Patience is a virtue

Sarah: It seems to me that whenever I pray for patience, all of a sudden I’m faced with a number of situations that tests that so-called patience I was wanting. So in all honesty I don’t like to pray for patience. But, it we’ve been faced with some interesting situations here in the valley lately that has tested the patience I haven’t prayed for, and thus caused me to pray for patience to come quickly. The first has to do with our first group that came last week. They had only been here a few hours and were getting ready for Efrain Chacon (the patriarch of the family) to come be a guest lecturer, when our power went out. Now, this has happened before, but only lasted a matter of minutes. This time it was getting closer and closer to dusk, and closer to the time Efrain was going to speak. So David and I scrounged up some candles and spread them all around the room. Thankfully, the power came back just as Efrain was finishing up, so we didn’t have to worry about what to do for the group for the rest of the evening.

On a brighter note, it was really great to be able to play host and hostess for the group. They were a group of college students from the States, studying down here at the Center for Sustainable Development Studies. It was fun to get to talk to a number of them. David was a guest speaker for their group in the evening, and he did a great job. He received many encouraging comments afterward, and there were quite a few adults and students interested in what we have going on here at QERC. So, who knows where that will lead in the future! The group got up early to do a field exercise looking at the relationship between hummingbird feeders causing lack of pollination. They even used mist nets to capture some hummingbirds, which was fascinating to see.

Ok back to patience. Last Friday our phone lines went out and didn’t come back until Tuesday morning. Talk about isolation! We weren’t even able to get on the internet, so we were without any communication both within the country and out of the country for days. The only way to talk to anyone here was venturing out in the middle of pouring rain to find someone to talk to. We even lost all power for a good number of hours again on Saturday.

Finally, tonight was another time we really needed to practice patience. We had been planning on having each of the families in the valley over for dinner, to reach out to the community and establish better relationships with them. Today I went to visit Efrain and his wife Caridad to see if they would be our first guests. They were delighted and were planning on coming to dinner around 7:00. So we spent all day getting ready—cleaning, straightening up, preparing topics of discussion, etc. It was almost 6:00 and I had already made the bread, the brownies, the fresh juice, and the salad stuff was ready to go. 10 minutes earlier I had put the rice in the rice cooker, and the chicken was cooking on the stove. When…oh yes, the power went out again. We had no idea what to do! Efrain called shortly after and said it was ok to reschedule for another evening, but we felt awful. We invited them to eat at the restaurant with us, but after Efrain called the restaurant, he said that there were so few guests and no lights that they weren’t prepared for us to eat there. David and I were bummed our meal was ruined—and theirs too. We lit candles and figured the power wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning, but alas, 20 minutes later, the power came back on. We were putting our meal back together and I called back Efrain. His daughter who lives with them answered (who was also going to come for dinner) said that once the lights went out, Efrain and Caridad turned in for the night! So a simple power outage for 20 minutes caused our entire evening to be changed. Such is life here in the valley! And thanks to whomever of you is praying for patience for us…I think we have a good handle on it. :)