October 9, 2015

Read on my friends and you will know of our late night run to Ataco.  Today was the last day to get ready for the big teacher training seminar that Charlotte, Linda and Rachel are giving in Ataco.  They are expecting about 60 to 70 ladies from 10 area congregations.   After working all day Thursday to get as much done as possible Arnoldo became (no surprisingly) our first overnight guest in our new home in Juayua.  We had stayed up late working on getting all of the example illustrations ready that Charlotte wanted to use for her part in the seminar.  We were all back up at 6 am this morning.  We worked all day,  Arnoldo and I on still more crafts and Charlotte mostly on cooking a huge amount of soup (I did chop a huge head of cabbage, clean and chop carrots and potatoes for that)  and about 160 cupcakes.  One batch of cupcakes has blue icing with a white middle strip and a pop stick with a picture of Moses holding up his rod pasted to it and stuck in the cupcake 1 to show the parting of the Red Sea.  The other batch had chocolate icing with a gummy worm and crumbled Oreo cookies on the top to show the good soil.  Charlotte had a gotten a large through the Bible coloring book when we were in the States and she wanted to give one copy to each congregation that attended as a resource.  We had them copied and had left them to be bound on Thursday afternoon and were told they would be ready to pick up about 3:30 pm.  When I went to get them I was told they had actually been finished on Thursday evening.  We were first told that the community center in Ataco where the seminar is being held would be available for set up at 3 this afternoon.  We called after we got the books to make sure before we headed out and Carlos said the room would not be available until 9 pm !!!!!!!  Originally, Arnoldo was going to go with us but we did not want to take him out that late so we continued working on stuff until about 6:30 (cutting out and gluing and glittering a golden calf and who knows what else)  then we had some of the wonderful soup for dinner.  We told Arnoldo it was great for losing weight which is the last thing he needs to do.  While we were eating his dad, Pedro came by.  He said he was there to walk Arnoldo home so that we would not have to take him.  We fed him a bowl of the soup and then I drove both of them home.  When I got back I helped assemble the cupcakes until 8:45 and we headed out to Ataco.  We just had too much demonstration materials and too much food to fit it all in the car in one trip plus Charlotte said if she had to set everything up on Sat. morning she would just not be able to be as ready as she wanted and she also was to have a car full of people on Saturday morning.  The rain had poured down between 7:30 and 8:30 but had pretty much stopped by the time we left.  There was little traffic and we had a good trip though we were somewhat apprehensive about being out so late at night because we have been told not to do that.  We got her table set up and all done that we could and got back about 10:30 our latest night out here so far.  When we got home I worked until midnight putting fruit on skewers for a fruit kabob (about 100) and Charlotte worked on getting her presentation ready.  After the kabobs I told her I had to go to bed and amazingly she said she was too.  What a day but we survived it and p.s. Wicket is about back to normal-eating and drinking well.