating a sort of triangle shaped sandbar out in the river where the two meet.  The rafts could only make it to this patch of sand, which meant we were left up to our own devices to get ourselves across the first stretch of water.  This is the point where I figured out that my bike could still run even when the water is coming up over the wheels.  Even so, the actual depth of the water wasn't as big of an issue as the current which was pushing pretty good.  By the time I got to the other side the muffler was squirting out water.  With Mike's bike, he and one of the raft guys basically just picked it and carried it through the water.  The actual raft ride, once we got to them, was not very eventful, just that by the time we made it to the other side, we had been swept way downstream.  Not a big deal, we just have to drive back up through all the mud.  The final touch to the morning was watching Mike struggle and fight his way up through this mud, only to be passed by a Dominican guy driving his moto one-handed while talking on his cellphone.

Of course after all this we had to have a Super Bowl party.  That basically consisted of Matt and Debora, Chris and Cherrie and the three of us going out for pizza.  We found out who won the day after.

Home, Home in the Rain. . .

. . .where the mosquitoes and the cockroaches grange.

So I am back home in the good 'ole DR, and it has been a little wild down here. It has been raining. . .a lot. Since a river divides us from our hall and the other side of the territory, meetings have been a little rough. Rain also makes it kinda hard to preach on a motorcycle. The hours I have spent preaching this month are dismal, but Jehovah still takes care of you because when the sun shines we have been having some great studies. My first study back with one guy (the one who lives right on the beach) he tells me that while I was gone he read ahead in the Teach book, found out the Christmas is pagan, and decided not to celebrate it last month. :-) I don't really think that I can take any credit for that seeing as how he did it all by himself, but it just goes to show there are lots of people down here with hearts that are willing and waiting.

Well, even though I would like to post more (ahem, yeah, sorry again for the giant holes in this blog) the power is still out and I have about 7, no wait 6 minutes of battery life left.

Oh yeah, and one of our roommates moved out, the one that went to MTS - he got an assignment right away to a city congregation. So now we are just the three amigos in the house.

Oh yeah, and Mike bought a motorcycle today, but I am sure you will all hear lots about that later.

really gotta go now. . .