A Different Merry Christmas!

   What a surprise to realize it has been almost a month since the last post!  Much has happened in this full month.  Our Christmas week was very different from any we have had before, but so memorable!  On the 23rd we were off work half a day anyway, so we took the morning too and went with a group of missionaries and some of their visiting daughters to a batey.  This is a place about an hour west of Santo Domingo where people mostly of Haitian ancestry live and work.  This small village has about 40 families who have been described as "poorest of the poor."  There are many lively children and they seemed quite normal.  At the small school there, a young woman has been volunteer teaching for eight years while working toward her certification.  We took beans, rice and oil, small bags of presents for the children, some baby kits, some hard candy, some songs.  These kids were thrilled with the balls and immediately put one into play--sort of a quick version of soccer (after a tussle to get the ball).  Here are a few pictures, including some of the tiny school, the teacher (in black), some of the children with their presents... The crying little boy thought I was going to try to take his monkey from him.  I was just trying to position it for the picture.  My cousins had sent some of the toys and baby kits and I wanted them to see them.  School bags will be taken to them a little later.  The men in this community work in the sugar cane fields, cutting cane for 10 hours a day for the equivalent of $2.50 a day!  Evidently, the outhouses there are a fairly recent addition.  Don't know what they did before those were installed.  The water source for washing, etc. is a small creek.  They have to buy bottled water for drinking.

As I stood watching these people, I was thinking, "This is my Christmas!"

Then on Christmas morning we had two opportunities to brighten days.  The senior missionaries created plates of treats for the young missionaries in training.  We carried them in, singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and saw some surprised faces!  

The missionary, Elder Abankie, in the suit is from Suriname (top right corner of South America) and speaks Surinamese, Dutch (official country language), English he sort of taught himself--but well, and now is learning Spanish to go to the Netherlands to work with Spanish-speaking people there.

The one on the left is Sister Conrady--same name as our bishop at home.  The one of the right is Sister Mahon, who serves with her husband as a senior missionary, teaching young adults in Institute.  She has also been a companion for this young sister some of the time.  They look like sisters!  In my opinion, no senior missionary should look that cute!

Next on the agenda for Christmas was a trip to the maternity hospital nearby where about 90 babies can be born in a day!  Several of the senior missionaries went to distribute baby kits.  We didn't know we would actually be taken right into the wards and hand the kits right to the moms.  The enthusiastic doctor who led us through about eight wards of 10-12 beds each kept us singing our Christmas carols in Spanish the whole time.  The babies are kept right on the beds with the moms--no nursery except ICU and no separate cribs.  The babies were darling, the moms mostly happy, the glorias in the music the best!  How fitting to give to these little babies and their moms in honor of that Baby born so long ago and wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.

    Last, we have the doctor who continued to lead the singing after we came back to the lobby, so we sang to the people there!

To complete our day, we had dinner in the afternoon with some other missionaries and that night attended a magnificent concert in the oldest cathedral in the Americas--dating from 1523!  The singers were powerful and the inside of the cathedral dramatic!  We were there with a few thousand of our good friends.