I’m excited to let you know that Daniel, one of the workers on the farm, decided to become a Christian yesterday. We have now reached 5 people through work on the farm. Funny thing is that David, Giovanni, Juan Pablo, William and Gabriel R. all went to study with him, and then went to the river to baptize him. They didn’t get back in time for services, so poor Gabriel T. who’s 13 had to do the whole thing all by himself since he was the only male available. He did a great job though!

We might be getting internet access in the apartment! I’m so excited. You just can’t have a computer these days without internet. You need it for updates, to register programs, etc. We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties with our CD burner, and the first thing it says to do to fix it is get your updates! That’s the reason for no pictures too.

We took the youth to the river this last Sunday. It was a lot of fun. We said a limit of 20 people, but adults wanted to go too (those who thought they could claim they were young still), and we ended up with 32 people. We had a ton of fun playing girls against guys keep away. I’m pretty sure the girls won. I won’t mention that we had about 5 guys playing for our team to even it out.

Oh, all of the coffee plants flowered this last week and it was sooo beautiful! I have pictures if I can ever get them to you. It is such a wonderful thing to see all of the berries start to grow, and the new leaves. We discovered 3 plants that are a different variety of coffee, and they make beautiful blossoms because they all clump like a ball of flowers. We decided that we’ll plant that type as flowers in our garden.

This last Tuesday, Roberto, our coffee expert, took me to a friend of his, who happens to own, process, and export his own label of coffee and works within five minutes from where we live. His name is Carlos Bendantilde; and is a successful business man here in Nicaragua and he also speaks English. Well, Carlos got wind of our plans of selling the coffee to a specific market here in the States (that being the members of the Church). He was very excited about our plans, because he realized the great potential for business. But not only can we help him, but he will be able to help us in a great way. As I mentioned, he has a license to export coffee to the U.S. and his company is FDA approved. We will be able to export our own coffee with our own name through his company. He has years of experience in coffee exporting and is one of the well known and respected coffee brands in all of Nicaragua. Right now we are working on putting a label on our coffee and working on different types of roasts and soon we’ll be shipping five boxes of our fresh coffee to the States. So let us know if you are interested in trying our first profesionally roasted coffee.

I put up new pictures of some of the work we have been doing on the farm. We converted one side of the storage area into the horses’ stables. I thought it was so neat to see what Juan Pablo did for the door hinges. He took a piece of on old tire and just nailed it to the door and the wall. Pretty creative!

We hired Roger today to do the overseeing of the workers. We’re so excited, because he has good experience with all of the things that we need. Our apartments are like a garden, so he knows plants. He is going to help us set up the farm so that we have plants to sell during the coffee off season. Citrus trees here produce twice a year, so we’re going to create an area (probably in the coffee lots to work as shade trees too). We can also do flowers to sell, which is a big thing here. He’s also a handy man. He fixed up our little coffee depulping machine we bought, and now it looks like new. The farm has several machines that it doesn’t need, so we are going to fix them up and sell them. The most important thing is that he knows how to manage people. We’ve had to get more formal in our management. Here there is a Ministry of Work where the workers can go if they have any complaints (usually when they get fired). Most places here are corrupt, so we have to have tons of paper work to protect us so that it would just be ridiculous to judge in favor of a lie. So, we’ve made up “Letters of Correction” that we make out for the workers when we tell them to do something and they don’t do it. That way they can’t say we never had any problems and we fired them for no reason. We’ve also made very elaborate pay sheets that explains everything we are paying (7th day, vacation pay, food, etc.), to be sure we’re covered.

Our coffee is starting to produce fruit. They call the flowers that produce these berries “crazy flowers” because they are early. Usually this is the lowest quality coffee, because it starts from random rains during the dry season, and so it doesn’t get the next good rain soon enough to be as large as the regular harvest. We’ll see how it will turn out this year though, because we’ve had some heavy rain this week. It might mean that these plants will be better quality, but we’ll have a longer harvesting season as we have berries ripening over a longer period of time. The hard rain usually doesn’t start until June. One of our visitors said, “One thing I know about farmers is, whatever the weather is, it isn’t right.” I think that’s probably true.

