What do we do for fun in Nagua? We like climb mountains and sweat a lot. 


We're pretty wild here in Nagua. Because only a crazy people would choose to climb a mountain on a hot tropical-island-summer day and that's what we did. There is a nature reserve called Loma Guaconejos in El Factor, a campo about half an hour away from Nagua. It's small-ish mountain with hiking trails and many rivers where you can swim and wade around in.


We decided to go on Sunday (it was the 20th) and conveniently, it was ridiculously hot and humid that day. The first hour was hiking steeply uphill and my legs were getting dangerously close to snapping off. I am in amazingly bad shape for all the walking I do in service and I always seem forget that key fact until it's too late and I'm climbing a mountain.

It started to rain halfway up which raised the humidity level to 1000, and made everything muddy and slippery. We would take one step upwards and slide eight steps down. As frustrating as that sounds, it was a hilarious sight. We all were waiting to see who would be the first to fall (I, thankfully, did not get that honor) and by the time we scrambled up to the top, we were sweaty,
sticky and mud-streaked.

      

You can see how happy we were to get to the top! That's me in the Star Trek shirt, by the way.

Now going down the mountain was the fun part. Now that the uphill torture was over, we could enjoy the lush green woods, which were absolutely beautiful and so was the river we followed all the way down. It was really the perfect place to admire God's creation and I'm afraid I got a little shutter-happy again.





 

We finally got to where we were going to take a dip and have a picnic lunch. It was a lovely spot, with a small waterfall and a rock island, where we ate. The water was freezing cold, but after the long, sweaty trek, we all but jumped in. Doesn't it look nice?







:) 





Okay, It's been exactly 38 days since I last posted. It's very bad of me, I know, but things have been a little hectic around here, between getting sick, service, work and school, and I haven't been able to sit myself down to write.

So, I hope everyone's Memorial went well. We had an attendance of 335, which was a bit disappointing, can't lie, we were expecting at least 400, but our neighboring rural groups did really well. Most of these small groups usually have less than 20 publishers but they all had 70-150 visitors and I heard of one nearby had 500 in attendance! We did also have a nice ASL attendance of 12, which seems small but it's really 3 times the amount of publishers in the group. There were a couple of deaf that couldn't come because it was Semana Santa (Holy Week) and usually everyone in DR visits their family that live in the campo (countryside) during that week, so I'm supposing that's what affected our hearing-persons attendance as well.
And just as importantly,

*
I did! For the 19th year in a row! I mean, seriously, I know I'm not the only one that gets nervous when the wine gets around to them! I've never had this happen in reality but I always get visions of me spilling the whole thing and having walk around with a huge wine stain on my skirt. But this year both the passing of the bread and wine went smoothly with no mishaps (we did have a few close calls, the bread was slipping and sliding all over the plate).

Due to the hectic pace of the last few months, post ideas have been piling up. I want to write a spotlight on a sister in my congregation, a serious healthcare post (I got sick 2 times with Amoebiasis, yuck), a campo-preaching trip post (we've gone on three since my last post), a post about my new study and about two more posts that I can't remember what I wanted them to be about. So, stay tuned :) 
(Oh, and if anyone's been around for the dizzying array of blog themes I've changed to, don't worry, I'm sticking to this one.)
*haha, just realized that the meme is misspelled. Still funny, though ;)



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