Discouragement

Gosh, I can be such a Pollyanna sometimes. Our water is back to only being on at night again. Would be nice to have it during the day when we are up.

And our potential new landlord not only didn’t have the house finished as he’d said (for the fourth time!) but he wanted us to give him more money and wait more. We talked it over with him and told him we couldn’t do that. He said he’d give us our money back and we could part friends, but he didn’t have it just now. Of course. So we are trying to be optimistic that he’ll give us the money back.

Then our truck got burgled and we lost a flashlight, Ralph’s new sunglasses and six of our favorite Christian and Gospel CDs. Bummer. Our landlord, Jacobo was appalled…said nothing like that had ever happened here before. Lucky us, we get to be first. Noticed today that his iron fence is all caved in, wonder what happened there, but he’s gone, so we’ll have to wait to see.

Discouragement is hard to deal with anywhere, but we seem to have more trouble dealing with it here and we can’t really put our finger on the “why” of it. Just try to stay focused on why we are here, keep praying about what God would have us do push forward day by day.

On the good news side, Tropical Depression Paul turned out to be a total non-event…just light rain, no flooding, no damaging winds. Praise the Lord.

And we’ve gotten to watch Candy’s new little daughter while she took Luis to the doctor for a couple of shots. What a blessing to sit and rock that little wonder, beautiful little child of God.

Thanks for your prayers.

Okay, okay…here are some pictures of Mazatlan

We go to Mazatlan about once a month, but normally just have a meeting and/or shop and head home. We’ve been trying to change that pattern of late and take a day off and do the tourist thing. Here are some pictures we’ve taken over several months of the big city to the south of us.

The Mercado…a very cool place to shop.

Loads and loads of fresh fruit and veggies.



Sweets too!



My personal favorites: agua frescas!



Pork anyone?



Perhaps fish?



Even more fish



All the clothes and doo dads you could ever want









Cerca the cathedral in centro Mazatlan:



The biggest bougainvillea I’ve ever seen…it has a metal structure supporting it’s weight








Plaza Republica



There are vendors at each corner of the cathedral plaza entrance selling all kinds of stuff



Various views along the beach:

A crazy platform diver, working for tips from tourists!



Yep, they are truly nuts!



Tourist stuff, Ralph bought the hat he’s wearing!







Fishing boats



More boats



Dolphin fountain



Sea lions



Valentino’s disco/bar/restaurant



Plaza Machado in the historic centro:

Updates

Today as we were having our team worship time several things happened in answer to prayer. We got water (about noon!) and it was gushing, not dribbling! Goodness! That's a blessing...we could actually wash the comida dishes after the six of us ate! And the water is still on as I write this. Truly amazing! Praise the Lord.

Then, just as we were discussing what to do about our new house and landlord, he came by and said the house was done! He'd finished painting and removing the trees and he'd put up a screen that he'd taken down to repair a window. He still has to take out the stumps from the storm damaged trees, but needs to borrow a saw to do that, but there is room to park the truck. He wants us to come by at 3:30 tomorrow to see what he's done. We may actually be able to move after all. He also said he's decided to tile the kitchen counter, which he hadn't mentioned before. It's presently concrete, so it would be nice if it were tile, but wasn't anything we considered to be necessary. Just a bonus for patience I guess. Praise the Lord.

And hurricane Paul is now just a tropical depression, and while it will still is headed straight for us and will likely rain pretty good on us, it won't be accompanied by huge damaging winds! We had a few sprinkles today, and it was cloudy, breezy and cool all day. Praise the Lord.

We've also decided that the guys will keep going to Campo San Juan, politely bugging them, until they get to see Benny and get to the bottom of the hold up in getting permission to go to San Juan and Santa Lucia to visit the folks that live there.

