October 26, 2015

Making plans and making headway.  Mondays we meet with Ricardo, Joli, Carlos and Cesar to discuss the works in Salcoatitan and Juayua.  Last week we had met at our house for the first time because of the rain and they said they would just come here again today.  We have had our Sunday service in the late afternoon since the work here began because of the times of the services in Ataco and Schututian and when the work in Salcoatitan was first discussed, the idea was that they would meet in the mornings on Sunday and we would go there and continue our services here in the afternoons.  However, morning is the usual time for services here in El Salvador as in the States and I had mentioned that we would probably at some point want to start meeting in the mornings in Juayua.  We had thought that would probably be sometime later, but we now have some members who are traveling here from out of town and do not like to return home at night (sound familiar) and also some of the people we are studying with have said a morning service would be better for them. So we spent a while during the meeting discussing how we could support each other’s services and still have morning services in both places.  The best idea was that one service be at 8 or 8:30 and the other at 10 or 10:30.  We have not decided yet which one will be first but does not matter much to Charlotte and me because we will always be attending in both places.  At 11 we headed out to meet with the director of the school in Salcoatitan.  He was very nice and seemed very receptive to our offering some summer courses.  As we have said summer here is the dry season from Nov. to April or May and beginning in about 2 weeks schools will be out for about 2 months until early January.  The preliminary plan is to offer two classes of English and two classes of morals every Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9 to 11.  There would be two age groups 7-11 and 12-15.  Charlotte and I would teach one group English for 45 minutes and Carlos and Cesar would teach the other group on morals.  Then there would be a 15 minute break and we would swap groups.  There would be 8 classes total in a 4 week period.  After lunch we went with Sister Regina to visit the school here in Juayua because she knows the director.  He was not in but we met with the assistant director who was very nice and receptive to our plans.  Tomorrow Carlos is going to take a detailed plan for each class and resumes for all teachers to the directors at each school and try to set up definite times.  We hope to also do the Juayua school on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.  This would pretty much consume these two days each week but only for 4 weeks and would hopefully get us some good contact with the communities.  We wrapped up our Monday with our usual study with Raul and Ana.  When we dropped Arnoldo off after the study we visited for a few minutes with Regina because she had just gotten back from an appointment with her Dr.  She has a tentative date for her surgery of about the middle of November when Arnoldo will be out of school for the summer vacation here.  She has to have several physical exams before the surgery and said she would go to get a price on those on Tuesday.