• Venezuela
    1996 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses

    • Remigio Afonso, a native of the Canary Islands, serves as a traveling overseer in Venezuela. He has contacted other immigrants. He has found that some in a family may not be interested but that others in the same family may be eager to hear Bible truth. Thus, in Cumaná, an Arabic-speaking couple who operated a business did not want to listen, but their daughter did. “She asked me to bring her a Bible,” relates Remigio. “I said that I would, but she wondered if I would keep my word. We arranged a day and time, and I made a particular point of arriving punctually, which impressed her. She took the Bible as well as the book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life, and arrangements were made for a sister to continue the study I started.

      “Soon after that, while I was visiting a congregation in Güiria, I saw a man sitting in the doorway of a shop opposite the Kingdom Hall, reading a book with a green cover. He beckoned me to come over. He was Arabic-speaking and asked me if the book he was reading was one of ours. It was in Arabic, but I could tell that it was ‘Let God Be True.’ He explained that he had received it as a gift in his home country and that he would neither loan it nor sell it to anyone! Having made sure he also read Spanish, I offered him the Truth book, which he readily accepted, and we started a study. He came to three meetings that week and even answered at the Watchtower Study.”

      Two years later at a district convention in Maracay, a man with a briefcase greeted Brother Afonso and asked if he recognized him. “I am the man from Güiria,” he explained. “I am baptized and now conduct three Bible studies of my own.” The following year at a district convention in Colombia, after Brother Afonso had a part on the program, a young lady rushed up to him with tears of joy in her eyes and introduced herself as the girl from Cumaná to whom he had witnessed. She explained that she too was a baptized Witness. What joy such experiences bring!