This having been accomplished, they moved into the interior of the country, traveling long distances by bus on dusty, unpaved roads. They preached in such places as Quiriquire, El Tigre, Ciudad Bolívar in the east, and Maracaibo in the west.

Among those present was Pedro Morales, who was all fired up with the good news. “In the late 1930’s,” he later said, “Kate Goas and her daughter placed the book Riches with me in the main market of Maracaibo. Years later, I began reading it, and it opened up the Bible for me. When I got to the part about marking deserving ones in the forehead, it was like fire! (Ezek. 9:4) This started me looking for people who had this literature. I found four people who had been receiving books from a Trinidadian. We met together to study Riches every night, using each one’s home in turn as a meeting place.”

When Pedro received an invitation to go to Caracas (a distance of about 430 miles [700 km]) for the meeting to be held during the visit of Brother Knorr, he and a friend determined to make the trip. But there were problems to be dealt with. Pedro continued: “My pregnant wife started to have birth pains, and my business needed my attention. What to do? I got a midwife to stay with my wife and left the candy business in the care of my three children, aged 14, 12, and 10. Then we left by bus for Caracas, a hard trip, two days on unpaved roads.” What a joy it was for him to meet the Witnesses in Caracas! While there, he received a telegram from Maracaibo: “Wife well. Child better. Myself in the business. Justo Morales.” His own brother had arrived unexpectedly from Colombia and taken charge of things.

On the very first day of those special meetings in Caracas, Brother Franz spoke on “Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Crucible.” Then Brother Knorr continued the theme while Fred Franz interpreted. What an eye-opener this discussion was! It focused attention on what the Bible says Christians must expect at the hands of the world, and it gave details of the intense persecution that Jehovah’s Witnesses had experienced in Europe during World War II.

The next day a baptism took place at Los Chorros, in a water basin at the foot of a waterfall. Ten people got baptized that day, including Winston Blackwood (who had been contacted by Sister Goas in Quiriquire) and his son Eduardo, Horacio Mier y Terán and his younger brother Efraín, Pedro Morales, Gerardo Jessurun from Surinam (Suriname), Israel Francis, and José Mateus.

Pedro Morales and two other brothers from the west of the country were overjoyed when Brother Knorr said that the Society would send missionaries to Maracaibo as soon as the government would permit.