Passed the baton

We celebrated birthdays; Claudia and Christian both had birthdays this past week (they're holding the cake).

Please pray for the translition from working in my house to working in the church. As always there will be glitches, but pray that we'll all be flexible in the new atmosphere.

The other changes that I made since I came back from vacation is that I've turned over the responsibility of leadership to the Deaf. It's exciting because one of my goals here was to train the Deaf to be leaders. So Grisel and José Eduardo are the leaders of TBLESSA and Edwin and Adela are the leaders of the Bible class. This will be a huge transition for them as they learn to take over as leader instead of just as helpers. But I have confidence in them that they'll do a wonderful job. I will still work along side of them to help in any way. But little by little I want them to completely take over.

Prayer request:

1. Flexibility in the transition from my house to the church.

2. For the new leaders: Grisel, José Eduardo, Edwin and Adela.

3. For the new interpreters that have joined the team and the other who's considering joining.

New Spaces

Friday afternoons will be divided between the Sign Language Project and the Bible Translation. here Eleana (interpreter) is helping the team with some of the difficult concepts in the Genesis story we're working on for translation. Saturday morning will be divided between the Sign Language Project and Bible Translation, but the afternoon is solely dedicated to Bible Translation. Sabrina (in the pink) is observing to see if she'd like to join the TBLESSA team or the Bible class on Sundays. She's a new interpreter. We were offered this space for Saturday morning and afteroon, however, there's been a scheduling problem and we can only use this area in the morning. In the afternoon there is another class here.

Until then we will be using the office space for our meetings. After 2 months the other class will be finished and we'll be able to go back to the other area. Either way we're grateful for the church offering us the space.

We have three new interpreters that have joined the TBLESSA team; Eleana who will work on Friday afternoons, Walter and Erika who will work on Saturday afternoons. This is an answer to my prayers because it was a lot of responsibility for me being the only hearing (who's Spanish is limited) to have others to join in this ministry.

March 2011

There have been some changes with TBLESSA. We are no longer meeting in my house, but the church has offered us some places where we can meet and work. This will be a process in getting established but it's going to be better for the team as well as for myself. One area is the Library of the church. There are three cubicles and we share one with others in the church. So I bring my laptop and set up at the desk to work. The other area is the long tables we have on Friday mornings. Three team members work on Friday mornings (Edwin, Adela and I) and Grisel joins us in the afternoon. We devote the morning to work on the Sign Language project.