Our first day out in service !

Today was a beautiful day but it was also incredibly hot outside! We worked with our new congregation , Santiago English, and did canvassing work. Our car group was Daphne and Adrian, a mother and son from Virginia Beach , and then 2 couples from Seattle, Wa. The couples have just arrived here in Santiago a few days before we did so it was nice to get to know them better. One couple will be staying here for 3 months so we look forward to the interchange of encouragement to come. Now today was a big day because we got broken in , pretty roughly too. We climbed some of the biggest hills I have ever climbed. And doing this in service clothes was just exhausting. But we found people who did speak English (a few who even spoke French ) and were able to see the rewards for our efforts. Break time here is a little different too. We stop at the little colmado ( these are little stores with water , basic food and of course cerveza ) and we continue to talk to people so our work always continues. Its also nice because we get a little bit of shade before we get back out to work. Today was a big day for Mom. She has her very first ride in a concho. I'll have to describe what this is for you friends so you can understand why it's so necessary we take these cars. Here in DR there are many forms of transportation. I won't go into them all right now but two main ones are taxis and conchos. Taxis cost more , but you get the convenience of air conditioning and having a car to yourself. The price for a ride to the local kingdom hall would be 140 pesos, which back home equals about $ 3.50. For us Americans this is so cheap tho! The conchos provide a similar service but there are differences. Conchos ride a route and each car is marked with the letter as to which route it will follow, kinda like a subway or train. You pay 20 pesos (less then a dollar) to ride this route around town. But unfornately there's no map or anything showing us which car goes where. It's fine tho because the friends are willing to point us to the right car and watch us ride off into the sunset. Here's the catch tho, these men need to make money. So they shove as many people as they can into these small sedans. Typically there are two people in the passenger seat and four people in the back seats. So you can understand why some people may feel uncomfortable. So to get home from the territory we took the M car to the university and thankfully the maximum amount of people in the car capped out at 6 of us. Then we walked through the university to get to the our path back home. We met one student who is our brother in the Creole congregation as we strolled through. So we had quite a walk ahead of ourselves which should have totaled about 30 minutes or so. But a brother from the creole congregation saw us and took pity. He gave us a ride back home which was great because dehydration was beginning to set in. That's one thing we are learning, there's never enough water! We need to force ourselves to drink more! So now that lunch and siesta have passed its time for some studying and meditation. We hope you friends are doing well and please , if you want to hear of anything in particular, email me at baileyap@ymail.com and I will try to post about it immeadiately! Below are some pictures of our day in service. The group met together to discuss where to work next, a man immediately began reading what he took and just a smaller hill of the day.

Nos Vemos,
Aaron