And we are going to begin prayer walking in Ceuta. The town itself is small, and in pretty terrible straits. Lots of drinking, drugs, gangs and dirt...rodents spreading disease. In fact Dr. Maldonado has suggested that is where Lidia has contracted the typhus and typhoid that is in her bloodstream. She does a Bible study in one of the homes there, and there is a rat population living in the area with the people. He's urging her to stay away for three months to see if her health improves. She's currently praying about that. It would be hard for her either way, she'd really miss the interaction with this group of women, and the joy of witnessing their progress as they study the Word. But it's also hard on her to be sick and tired all the time. Please pray along with her and us on this issue.

Thanks for your powerful prayer support...it makes all the difference in this world!

Here we go again…

We've got another hurricane/tropical storm headed for us and we've been praying for a couple of days that it will veer out into the Pacific, but it has turned toward us! It's a category three hurricane now, but they (NOAA) are predicting it will diminish to a tropical storm before it comes onshore south of us again near Mazatlan. That's our prayer too!! Even at that it will pack a lot of wind and rain for us.

Our poor water system hasn't recovered from the Hurricane Lane, let alone is ready for Paul and what he may bring! We have fallen into a pattern of having water from about 10 pm (sometimes a little earlier) to about 5 am every day. Yep, that's only at night folks. So we have reluctantly turned into night owls trying to get the daily chores done during those hours when we have water. Adding to the problem is that the first hour it is on is basically a trickle, so you can't do much then except sit a bucket under the faucet to catch it all as it trickles in. No one in town has water 24/7 yet, and different parts of town have it at different times of the day. Tom and Lidia get it around 10 am until about 2 or 3 pm daily. Mostly! Please keep this in prayer, particularly in light of another potentially damaging storm on the way.

We tried again to see Benny at Campo San Juan to get permission to visit that camp and Santa Lucia. Kind of frustrating, as they wouldn't even let us past the guard barricade this time. They just radioed to Benny, and he said to come back in 15 days. Please pray that we could get permission to visit within these camps.

And our potential new landlord hasn't done a thing in the house since I last blogged. He told us it would be done by last Wednesday, we didn't hear from him so we called Thursday morning and at that time he said it would be done by Friday night. We thought that was a tall order as there was still all the painting to be done, the new door installed and removal of the balance of the storm-damaged trees and stumps. He said he'd stop by on Friday night and take us over to show us that it was indeed done. Haven't heard from him since!! So after much prayer, we've decided to just wait him out and see what happens, rather than calling or going by and checking on the progress. I think that just frustrates us and puts pressure on him, nothing any of us wants. This is certainly another point of prayer for us.

On the good news side, it's been so much cooler, it's a wonderful thing. Only low 90s and high 80s for high temperatures!!! The best part is the humidity had diminished a ton...downright pleasant out most of the day and evening. So much so that we haven't used the air conditioner in over a week, and only have been using the fans for a few hours here and there! What a huge blessing!!!

Thanks so much for lifting us before the Lord.

A chilly 66 degrees!!!

Well now, precisely as promised by the neighbors, it's October 16th and the cooler temps have arrived. 9 am and it's still only 66 out. After weeks of humid 100 plus temps this is such a nice change of pace, let alone a great blessing. And they also promised that along with the cooler temps, the bug population would diminish drastically, and there are far fewer annoying little gnats about this morning too. Praise the Lord...maybe we'll actually get fall after all!

Thanks so much for your prayers regarding our water system. We now have water almost every day for a few hours. And we had a straight streak where the water was on 24/7 from last Wednesday afternoon until 8 am Saturday. That's a record! We've never had water on that long the whole time we've been here, let alone after the storm. It was off again from 8 am to 8 pm on Saturday, then back on at 8 pm until about 1:30 pm on Sunday. Then off again until about 10:30 last night, and it just shut off again now. Bottom line, we still can't really count on it, but at least we aren't struggling as we have been for the last month. Praise the Lord.

