The last few weeks have been very exciting. One day several weeks ago we travelled to two new areas within 30 minutes of Nagua, where we met with several pastors to get to know them better. One pastor lived in a shack in a village called Helechal. Literally, it was a shack - all tin. He hopes to build a home for himself, his wife and three kids. The other pastors lived in an area called El Pozo (The Well). There must be over a thousand homes all spread out around the rice fields with no running water. One pastor’s church has been under construction (and unusable) for about a year, and so his church congregates with another church a distance away. It is difficult for some people to travel that distance. This is a common problem here - there are many half-finished projects and churches. They are started in faith with what little the people have, and then left unfinished because the people have exhausted all their resources. Please pray for us that we would have the wisdom to know how to help them.

After our visits with the pastors, we sat down with some glasses of fresh lime juice in the house of a brother from the church. He and a former pastor were describing to us the process of the rice harvest. It costs about US$60 to plant a crop of rice on an area of about 0.155 acres (629 square meters) - this size of land is called a ‘tarea’ in the Dominican Republic. Each tarea with a good crop will yield about four sacks (125 pounds each sack), twice a year. The rice is sold to the local rice processing factory, where the rice kernels are de-shelled and dried. The rice factories buy the rice from the local farmers at about US$20 per sack, which is about US$80 per tarea. So if they get two good crops, they make about $40 for one tarea of land. However, our friends told us that this past crop was damaged, and the farmers are suffering loss because of it. This makes it very hard for them. They will hope to make up for the loss in the next crop, praying that it will be a good one.