We had a work day fixing up our storage area, and even little Chepe helped out.

This planning a mission trip isn’t easy. Plane ticket prices change, projects, how many people! Where to start. I guess all good things take effort!!

We’re down to our 7 regular workers on the farm. This week we’re worked on getting the organic materials together for fertilizer. Fun! We got coffee pulp from the processing plant, and a truck accidentally dumped chicken manure on the road, and after it was left unattended to for several days we confiscated it. I’m sure the neighbors were grateful! In May we will make a little grove next to the rows of coffee where we’ve worked to put the fertilizer. Some day we’ll have a whole area set aside for fertilizer with the worms and everything. I said we should put it lining the fence, so if people try to sneak in they get an unpleasent surprise!

I think I forgot to mention what happened with the rest of the gospel meeting. We added two more members to the church. One is Lorenza. She is Johanna’s mother. Johanna is one of our recent converts, along with her daughter, Belky. Graysel was also baptized. She is a teenager. One of the greatest things about the new members (we had a total of 5 baptisms during the gospel meeting) is that they all got involved quickly. Marjury helped Lorenza prepare for her baptism. Maria Auxiliadora led a prayer in our ladies class. Graysel was manning the welcome booth for the gospel meeting the following night. It is so exciting to have new Christians who are waiting to be asked to do something, but looking for ways to work for the Lord.

Our ladies class continues to go well. The week before last we had a “finding your talents” class. Each of us had to participate by saying prayers, reading and explaining scripture, and leading singing. This week I get to teach my first lesson (well, to adults that is) in Spanish. It’s over Lydia.

We are finishing up the pruning of the coffee on the farm. Today we had to let the majority of our workers go, and get down to just our permanent workers. It was not a fun or easy job! We’ve really been happy with all of our workers, but we were up to 19 people, and that just isn’t a number we could maintain long term. It was a relief to hear all thank us for the opportunity to work for us. No grumbling. I hope we were able to help ease the financial stress so many here feel during this time of year. With the coffee harvest over, many don’t have work, but have all of the expenses of their kids starting a new school year (new books, uniforms, backpacks, etc.). 11 of the workers were members of the church, and one of our workers who isn’t a member is the father of Marjuri, who was recently converted.

David and I are working right now on finding a “right hand man” who can work on the farm. We need someone who can work with the workers but be in charge of them and keep them all working, as well as someone who can help make plans and projects with us. This will free up our time to do the work that only we can do, like finding out how much we owe for land taxes, looking at places to process our green coffee that we saved to dry ourselves, and talk with CISA who processed the rest of our coffee about our bill. I know David will be relieved to have help with the day to day work so he can focus on the important things. We are looking at Roger, who is the number 2 man at our apartments. He helped us pay the workers when we went to the states. He and his dad own a small coffee farm, so he has the know-how, and our apartments are dressed to the 9’s in flowers and plants, so he definitely knows his farming. He also is good at being in charge of people, which most Nicaraguans will tell you is an unusual trait here. Please keep this and all of our projects in your prayers.

Oh, for those who might have seen some of the offensive comments on the site, we had a glitch in the system that let some comments go through without my approval. We’re working on it, so it should be cleared up soon. Sorry about that.

I don’t have much time, because I have to go pay the workers, but I just wanted to let everyone know what all we’ve been up to.

We finished all of the fence work, so the farm is now totally enclosed! Yeah!!! We started on pruning the coffee trees. This is slow work, because all vertical stems have to be cut but two, and then unproductive horizontal branches have to be removed, along with any left over coffee berries and vines. The engineer that we have advising us was shocked at how fast our workers are getting it all done. It looks like we will be able to accomplish more this year than we originally thought. Our plan is about 2 more weeks of “high intensity” work like we’ve been doing. After that we will have to lay off some of the workers, and choose our small group (4-5) that we will have working full time for the farm.

We started a plan where Saturdays we do different projects. This week we are getting Juan Pablo’s house cleaned up, and we are cleaning out our storage building. Once we get all of the one time work done, we are going to take one Saturday a month to do social projects for the workers or members of the church (help build kitchen areas, showers, etc).