And our new landlord has been a busy guy, at least by his standard. He says he's busy and he's poor with the time and money he's putting into the house. Just the stuff he originally agreed to do mind you, but he wanted us to know it's making him poor! But he's cleaned the trash (tires, refrigerator, old screens, etc.) from the yard, cleaned the interior, replaced the broken and missing windows (except the kitchen, too spendy) and painted the entry door and had taken the back door off for repair/replacement. He's also plumbed for the washer and for the new shower head we wanted installed. There was no shower head at all, and since it had to be replaced anyway we asked to have one like we have now, electric warmer type, so we don't have to plumb for and buy a boiler. We bought the shower head and he has an electrician friend who'll do the electrical installation for him. All that was left when we saw him last was to paint the interior. He's hoping to be done by Wednesday, only a week after his original target date! So, we may be moving by the weekend! Guess I should start to pack up a bit. Praise the Lord.

Candy and Luis' little daughter was born a week ago today, and she's a tiny little jewel! When we got home from immigration/customs on Wednesday we were in the kitchen having comida when Candy shouted down from her balcony that we needed to come up and see the new baby. Baby and mom are doing great, and dad Luis and big brother Luis are proud as can be of the new addition. Here's a picture of Kitzia and her mom and with her big brother.





Traditionally, the Peraza household has made and sold tamales every other Saturday to supplement their income. Since Gloria and Mimi returned from their vacation they have decided to do this every Saturday! They make both chicken and pork and also a small supply of sweet tamales with raisins. It's a huge production with two large kettles over open fires in the yard to steam the tamales once they are made and tied into their corn husks. Then they must be assembled into the orders that Jose takes the day before and made ready either for pickup or delivery to the customers.

It takes most of the day, but they make and sell about 400 tamales each Saturday in this venture. 400 tamales equals $2400 pesos, about $240 dollars for the days work. This is in addition to the other things they sell out of the house pretty much every day: little mango flavored Popsicle like treats, chimichangas (not what you would get in the US by the same name!) and a few other things. The Peraza women are nothing if not enterprising! Plus, I don't have to cook comida on Saturdays because we order five tamales from them each time they make them and then we walk over and pick them up. It gives us an opportunity to visit for a minute and marvel at the industrious nature of these women!

Pastor Jose cancelled church again this week, and we are beginning to wonder if it is his way of saying he wants to retire. He's 65, been preaching here for decades and is increasingly busy working his ranch property. It's been discouraging for him to have such a small congregation too, mostly just us and his wife, daughter and granddaughters. Sometimes Adolpho comes too, but only once or twice a month, if that. Please pray with us as to whether we should try to talk with him about this. We don't want the church to be a burden to him, and if God is leading him to step down we'd like to encourage him to do that without feeling guilty about it. There is no apparent person to step into his place, and he might be waiting for that.

We have some experience with that feeling. When we were on the rez, God was clearly telling us to leave, but we hung on for months after he made that clear, because there was no one stepping up to keep the church and mission going after we left. Finally, we came around to obedience to God and left, not without some guilt about leaving an empty pulpit!! But within a month after we left a new pastor came forward, a Navajo man and his family, which is exactly what we'd been praying for the entire time we'd been there!! God was answering our prayers and just waiting patiently for us to step out in faith and get out of the way and let that happen!! Even though they faced a lot of adversity, Nate and his family went on to have an extremely successful ministry there, growing the church and reaching out into the community in ways that we probably never could have as outsiders! It has been an awesome blessing and lesson for us to see that come to pass. We serve such an awesome, patient, forgiving God!

Over these past several months, with all the hassles and problems with our visa process, nearly having to leave the country and all, we began to wonder if God really wanted us here. We were looking to the visa process as another confirmation of our call and for a while there, it really looked like we weren't going to get them and were going to have to leave. But, as always, God has a plan and we may never know why all the problems came up, but in the end we got the visas and also gained insight into hopefully making the process less painful next year!

