Nearly two months in Mexico!

Wow, we’ve already completed our first month in La Cruz and we are sneaking up on the completion of our second full month in Mexico…seems hard to believe.

This has been a week with lots of ups and downs. On the upside Tom and Lidia and the girls have been with us since last Thursday and they were excited at the prospect of getting into their own home again. They left the states on January 20th, and are anxious to get settled. Sadly, the deal on their rental house fell through and they were without a home here. But they now have two prospects, one they could move into right away and one that could take a month or more to finish. They should find out today…they are hoping for the one they could have right away because the other one would mean that they’d need to live temporarily in a small apartment or hotel for a month and they’d like to avoid that if they can.

We also had lunch in Mazatlan with a retired missionary couple, the Knutsons and our neighbors from Olympia, the Krumlands! What a blast! The Knutsons come to Mazatlan for two or three months each winter and then return to Minnesota…the Krumlands usually come for about a month. We had a lovely lunch and a great visit. The Krumlands are on their way back home now, but the Knutsons will be here another month, so we may see them again.

This week Ralph and I both caught some kind of 36 hour bug…thankfully we had it at different times, but man, were we ever sick. It kept Ralph down for two full days and me for a day and a half. Thankfully, we are both doing fine again.

While Tom and Lidia have been here she’s been helping us with our Spanish too and getting us more formally set up on the immersion method we’ve been using, Brewster! It’s so wonderful to expand our Spanish so much more quickly and in a more formal way. I actually was able to ask about a temporary water outage and be completely understood, and using full sentences too, not just the individual words that I know strung together well enough to be understood. It felt great.

Ralph and Darwin went out to Campo Ceuta again last night and spent some time working with brother Ismael. He wants to start visiting some of the parishioners who have dropped out of church of late and see what he can do to get them back, so that may be on the agenda in the near future. On a whim, they decided to see if they could locate a camp that they’d heard about but had never been to, and they located Campo Santa Lucia. The people were very warm and welcoming and the guys actually had a couple of different crowds going as they walked through the area talking with people. The guard approached them wanting to know what they were up to and when they told him said he was glad that they had come and could come any time!! So they began to take orders for Bibles and Gospel tapes and will return next week to distribute them and to get to know these new families a little more. Please keep brother Ismael and the people of Campo Santa Lucia in your prayers.

As we get to know Pastor Jose more and more he revealed to us that he had a serious injury to his leg about 17 years ago and hasn’t had any trouble with it until the last few months when a cyst developed and he had to have surgery. It’s been a struggle for him to get up and going again after this surgery, but he has persevered with the help of God. He wants to get out and visit more, so it’s likely that he and Ralph will go together and just visit perhaps one or two families each day until Pastor is fully recovered. He’s a bit discouraged over the length of time it’s taken him for recover. Please keep him and his family in prayer.

And, Praise the Lord! We did get our phone installed last week! We can only call locally for the first month, but once we get that first bill we can sign up for a package that will include long distance!! The phone installer got my hopes up by asking a friend of his to bring the modem up from Mazatlan on Wednesday and he promised he’d be back by on Thursday and install the Internet! I was so thankful and excited, because I’d been told it would be another month and five days for the Internet installation! But he never called or came back and the modem never appeared either. I was crushed.

Then on Saturday, a different TelMex guy came by and said he’d be installing the Internet that afternoon! Yippee!! I was thrilled. Then he called later in the day and said it was hooked up, and to just install the modem…which of course we didn’t have. So they ordered it and we should have it by Friday…maybe. The Lord must be working on my patience or lack there of on this one. We miss the kids so much I just want to see them. This is our biggest struggle, not being able to use the video hookup to see the kids.

This has been a good week, and we feel blessed, even getting up and finding we had no water in the building this morning didn’t seem to phase any of us…the six of us are just rolling with the flow! We just left the dishes in the sink and we’ll all bathe and do laundry when we have water again, which they tell us will be later today. At least we are all grubby together and we can laugh about it!

Thanks so much for your prayers and support…we appreciate it so much.