9/3/2012 Another couple of days without power or internet

  At this rate I will never catch up!  Just when we thought power outages in our apartment were fairly rare, the power has been off for 6 hours each of the past four days.  Plus the internet service comes and goes - mostly goes...
   We have had trouble getting in touch with the people who are in charge of this apartment because several things needed to be fixed and our rent for the next six months was due.  Scott finally got ahold of Joel, who is a guy we met sometime back that Scott gave a church video to. He is in charge of the maintenance of four apartments here and ours is one of them.  He came to talk to Scott  - at the time he said he would.  Imagine that!  Then we invited him to bring his family and have dinner with us and watch the video.  He said they would be back in two hours and they were!  The interesting thing is Joel was so full of light when we first met him, but when he came earlier we were both surprised at how his countenance had changed - and not for the better.  Don't know what has been going on in his life but he didn't have much to do with his wife.  They brought a 6 year old boy who he obviously loved but left their six month old baby home.  And to think I had spent time trying to get Scott to teach me how to say "Can I hold your baby?"  She had pictures of the baby. I wonder if the baby had something to do with the problem since the baby was white skinned with reddish brown hair and blue eyes.  It was such a shock I came so close to blurting out "Was she adopted?" but didn't.  They are both dark but he is really dark brown.  Here is a picture of their family:

They did like the poppy seed chicken but wondered where the wine was.  When Scott told them that we didn't drink wine he was shocked.  They are among the wealthier Dominicans.  The did want to see the video then wanted to take it home.  There is something not quite happy in their marriage so I hope they can get it straightened out.  Maybe they aren't even married, who knows.
   We probably spend as much time here doing missionary work as we do music. We are blessed to have the time to meet people here and be a part of their lives.  As Joel's family was leaving our neighbor, Patricia, was coming home so Scott invited her in for dessert.  She had some questions about the Book of Mormon he had given her to read.  And miracle of miracles my skpye worked for a few hours and we got to talk to Megan and Alysha.  Scott thought it was just a tender mercy for me because I hate to be out of touch with the kids and was especially worried about Stan and Sue.
   On Saturday we traveled out to do lessons at Hainamosa.  They have about 50% of the signs back up. This is a huge sign and my favorite!

So many interesting pictures.  Everywhere we go they have these Goma shops  -

 Yup  - they are tire shops.  And from the looks of the tires they must be used tires or/and stolen tires.
The "moto" is a very useful and cheap method of transportation.  They use them as taxis:

These are not big motorcycles but they carry alot of weight here.  Usually they are moving through stopped traffic so fast you can't get a picture!  Scott says this is just half a load of Dominicans.
   When we got to the church they were having their stake conference meetings which no one had told us about so no one showed up to the lesson.  But on the way home we had fun passing some interesting things:

This is a furniture delivery vehicle!  The inside was jammed full of the rest of the set.

This is a normal small truck bed filled with as many people as they can cram in or hang out of. These people have total disregard for personal space or safety.

   We passed another horse/cart street vendor on his way home for the day.  This horse looks to be in pretty good shape!  They put plastic plates on each side of the horses head so he won't be frightened by the traffic.  Most of them are just too weak to care.