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Santiago ASL Hopes to Split!
By Jac | May 20, 2010
In a previous post I mentioned a lot of the growth happening in the ASL field in the Dominican Republic. At the assembly they announced that there are 6 locations where there is no group, but they have started interpreting meetings and hope to become groups soon. One of those is being held right here in Santiago!
Santiago is the second biggest city in the Dominican and was also the first city with a sign language congregation. The capital, Santo Domingo, is about 3 times the size of Santiago and has 6 ASL congregations and a number of groups. Santiago, for the last 14 years, has had just one congregation. According to size and deaf population, we should have at least 2, if not 3 congregations. At Bethel’s encouragement it was decided to hold one meeting on the far south side of the city to determine the interest.
The meeting was held in an area of the city called Pekin, where a book study was held before the arrangement changed. One elder lives in the area with his family, and many deaf friends live there as well. We spent the weeks before the special talk and Watchtower study letting all the deaf in the area know there would be a program given in ASL. We even had a special guest speaker, Bill Ramsey from the States come with his beautiful wife Lynne, for the talk. We were delighted to have 60 in attendance, 26 of those being deaf, and about half of those being newcomers. The following day at our normal meeting in the Imbert Kingdom Hall we had 53 in attendance and 28 Deaf.
With such a great turnout it was decided that Saturday meetings would be held regularly in Pekin starting in April. We will still all meet together during the week for now, but on the weekends some of the friends are assigned to go to the new group. Anton and I are with the old side, the original Santiago sign language hall, but Anton was one of the brothers asked to help conduct the Watchtower at the new group every couple weeks, so we will at least get to visit from time to time.
It is so exciting to see the growth right here in our own city! After so many years of just being one hall doing the same thing, now something completely different has come about, and we are thrilled to be a part of it. You can really see how Jehovah is rocking the nations and speeding it up!
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