OUR HOUSE

This is our house. Gary is taking this picture from the middle of the road. He is waiting for the garbage truck (there really is no garbage collection here at all. Garage is handled by collecting it for a few days, then, finding al local open space and burning it. The pick up in our little collection of town houses is done by some local guy that just takes It home and burns it. Gary has to wait in the street for him to show up and pay him cash. We were told the pick up would be about $5 per month. Gary didn't know it was cash. So, after ten minutes of totally not understanding each other, he finally just picked up the trash and took off without pay. So this week, Gary was ready with cash in hand, and, the garbage man only took about $2 for the month! So Gary figured that without knowing it, he negotiated a better price.
The other picture is our front gate, There is a man there day and night. We pay about $13 per month for the service. Our guard does not have a machine gun like other guards. I guess we have a lower priced guard.
That bump thing in the road is a " speed limit sign" This one is not as high as some others. But, they work. Drivers come up to the bump really fast. Slam on their brakes, go over really slow, and the hit the gas pedal again.
We were so frustrated with learning the language because we study and study with what seems little result. We finally reached a point that we were ready to give up. With lots a prayers a a few tears, we decided that our situation was unique in that the new young missionaries are usually paired with a Latino and, along with daily meeting with investigators, they are completely immersed in the language. We are not completely immersed. In the office where we do most of our work, the office missionaries will speak English to us. And, you would get a kick out of us try to speak Spanish to each other at home! With bad pronunciation and constantly looking up words, it take 15 minutes for us to say good night! So, we had to solve this problem. Our solution was to pay some Spanish speaking person to come to our house for several days a week and talk with us. Well, at church on Sunday, a lady approached Kathy, and, has invited us to dinner at her house on Tuesday and will be glad to spend time with us a few days a week. Then, the lady that cleans our house invited us to dinner Sunday night with two of our office missionaries. (See picture) When we got there, our office missionaries were translating for us until we asked for no English. We spoke more Spanish there then we ever had. And, our cleaning lady said she would be glad to come to our house to speak with us several days a week. Along with our office missionaries deciding to not talk English to us in the office, we have been blessed with a solution to our problems with in a few days of our time of complete despair.