Don't Flush the Yellow Toilet Paper

Hola, y Dio te bendiga!  We’ve been in the beautiful, hot, mountainous Dominican Republic since Friday, the 13^th.  Thankfully, the day’s events didn’t correspond with superstition, and we had a nice and smooth travel day.  From our hike from the church where we stayed during Launch to the bus station at 6am, to the train, to the shuttle, to the airport, it was an exhausting but great day.


 
Team Mosaic’s ministry site is at a church in Arroyo Cano, Dominican Republic, where roosters crow all day (and night) long, natives never get “peopled out”, used toilet paper lives in the trash, running water is available “sometimes”, and coffee plants abound.  We set up our sleeping bags on benches in the sanctuary so the rats can’t kill us, and we flush the toilet, take “showers”, and wash dishes via buckets of water.  Oh, and they’re celebrating the Festival of the Saints from the 14^th to the 22^nd, so there’s been loud music playing outside everyday until about 2am.  Thank God for earplugs.  So it’s different… but in a sort of simple, hilarious, “I can’t believe this is actually my life” kind of way.



Everyone here speaks Spanish (and very little English), so we’ve relied on our fabulous, Spanish-speaking team leader, Rachel, to translate.  We cluster around her during each church service or do our best to pick out the handful of palabras de español we happen to know.  The church body is small but unbelievably friendly, and few of them leave without a handshake or a hug.  Each time we visit someone’s house, they offer us a place to sit and something to eat or drink.  To them, everyone is family.



Our ministry “jobs” here are still sort of in the works, but we expect to be helping out at the Compassion International base next to our church in Arroyo Cano and the one in Desarrollo.  We’ll also be visiting and building relationships with families, doing Bible studies with the church pastor, and preaching (eek!) in another village.



That being said, we haven’t done much since we’ve been here.  Except for the one time we ate lunch and drank fresh, homegrown coffee at our ministry host’s house, or when we hung out with un hermano de iglesia, Jesús, and picked oranges from his orange field.  We also drove into Desarrollo to hang out with the Compassion International kids and ate ice cream with our host.  (Side story:  It’s really hard for people here to say my name.  Most people here go by more than one name, so we joked that my “other name” should be Ashley.  The Compassion kids called me that for the rest of the afternoon.)  And we hang out with todos los niños, who are constantly screaming, “americanos!  Mira, americanos!” as they run around the church or peek in our windows.  Overall, it’s been pretty neat.




 
Thanks for the continued prayers and encouragement!  Please keep praying as we learn to get into the swing of things and as a few of us have been feeling a little icky the last couple of days.  Muchas gracias!