Bob and All Those Women?!?!? (Part 2!)

Ok, ok, like I said, the ladies don't play attention to me. They're cooking. A couple weeks ago, we had the biggie--cheesecake. (You can see why I stick around). Cheesecake is served only at very formal and/or fancy meals here. It's not something that Dominicans eat on a regular basis because cheese here is very expensive. It shouldn't be, they produce it here in-country, but it is. And so Judy makes it only for special occasions.

The ladies enjoyed making it--and even though it's expensive to make, in the battle of the budget, we did fine :-) And even though it's fattening, so far in the battle of the bulge the waistlines remain the same! We gave away most of the cheesecake we made, to the ladies who came (20 each for both Thursday and Friday nights), to a deacon in the hospital, and to two elder ladies--one named Margarita, who does this cutest painting class with about 10 kids on Saturday afternoons. And their paintings are really good--they did one with a sailboat in the water with an island behind it (reminded me of La Tortue!)

By the way, the deacon is now out of the hospital. He had hemorrodes. The operation was successful, and he's been back to church a couple Sundays. We were sure glad he came back too. We laughed because every question after, "Is Santiago well?" was followed with, "Was he able to go to the bathroom successfully?" (I'm translating the general sense. The questions were FAR more explicit than that!!)

Back to the cheesecake, three other really neat things happened. One, one of the younger ladies who come on Thursday night has just started coming to church. I overheard one of the older ladies in the group talk about God’s love with this younger lady during the cooking class, a wonderful application of the 1 Timothy 5 passage where the older women are commanded to mentor the younger women. Two, Judy invited an unchurched lady to church who came for the Friday night class. Three, our unchurched neighbor came again to the Friday cooking class. She had attended the first one.

Pray that the fruit of these classes will be more than excess calorie intake. We're hoping that the ladies will develop closer relationships, and that some will be able to help their families financially. Plus pray for the ladies mentioned above.