Update from Julie Tiessen

Now it's later and my heart has slowed down to a rate where I can actually think again, so I will attempt to write my blog.  We have had two very full days of teaching sewing projects to the incredibly thankful and eager [read: bulls in a china shop] ladies.  It's been wild and wooly!  Most are quite young, 17 yrs and up, with few over 40 (although they look as old as our mothers due to their difficult lives).  Many are single moms as men tend to leave, especially since most can't afford the $3 marriage license and the trip to San Salvador (the capital city) to get one, so commitment is low.

Each day we get done with the first group by noon and hike 1/2 km up a muddy road (accompanied by chickens, pigs and patties) to the home where lunch is made by local women.  Our team distributes meals to the 60 women (morning and afternoon groups) plus all their many niños, our translators and Rebecca's childcare helpers, then we sit down on cinder blocks to inhale ours before the stray dogs come around.  We pray for the food energy to kick in as we hike back down the rocky road to the makeshift sewing centre, drenched from the wet sauna called El Salvador summer, but smiling and waving "Hola" to the afternoon ladies who are waiting for us (good thing we watched Dora!  Actually, a Guatemalan woman named Rina from Bethany graciously taught us Spanish as her ministry every Monday night starting in June).

On the first day, my group got their hanging jean pocket organizer completed and were SO proud of their accomplishment!  It was a learning process for all of us ... a steep learning curve for some of the women and also our translators ... especially the young guys learning sewing vocabulary and getting used to our English idioms (i.e. this next step is a piece of cake!)  By the afternoon group we are more prepared to team-teach the same project for the second time.  But by then it is unbearably hot and even the El Salvadorians are sopping up their dripping faces with cloths.  I am so thankful for the fan by the window and the screeching ceiling fan ... not to mention the lights to disperse the bats in the morning when we turn them on, since the roof doesn't sit snug on the cinder block walls (today's bat count: five).

Right from the first day sewing machines started breaking down, mainly due to the bulls (as per above). There are 2 industrial machines and 7 home machines.  The El Salvadorian sewing teacher is kept busy full time repairing and re-threading them.  Most of the ladies are scared of the industrial ones because they appear to have only one speed: Breakneck!  But they must learn, so I am making my women use them for basting, when a straight line isn't mandatory.  Line ups for machines inevitably form and sometimes tensions rise when a group feels like another group is hogging too many.  We are all learning patience and it's back to "Sharing 101."  But nothing can squelch the enthusiasm of these ladies, who get teary when they talk about how grateful they are that we came: "Nobody has ever come to us" they say.  They're probably right, since the 'town' of Rio Frio (I use that term loosely as it's more like a village minus the quaintness) might as well be Timbuktu.

Today, following the lead of Carie-the-missionary, I pulled in a sewing machine to my room, so at least we would have one machine for our group.  My project with the ladies was harder, so we didn't finish it in spite of mostly speedy-Gonzales types.  In addition to the machine backlog, in our afternoon group we have one 'older' woman (all of 42) who appears to be a bit learning disabled so she takes up a lot time on the machine.  By today another one of the 'older' ladies was helping her, as she has still not finished her first day's project and seemed almost entirely unable to comprehend today's.  Although my ladies were thrilled to learn how to sew in a zipper and make a cosmetic bag, they were frustrated that they did not get to finish it.  Still, they were undaunted and anxious to come back tomorrow to do so.

Tonight, our team leader Karen and I felt sheepish on the way home as we sat comfortably in the lorry cab with Carie the missionary/komakaze driver, while the rest of our team rode in the back standing (holding onto tall bars) along with about 15 El Salvadorians we let off along the way when they all whistled a stop.  In spite of Carie's best efforts to get us through hairpin-curved mountain roads back to the city of San Vicente, the dark clouds finally burst into the third tropical monsoon we have had since being here (the first one that happened during the day).  We arrived home with our three drowned rats!