Gringo Heaven

It's been a few months since I've been able to visit the English group in Cuenca but I made a special effort to visit today for the purpose of hearing the Special talk in the language of my heart.  As always, the English meeting was a very special experience and not just because I can understand everything that's going on.  It's so nice to see how the English group is growing and to see the progress of the Ecuadorian friends making the effort to learn a foreign language, plus you just never know who might show up.  There's always a handful of visitors at their meetings...more recently is a family from the states coming regularly to the meetings with a mom and 3 young boys all dressed nice and commenting.  I got to meet a sweet older man in his 90s from Colorado who's all alone here in EC and is attending the meetings because he enjoys the companionship of the friends and I even got to sit by a nice young girl from Iowa who's been studying (secularly) for the past 2 1/2 months here, she'll be returning in 2 weeks back to the states and has only ever stepped into a Kingdom Hall here in EC.  After the meeting I asked her if she received an invitation to come to the Kingdom Hall, or how did she hear of it?  She replied, "what's a Kingdom Hall?"  And only now as I am typing out this blog am I realizing that the building she was in does not exactly say Kingdom Hall on the outside of it but in fact says Salon del Reino...duh, Damaris.  At any rate, we can see the English group is hard at work and it's definitely paying off!

Usually thrown into the mix of Ecuadorians learning English, visitors and need-greaters desperately longing for a meeting in their mother-tongue are the newbie-need-greaters (I don't think you'll find that term printed in the WT anytime soon).  They're looking happy, slightly shell shocked, and still can't gracefully get their way around the traditional Ecuadorian greeting which is a cheek-to-cheek kiss between the sisters and a handshake between everyone else.  And even though we're in Gringo Heaven we all still do the greeting because it's kind of like breathing or blinking at this point - you have no choice, you must do it.  Anyway, I was not disappointed today.  I got to meet one of Cuenca's newest imports.  A nice family from Australia with a mom, a dad, son and daughter.  They've been here about a month. 

A slightly ironic bit of info...it took me forever to get my hand up at the English WT and once I did and got that comment over with, I took a look at my hand it was shaking like a leaf!  You'd think it'd be a relief to comment in my own language but as I was holding the mic and searching for the words and just simply trying to form logical sentences well...let me just say that I went to a Spanish WT and a Chinese one last night, gave one Spanish comment and countless Chinese ones and did not so much as twitch.  I don't know if this is a good, sad or scary thing.  I guess it just is what it is. 

Yesterday was a great day too.  Part of the Chinese group took a little road trip to a near-by city called Cañar which is about a 2 hour bus trip north of us.  There are 3 Chinese locations in the city and every last one of them had a nice person to talk to.  We even conducted a study with one girl there and plan on going back in a couple of weeks.  I hope to see her again as soon as possible - possibly in just a couple of weeks.