Update from Julie Tiessen #3

The last few days were every bit as intense as the first ones, and we wondered how they could possibly get any fuller.  For me, every day I was pressed to the limit physically and mentally, but somehow managed to get through with an abundance of good humour and energy from beyond the volcano which tours over this region.  By the end of the week the translators were congratulating me on my language-learning capacity, and I was feeling it was a shame to have mastered all this sewing vocabulary and not return!

The ladies were so eager to finish as many projects as possible in the week.  Some of mine even took them home to complete hand sewing and topstitching since a few had sewing machines, or their mothers or grandmothers did. Or they sheepishly brought their projects out during our devotionals to work on hand-sewing or stitch-ripping, and I nodded an okay since I wondered how else we'd ever get done at the rate they were going.

Our group got three projects done: 1) a jean pocket organizer to use up the hundreds of jean pockets leftover from the jeans they use at a quilting centre to make quilts, 2) a small zippered pouch which some of them are now using as a little purse for their money and cell phones (yes they market cheap pay-as-you-go knock-offs to the ends of the earth!), and 3) a purse tote with handles that loop through each other and a lining with pockets.  They all agreed that the small pouch was the hardest and we later had a good laugh about how they were so frustrated at certain points they wanted to tear it up or throw it across the room!  We all sympathized with Brenda, the pastor's 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and therefore uber-emotional.  She was at the point of tears several times this week.  Others who were more confident raced ahead of the group and then had to do a lot of stitch-ripping when they got it wrong ... note to self: bring a truckload of stitch-rippers next time!

I commended them for their perseverance through our second and third projects, which they agreed were NOT beginners level (won't say told-you-so to our fearless leader but...) I also sincerely thanked them for helping with Cruz, one of the older women who appeared to have a learning disability, making my job much harder.  Some of the quick ones would start to just do it for her, but I explained that we needed to be patient and allow her to learn at her own pace.  We worked through it together and somehow managed to help her get all three projects done by closing time Friday ... okay, so at 4:45 when she got a call on her cell phone I quickly buzzed away to finish the handles she had pretty much botched!  I was pouring with sweat by the end but we all yelled hooray!!!  I was so flustered that I totally forgot about photos of their final project, but they each insisted on photos with me on their cellphones in the depths of my slimey-ness, but honestly I looked that way the whole week, compared to most of them who hardly broke a sweat even wearing jeans!  With very hard water my hair has turned to hay here, and there is absolutely nothing I can do with it (good luck to my hairdresser who will have to perform a miracle next week!). Diego, one of the hunky young translators, said he liked my hair and that they call it the "California look" here, but I think he was just being kind.  I couldn't wear contacts and see to thread the machines so I wore glasses that constantly slid off my nose along with the pouring sweat and grime, and clothing was a terrible inconvenience that got soaked through by our treck on foot each day to and from lunch ... up a gradual hill fraught with rocks, flowing rivers of raw sewage and mounds of animal poop.  Garbage was everywhere, as there is simply no place to put it ... so they seem to have foregone the 'don't be a litterbug' campaigns in the schools.

My girls thanked and thanked me.  I gave them food treats I'd brought as a little reward for their efforts, but I could not out-give them.  Throughout the week they brought me exotic fruits that we don't even have English words for, and treats like deep fried plantain filled with a sweet gelled milk and covered with sugar (which she had just purchased on the way and insisted I eat while it was warm)... I guess this is their version of Timmy's Boston cream!  A decade as a missionary in Russia eating what we called 'road-kill shish-kebab appears to have given me a stomach of iron as I have had no problems all week.  A couple of them made me colourful beaded 'blingy-bling' for my hands and wrists, probably taking pity on me for having none (as advised, I left all my rings at home).  They are so poor, yet they come out of what we would call 'forts' put together with sticks and tattered plastic sheets, corrugated metal ... garbage mostly.  And yet they look so lovely and give so sacrificially... it is very humbling.

I will let our leader Karen write about the 'graduation' ceremony, so will close this post saying a very sincere thank you for your prayers, which have amazingly sustained me.  My doctor was very against me coming, due to having Chronic Lyme Disease contracted from our guard dog as missionaries for a decade in Russia.  My natural killer cells (immune) are dangerously low, but I felt God had paved a way for me to come, and your prayers have made it possible ... with a little help from El Salvadorian coffee and the adrenaline that has been coursing through my veins all week, making sleep almost impossible... running on 4 hours per night and making it through brutally full days (footnote: don't call me before noon next week!)

One last project we somehow managed to accomplish on the final day in our morning and afternoon groups was making three extra jean pocket organizers for the three local families that went above and beyond to help us ... the family with an indoor pink flush toilet across the 'road' (again, a term I use loosely) from the makeshift sewing centre that has no bathroom; the family with the metal home built by an earlier team where all the cooking was done outdoors and we converged with 60-80 people each noon hour (including niños), and a local pastor who was our tireless smiling gopher all week!  We presented our creations to these three very appreciative families.

In conclusion, it has been an AMAZING week and it was hard to answer my ladies who asked when I could come back.  They want to stay connected on Facebook!  So I will keep posting photos in my albums (DougandJulie Tiessen).

Postscript: after one more subsequent gecko sighting, running from under my bed to under Karen's, the geckos seemed to have gotten the memo and have 'vamoosed' from our room and even from the restaurant here, so thanks for praying them away since crawly things are not my forte, to put it mildly ... my mom Marjorie knows this only too well and wrote that she could hear my screams from Stoney Creek!