Service and Apartment search...

Here are some pics of our first few days of service n apartment searching!

Service here is pretty different in many ways to California .. But I'll give ya a few facts about Chetumal:

•Population is about 150,000
Can drive from one end of city to the other in about 15 minutes.
•24 Spanish congregations (in 4 Kingdom Halls!)
•1 sign language
•2 Mayan speaking
•1 English congregation in all of chetumal( so territory covers 400 kilometers radius)
-Territories in English get worked about every to 2 years
•5 pioneers in this English hall , so territory gets seldom worked even with their hard efforts, it's just soo much to cover!
•English has about 39 publishers with a reg meeting attendance of 41-42 ..

English here find alot of people from Belize(their national language is English) since its Chetumal is right on Mexico border with Belize.

For service we were told to really look for facial expressions of how they react and beware that if they say "I only speak a little bit of English" in this area most likely means they speak alot.. And so far very true.. We are learning a lot from the brothers here in Chetumal:) service it has been so fun and we are doing alot of census looking for English speakers. It can be tough though, because there are so many Spanish halls their territories get worked almost every week, that the people feel overwhelmed.

As for apartment hunting ... That has been interesting . We find places by word of mouth or just signs in front of apartment buildings. Unfortunately since we're only here for a short period of time we needed something with a few furnishings (fridge, stove, bed), so that made it a bit harder to find a place, and since we're American everyone wanted to rent us a house for three times our budget lol. But after a lot of prayer and the help of the brothers here, we've found a nice little place. its close to most service arrangements and a short taxi ride away from the hall (plus there's a soccer field and a basketball court with lights down the block for Raff haha).

At our first theocratic school meeting this week we both had last minute parts! Rafa, did reading and helped with a demonstration! Raff did good job with his first ever English bible reading! Our meetings here are service meeting on Saturday at 730pm and talk/ WT study Sunday at 10am! Kinda crazy schedule.. this week the hall is having their first Circuit as an official English congregation(very exciting week for them)! So the hall is hoping to move service meeting to switch from Saturday night to Tuesday night:-) it would be a nice change so that the brothers could could use saturday for get togethers and have some time between meetings to prepare :) we shall see what thebrothers decide!

Overall things seem to be coming together thanks to Jah and the help of our brothers and sisters here.

~Rafa & Lizette

Pics will probably upload in a weird order but hope u enjoy :)

Apartment pics in post coming up soon!:)