Plans continue to come together for my trip to Laguna de Perlas. As it turns out the Airplane from Managua to Bluefields only leaves twice a day, once in the morning and once in the early afternoon. Since my flight from Cancun arrives in the evening, I would have to spend the night in the airport. However, the bus to El rama leaves later in the evening and travels through then night. So i get to choose between a night in the airport and a night on the bus. Taking the bus it may be possible to make it to Laguna de Perlas in one day. But this is all still months away.
Meanwhile, I am keeping busy here in Mérida. The English pioneer school is under way in Playa del Carmen, and as a result most of the pioneers in the congregation are gone. And since this congregation has so many pioneers weve taken a big hit in attendance, so the few who are left are very busy picking up the slack. I have 3 talks to do this month, as well as many smaller jobs at the meetings.
Those in the school right now are missing out on something else, we have started our metropolitan witnessing program. Now, this is not the special metorpolitan witnessing, where the branch assigns special and regular pioneers to high traffic areas. Rather this is just within our congregations territory. Since we are the Ingles centro congregation, our territory includes the main square of the city which is often crawling with english speaking tourists.
We set up a table with literature in english, primarily bible teach books as well as magazines in other foreign languages that are common here, such as french, german, italian, chinese, japanese, and russian. The first day was a great success, we were set up from 8 am until 12 noon. At least two people came and sat on the bench next to our table and had a bible study out of the teach book right then and there. We noticed that people rarely would simply walk by and take a set of magazines, they usually stopped to talk to us for a while. Evidently that is part of the culture here in the Yucatan.
Passersby also commented that they thought the table was a good idea. Many local people were interested as well, but we did not have any literature in Spanish. Next week we hope to work alongside the Spanish congregation whose territory the central park is in, that way we will have plenty of information for the locals. Our pictures will probably show up elsewhere as well, because many local brothers and sisters stopped to take pictures of us and our table. Some from Spanish, and even some sisters from a Mayan congregation paid a visit. Ironically the table seemed to draw just as much attention from fellow witnesses as from the public, as this had never been done in Mérida before to my knowledge.