Non-Christians often think that as Christians we lead perfect, problem free, happy lives (LOL), but we all know that is not true. We have many of the problems that non-Christians face, the difference is we know who to take the problems to in prayer. We rely on God for our strength and he not only gets us through even the roughest stretches, he literally is there with us through it all. It's a comforting and calming and makes life doable. It's good to be able to share that knowledge with people freely, to let them know there is another way to deal with the highs and lows of life. To have freedom here and now and an eternity with our Father! Doesn't get better than that.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Yes, those are visas in our hands! We are legal again at last, clear through until September 20 next year. Woohoo!!

We arrived at the Immigration office in Mazatlan, signed in, grabbed a cup of water and settled in for the usual long wait. Ralph went upstairs to use the facilities, and they waylaid him in the hall and asked him to get me as our documents were ready!! So I went upstairs, we each signed a letter, put our thumbprints on a few documents and the visas themselves, they copied our letters and that was that! We were there less than 10 minutes. We said our thanks and our goodbyes, and our “see you next years” to all the staff that helped us through and were on our way to the copy place and then to customs to get the truck legal.

We had to wait a few minutes to see the specific guy for the truck at customs, but once we sat down he quickly reviewed all of our paperwork and then without a word disappeared into another office. He came back in a few minutes and started to tell us about how we were late and that our hologram expired in July. As always, I have my notebook full of immigration/customs related copies and showed him the letter from July explaining the difficulties with immigration, a letter that he had stamped and written his name and phone numbers on. He just said “Okay” and stamped our letter and sent us on our way. We were so happy and so relieved!! What a tremendous blessing to have this squared away at last. Thank you so much for praying us through this whole process!

Our dual lives

It's interesting that we and Tom L. and the little L. girls are perhaps the only Americans in La Cruz. We've heard of a guy named Chris who runs an RV park in Celestino Gasca, 10 miles south of us, but we've yet to meet him. Just this past week or so Tom also heard there is another gringo couple/family in La Cruz, haven't seen them yet either, but we'll hunt them down eventually. This is a truly Mexican community and unlike Mazatlan that has a real split personality in English and Spanish, La Cruz pretty much does not.

However, the pizza guy sometimes refers to me as Americana Cristina. He knows our pizza order by heart because we are different and the order itself is different from most of their orders: Mediano con cebolla, tomate, champinones, jamon, salami, pepperoni! (Medium with onion, tomato, mushroom, ham, salami and pepperoni). He even knows not to pack the two containers of different salsas in the box because we don't use either one!

We watch American football on Sundays, with the commentary in English. They come complete with American commercials, which we don't get with any other broadcasts except once in a while on Speed Channel or Fox News. Just interesting to watch and hear, oddly, the commercials seem foreign to us. Anyone who even know a little bit of English will greet us in English when they see us and it's surprising how many people do know a tiny bit of English at least. They've either worked in the states briefly, or have family in the states or took English in school. We are the perfect place to practice what they've learned!

The Chinese restaurant just recently updated their dining room, new tables and chairs throughout, and a new menu with slightly increased pricing. But the big news on the menu is it's printed in both English and Spanish! The only dual language menu in town that I'm aware of. Their staff speaks Spanish almost exclusively though, so as we commented to them in Spanish about the new English side of the menu it caused some confused looks, so that may be an issue as they use it! But they are gearing up for the tourist season and the upcoming fishing at El Salto I'd guess.

We worship in Spanish, using Spanish language Bibles and hymnals. 95% of our communication outside of our house is in Spanish, with neighbors, friends and merchants. We use a mixture of English and Spanish at home. We listen to Christian music and oldies in English using CDs and the music channels on our satellite! But we also listen to some music in Spanish as well, sometimes by choice, sometimes via the neighbors!!

Lidia's birthday was this week and they hosted a small party including us and many of their neighbors, some of whom we knew, so we didn't. Normally, when I meet someone new I have a hard time understanding them at first, not sure why, just do. But I found that I understood the new couple much more easily than the neighbors we've met and talked with on several occasions. But the party itself was much like any other birthday party you'd have anywhere. And even though she is a native Mexicana, and they are all Mexicano, they sang happy birthday to her in English!

