Walk To Siparuta / JW Broadcasting

Let's seen if one of our more astute readers can recognize what's happening in this photograph...

Oh wait, I gave it away in the title, didn't I? Ah well.

For those of you who may be new to this blog, allow me to explain. Orealla is a small village with a small congregation right off one of the largest rivers in Guyana. Our assigned territory is the village of Orealla which gets worked frequently. However, we also have any homes along the river, and a neighboring village called Siparuta. Unfortunately, Siparuta gets worked very rarely due to it being a three hour hike away. Through the jungle. It gets worked only when we have enough intrepid hikers to make the journey. As difficult as a three hour walk is, it's even worse when the entire path looks like this:

And so on an so forth. Then you do this again on the way back home. Naturally this is not a desirable situation to endure, but what else are you gonna do? We have rented a boat a few times before to get us to the village, but that gets very expensive very quickly.

Fortunately this time around, we had worked out a new idea. There was a boat that was going to be going from Siparuta to Orealla later in the day, so we could make the hike and then ride the boat back when we were done. Free passage too!

So therefore we set out at 6:30 in the morning so we could reach the village early enough in the day to work as much as possible. When we arrived we learned the boat was going to be leaving a bit earlier than we'd thought, so we wouldn't have enough time to cover the whole village (of 400+ plus people), but we were still able to work most of the downhill segment of Siparuta (the village is split evenly between an uphill region and a downhill region).

We were also able to talk to some interesting people and have a few good experiences. Kojo spent nearly half the time there sharing the Young People ask books with two young men in the village, showing them what the books covered, Bible principles they used, etc. We were also able to introduce the Caleb & Sophia videos to some new audiences....

 Then finally, hitching a (free!) ride home with Neil....

Another recent experience: Orealla is still very much an Amerindian village, to the point where electricity is still fairly new. There's only one radio. Cell phones were introduced only this year. Due to this, internet is out of reach for almost the entirety of the residents. While this lack of distractions can be nice at times, this does tend to leave people without the ability to easily access jw.org and the new JW Broadcasting videos. What to do about this? Simple!

Before coming back to Guyana I was able to get the October and November programs saved to my computer, so Saturday we invited the congregation to a very informal gathering where we set up a computer monitor on the stage (seen above) and showed the programs. Due to the weather, a few couldn't make it so we've been inviting them over to our house at a time they can make it, or taking a laptop to their own house and showing them then.

Of course December is approaching, and with that a new Broadcast video, so we're going to send someone out to the coast where there's better internet and have them try to get the video so we can continue this.

So that's all for now. Stay tuned for the gripping saga of my battle with a vicious man-eating Orangutan.
(Not really. I just need an exciting conclusion for this entry).

Until next time!