Beautiful Feet: January 4, 2016

What a blast! We are in the season of celebration. At first we thought this was an extension of the New Year celebration, but we learned it is a celebration of the founding of Juayua. We were told that it would be noisy for two weeks living downtown. Our first nights were not too bad because speakers were set up in various locations in the city and they were not really close to us. Our luck ran out. The first thing we noticed when we walked out our door in the morning was workers setting up speakers in front of our house. We live on a corner now, and it appeared that all the noise would be in front of our house. We had our first team meeting of the new year. As everyone arrived we got condolences. They said it was directed for children, so the speakers would go all day, while most noise had been in the night. It was so loud, we moved from the living room to a sitting area beside the kitchen for the meeting. It was still a struggle to hear. The meeting was an evaluation for Sunday’s grand opening at Salcoatitan and some planning for January. Since our grand opening is Sunday, there was the possibility of that serving as the January events. However, it was decided for Salcoatitan to have an event for young people and invite our small group of young people from Juayua. I think this event will be a little more laid back. We also planned the program for our opening in Juayua for Sunday. While we have a location, we don’t have a key yet and there is some things the landlady still needs to do….small things like water, electricity and a leak in the roof. We have faith that it will all come together. The meeting lasted until about 12:30. Afterwards, Dwaine and I decided to go to Sonsonate. Although it is not too far, Sonsonate always has a ton of traffic and is really hot. First, we were looking for a very small table to serve for eating in the kitchen and a communion table for the building. On the way to Sonsonate there are a lot of road side markets that sell furniture. It is a fairly famous run of carpentry. We stopped at almost every one, possibly 15 spots. We think we will go back to the first location for the communion table on the way to the preacher’s meeting and we found two small tables that can also be used as a desk and two chairs for dining. We haggled a while on those, but think we got a good deal. That should have us set up in our new location. In Sonsonate we went to Freund, a home depot type store, for just a few odds and ends and then on to Dollar City to look for a birthday gift for Arnoldo. He will be 14 on Thursday. We were running out of time, but we made it back by 5:30 to have a study with Raul and Ana. They have two children Cessi and Josue. Josue is 5 and he has low resistance and seems to be sick a lot. They said that the doctor told them that he had an infection in his throat that could spread to his heart. Then it could be life threatening. The doctor had done a culture and Josue had begun a 7 day regime of injections of antibiotics. I wondered if it was strep. We had lots of prayer for this. Afterwards we made one more trip to the old house to skype. It was really a shame that we didn’t still have a bed there, for when we returned I counted 19 huge speakers in front of our house for the nighttime activities! It was so loud that the house was literally shaking! That went on until about 12:30. What a night! Since the events of the celebration seem to move every night, we are hopeful that our turn is finished. Although, many have said that the last two days, the 14^th and 15^th will be really loud. I think we both went to bed with headaches!