District Convention

Our convention for the English circuit is in San Salvador, El Salvador. We left at around 5 a.m. Thursday (Sept 6th), we didn't arrive in San Salvador until midnight! It was quite an adventure!

Let's see what happened first! When we were getting ready to  leave the house to meet the rest of the friends at the hall....Shannon fell into some sort of drain, but we don't think anything's broken. We had some problems leaving Nicaragua, one of the brother's passport was missing a special stamp. We sat there for about 4 hours. Then we headed into Honduras, where we were stopped many times within the country.

Finally we arrived at the border of El Salvador! We had to wait here for about 2 hours with the same previous problem. 

We met some of the local San Salvador brothers at a museum near the convention site, they were expecting us at 4 p.m. but they waited for us to arrive at midnight! They were so welcoming and hospitable! They drove us to wherever we were staying.

San Salvador is really different than Leon it is pretty big and is more comparable to U.S. cities. Here are a few pics:

The first day of the convention was awesome! Some of the brothers in our hall had parts. Scarlett was afraid to informally witness to her neighbor (Hazel).

 Lydia helped Scarlett to see how to prepare for informally witnessing.

Theo handled the part in the afternoon symposium on informal witnessing. All three of our elders had parts this convention, and Theo had two.

We met some really nice friends at the convention. It included all the English congregations and groups in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. We met the Kings, Stephen and Lona who are from Ontario and have been serving on the Honduras island of Roaton for the past year. They decided to move there when they heard of a horrible plane accident which killed three of the elders in that congregation.

We also met some very hospital local friends, the Marins, who go to the local English congregation Antiguo Cochatlan. They saw us walking to catch a taxi back to the hotel and picked us up and took us for some authentic Salvadorian food. Also on Saturday they took us to the mall and to get Mexican, we definitely met some new family. Milton (14), Ornada, and Erick.

This is Desmond eating empenadas, made out of a plaintain dough and full of a cream cheese or beans!

This is me eating a papoosas, it's a flat tortilla filled with beans and pork. Yummy!

Here's the couple we are staying with for the full 6 months, Miguel and Michelle Martinez.
They may look familiar!!! Michelle is from Ruckersville congregation in VA.

So we had an eventful trip to the convention! It was so encouraging and very much like an international convention with locals from central america, as well as Americans, Brits, and Australians!
It took about 12 hours to get home on Monday. We were all very very happy to be home!!! We're excited to get back into the field!