English Assembly!!!

Our Open Air Assembly Hall

I will admit, there are some serious low points to living in the good ol'Caribbean:

I could list many things, but having to stop a study to fight off a horde of advancing baby tarantulas was a real low point - there were honestly about 200 of them...

Added to this are:

• Noise
• Ubiquitous trash*
• Quite unspeakably bad chocolate (an insult considering how many cocoa beans are produced here)
• Poor Drivers
• Noise
• Anything related to immigration#
• Migraine inducing bad customer service (everywhere)
• Smells: ranging from retch inducing to oddly unidentifiable
• Noise

But of course, It's easy to concentrate on the bad. There are some amazing benefits to living here, and for that very reason more people arrive every year to get in on the action.

To what do I refer? Well, there's the...

• Fantastic field service
• Unbelievable fried chicken (hang your head in shame colonel)
• Great weather
• The sheer joy of riding motorbikes
• Some of the nicest people you will ever meet
• Esponjitos (there's no greater pleasure for just 5 pesos)

And of course...

•  The English Assembly

The English Assembly is truly awesome. It used to be a smaller affair, but these days the attendance brushes the underside of 1000 due to the increased ranks of the English circuit.

Formerly the English Assembly was the solely for foreigners serving in this country (in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Sign Language and other language congregations). It was organised by the branch just to give those visiting pioneers a boost in their own language. That meant there was no baptism talk - this was replaced by a "need-greater" talk - basically an awesome spiritual pep talk. Almost 100% of the audience were pioneers or missionaries.

Of course, things have changed a little now, a few years ago an English circuit was formed and has steadily grown since then. To be honest though, things are still almost the same as before. I'd say at least 75% are still in full time service, and although there's no Need-Greater Talk, it's awesome to see people getting baptised every assembly.

The branch still does their absolute best to keep everyone encouraged. The sent a special letter to say "thanks to all the self-supporting missionaries". Nice.

They also announced some really interesting statistics for the work going on here:

• 29 new congregations were formed in the last service year
• This service year 24 new congregations have already been formed
• Lots of new Kingdom halls were built (They still need 87 more). There are already two full time construction groups building halls with a third one rumoured.

All assemblies are fun, but this one has a festive feel to it.

Only a few months until the next one!:)

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*Of course, this is a generalization, Dominicans are in fact possibly the cleanest people on the planet. You've never seen a house cleaned properly until you've seen the garden hose being used to wash down the walls inside the house - and that's not even spring cleaning, that's like the weekly vacuuming. Unfortunately a large swathe of society here seems to have some blind spot when it comes to putting trash in a garbage can, not the gutter/beach/street/field/river/sea.

#Immigration in the DR is one of those special joys that just keeps getting better. The "Migracion" office (as immigration is known) in the capital has actually been proved to be the basis for the pagan belief in hell, and going there certainly feels like a never ending torment. The statement "I'm going to do my residency" is synonymous with "I have an awful disease" - it will illicit cries of pained empathy from fellow foreigners due to the knowledge that you will look some years older before the process has run it's course. (Christine gets to go on Thursday!)