In those group situations I find myself getting worn out trying to stay in the conversation, hearing it, translating it, asking questions if I don't get it all, then translating the answers and just trying to participate! After a couple of hours I need a nap! A new language in a relatively old brain is not an easy thing. But I'm thankful that it is coming along.

Our main meal (mid-day comida) is mostly Mexican cuisine. We might have what you would think of as an American meal maybe once a week, often less than that. However, we've discovered there is Mexican cuisine, and then there is Mexican cuisine!! We had comida at my friend Maria's house yesterday because they slaughtered their pig and wanted us to join in the feasting. She fixed this beautiful plate of starters, different bite-sized chunks of smoked meats surrounded by tomato slices and sprinkled with lime juice and a sweet-hot salsa. As I was inquiring about what all was on the plate I learned it was intestines, kidney, liver and ears of the pig. Okay then!

In three years on the rez I managed to avoid meals like this, but there was no avoiding it now! We have a good and growing relationship with this woman and her family and I wasn't about to blow it over food. So I plunged in, remembering the missionary prayer: Where you lead me I will follow, What you feed me I will swallow. Ralph actually likes liver, and he ate intestines on the rez so it wasn't as great a leap for him. It was for me. Surprisingly, amazingly it was VERY good. Ate quite a bit before the main course of carne asada tacos with salsa cruda and cucumbers! Came home stuffed!! She's making tamales today and we have been commanded to return for some of those...she would not take no for an answer, so later today we'll be having tamales with her and her family.

Life here can be much like home sometimes, too. As we were visiting yesterday Maria was talking about her newest grandson who is due in mid-December. It dawned on her that I hadn't yet seen the ultrasound picture of the new little one, so into the house we went to view his first portrait. I thought about how many of those ultrasound photos I've viewed over the years with family and friends!

We capped off last night with a visit to the plaza with the Tom and Lidia and the girls, we sat and visited, listened to music, (a mixture of Mexican and American) had a treat in the form of ice cream or agua fresca and just watched the world go by. Not unlike going to Percival Landing at home. Strolling along, listening to street musicians, having an ice cream cone.

Bottom line is there are so many differences in our lives, but lots of familiar, similar things too. We are thankful for all we are learning about others and ourselves. Some days it's a steeper learning curve than others, but we are learning!

We do have some prayer issues that we'd like to share. Our water in all of La Cruz has been off pretty much of the last two weeks, since Hurricane Lane whipped through here. We had water Wednesday night from about 9 pm to 4 am then didn't have it again until this morning at 1:30 am. Believe it or not, we got up at 1:30 am and flushed, did dishes, had showers, Ralph shaved and we filled up our 55 gallon reserve barrel for flushing. We have learned not to trust that it will be on "later" because it's usually not! Sounds crazy, but we were thankful we'd done that when the water went off again at 8:15 this morning. We don't know when it will be back to normal, or if it ever will. Apparently there is a lot of damage to an already old and under maintained system. Seems it will be a while. Please pray for a resolution to the problems and water restoration for the whole city.

The man we'd been talking with about the new rental house came by Friday evening and we made a deal for the house. He has hired two people to clean and he'll be painting and getting the missing jealousy windows replaced early this week. He wants us to come by on Wednesday and see the progress. Our experience is nothing happens that quickly around here, so we'll be pleasantly surprised if it is ready to move into by then. Our rent is paid here through the 25th, so we can take our time moving. But keep our new landlord and his workers in prayer as they prepare the house for us.

Three months after our paperwork was submitted and two months since they were promised and we still don't have our visas. Please pray they will be issued before we need to leave for the states on vacation in late November. Otherwise it will be pretty much of a hassle to leave and come back.

Thanks so much for your prayers and support...you are always tremendous blessings to us.