back from merkos shlichus

her goes. its late at night, and i just got back from maracaibo with the events of teh past week and a half a bit fresh in my mind, so here goes. the first thing that you should all remember is that once you leave a hotel, never go back, seriously. but let me start from teh beginning. bh, we were pretty busy with merkos shlichus for the first while, nothing major, just visiting people at the office and in their homes. a few vignettes: monday night we visited some people, a couple (she is jewish, he is italian spic) and their 18 year old son. naturally, after a nice conversation, it came out that he had never had a bar mitzvah. you see, he had been baptized and had had a bris, but eh parents sort of wanted the kids to come to their own religion, and he just never had a bar mitzvah, which means he had also never put on tefillin. so we mad up that on wednesday morning he would come, with his tefillin that his aunt had bought him when he was 13, and we would dot eh bar mitzvah in shul. which we proceeded to do, bhashgacha protis there actually was a minyan (i think we only missed twice, but it was takeh a poshite mitvoch), and we put on tefillin, tought him how to do it on his own and took a lot of pictures. however, my friend suspected that the tefillin were posul, so he explained to the father that the first time he puts on tefillin, he should put on the best pair available, so he put on mine just to be safe. mazel tov.
by tuesday, we had finished our list, and there was just no one to see. so we revisited people, but it was tough. wednesday, i picked up the phone and tryed calling some people back that we hadnt had any luck with. i called a guy who had never been visited by bochurim, being that he was an assimilated argentinian jew who wasnt really part of teh community, and to further complicate matters his boss who was the president of the community was very protective of the office and didnt really want us to come by. but, when i called this guy, he actually agreed to make a 830 appointment (as in a.m.). upon arriving at the office a mere 45 minutes late (we had to daven with a minyan, check out of the hotel and get some food, and no one had told us it was that far), we met this guy, and it turned out that he had never put on tefillin in the 66 years of his life. so we helped him to put on tefillin.
afterwards, we visited a jew on a farm two hours out of maracaibo "(ill try to put up pictures but its cellphone quality, so dont get too excited). maracaibo happens to be a very ugly city, so the farm was very nice coming from maracaibo. we got a full tour, walking, which took a while, then we rode the horses around, drank some coconut juice straight out of the coconut, and then we milked some cows. by that time we had to head back to catch our flight.
more details over the phone, gtg
lavy