Auxiliary pioneering here is a bit more like hard work than it was in Australia, but it’s been worth it.
In Australia, you get in your car and drive to the field service group, or to your return visits or back home at the end of the day, and if you are a bit tired you hope to do country territory (by car) rather than town territory (by foot); but here a lot more physical effort goes into witnessing.
You also have to make sure you allow extra time to get where you want to be, especially if you have an appointment or have to meet someone. As an example, last week we were working on the other side of town from where we live. At 11.30, we all left the territory and I walked 20 minutes to the bus stop to catch the bus over to our side of town, on the bus for approximately 40 minutes then a walk of about 15-20 minutes at the other end. I got home an hour and a quarter after I left the territory! After all this walking, we now have some pretty good muscles we didn’t know we had!
(Disclaimer: the following photos really have nothing to do with the topic under consideration – they are mainly there to break up the narrative and give some views of Cuenca)
Parts of Cuenca are quite old, some parts are quite modern, and some parts are just plain ordinary!
In order to be able to get an early start to the witnessing day, I decided to start witnessing at the bus stop; in the mornings it’s normally my “quiet time” and I’m half-asleep on the bus until I get to the witnessing group, so this month I had to get my act together! So, after lots of prayer and psyching myself up to be brave and approach total strangers (not something I’ve ever found easy – but at least Ecuadorians are less scary than expats), I’ve used a simple presentation in Spanish to offer tracts or older magazines to people waiting at the bus stop.
While doing so, you need to keep one eye out for people who look approachable and the other eye on the buses, as when the bus arrives, everyone rushes to get on (including us, if it’s our bus).
Generally people are happy to take a tract or magazine, and a few days ago one lady accepted a tract and a man next to her asked if he could have one, too.
Siesta time
When we’re on the bus, if I’ve been sitting next to someone other than Brendan, I often offer tracts then, too. Most people will take a tract – Ecuadorians tend to be friendly, helpful people, and like to be polite. Whether they read the tract or not, who knows. But if they don’t, someone else probably will.
As an example, there is an older Ecuadorian brother (I think he is around 80) whose house is on the street we walk down to catch the bus. Due to arthritis, he doesn’t get about very well, so more often than not when we go past his house, he is sitting out the front on his chair with tracts and brochures on his lap, and he offers them to people going past. Sometimes we find a tract or a brochure which someone has dropped on the ground (people here are not so concerned about littering as in Australia!) – maybe they were being polite when they took it, and then decided they didn’t want it. But we’ve found that other people will pick it up and look at it.
One day I noticed a woman walking along the footpath who saw a brochure that someone had put into one of the rubbish/trash/garbage racks on the front of the fences/walls, got it out and started to look at it. We’ve all heard of experiences where someone has learned the truth by picking up a discarded tract or magazine, so here, if we see literature discarded, we tend to leave it, as someone is bound to pick it up and read it.
One of the old buildings in town – many of them are restored and are quite pretty
On the first day of the month (after I had been praying for courage and holy spirit and as a result had stepped outside my “comfort zone” and approached some people to offer tracts), Brendan and I were getting on the bus to go to field service and an Ecuadorian-looking young lady smiled at us as we went past, and then we sat behind her. She turned around and said in English in a USA accent “you guys are Jehovah’s Witnesses, right?” and then proceeded to ask us if we could ask a certain sister to come back and see her as they had been having Bible discussions but had lost contact. She had lived in the States most of her life (she looked to be mid to late 20’s) and had come back to Ecuador in the last few months and had lots of questions.
That was a great start to the day (and the month), and I really felt that was Jehovah’s blessing.
A bit more of old Cuenca
There’s a young sister visiting from the USA for 3 months, and has been involved with the Chinese “group” here – it’s so small it’s not really even a group – apparently they call themselves the “unofficial Chinese bunch”, or something to that effect. There is only one brother involved, but a few sisters.
Up in the jungle in the north of Ecuador hydro-electric schemes are being built, using all Chinese labour, and there are work camps there each with a few hundred men living there. It’s difficult for the “Chinese bunch” to go there, as there is only one brother in the group, the rest are sisters – more brothers are needed. She says its really fascinating witnessing to the Chinese there as they have no concept of God or the Bible or Jesus, etc. and you have to tell them everything.
At the flower market
Yesterday, at our Kingdom Hall, I spotted a young couple from the States who came to Cuenca a few months ago with the intention of being in the English congregation. When they found out that the sign language congregation also met there, they changed over to attending the sign language congregation, as they knew signing from the States. They could only be in Ecuador for a few months, but enjoyed it so much that they hoped to be able to rearrange their circumstances to be able to come back. Well, it appears that they got things sorted out, as they are now back long term. That was really encouraging for us, and exciting for them to be able to serve in the field they enjoy.
The cool thing about sign language is that the sign for “hello/how are you?” is the same in Spanish sign language and Auslan (Australian sign language), so we can at least sign Hi to the deaf brothers and sisters when we see them.
This is Parque Calderon – the main park in town. Good for informal witnessing as lots of people go there. It’s also a good place to meet expats
This month for the campaign to distribute the Memorial invitation to English-speakers, we used the maps we have been trying to build up. We do a lot of search work in order to find English speakers, and when we locate them at their homes, we note down the “address” so that they can become part of a map with just English speakers on it.
One of the problems we have here is that getting accurate addresses can at times be extremely difficult. As an example, where we live there is no street name marked, and none of the houses in our little street have a number. The house that is the most identifiable in our street would go like this: “house at the end with the chickens”. Although we try not to put such identifiers in case one day the chickens all end up in the pot!
There are many vendors who peddle their wares while on the move (scissors and cottons, in this instance) and quite a few “fruit wheelbarrows” in the centre of Cuenca – these are strawberries
So this month we did lots of walking as the English speakers are scattered over quite a large area, but often we couldn’t find the addresses or the numbers or “the yellow house with wooden gate” just could not be found.
But some who’ve been here longer than us say that the maps are a lot better than they used to be when the English congregation first began, and the brothers have various ideas on how to improve the maps further, so it’s an ongoing process and we do the best we can.
A couple of lovely old buildings in Cuenca
This morning when we were searching for English speakers, one Ecuadorian householder said that there were some English-speakers in the place with “the black gate just after the avocado tree”, so we called there, and our young sister from the “unofficial Chinese bunch” opened the gate! A few pioneers have little apartments there. It’s hard to keep track of who lives where, as we are scattered all over the city.
A view over part of Cuenca
So, that gives a little bit of an idea of auxiliary pioneering in the Cuenca English congregation in March.
