Big city life, small city life and life on the rancho

Though I was born and raised in a big city, later in life I decided I don’t like it much…way too hectic and crazy for me. I really prefer a smaller city or town. La Cruz was just my speed. Getting used to life here hasn’t been as bad as I thought though. I love having water 24 hours a day every day…that’s a definite plus for the big city. We haven’t been without water once since we’ve been here, and have only had one brief power failure. We never had water at night in La Cruz and there were many days when we didn’t have it either all or part of the day. Power failures in La Cruz, while brief, were much more frequent.

I also love the really cheap and convenient bus service. In La Cruz you could easily walk wherever you needed or wanted to go, but here you can’t and since I’m not driving the bus is the answer. Four and a half pesos and 25 minutes and the bus literally takes me from my door all the way down to the mercado downtown. That’s a bargain. We even take the bus to church…drops us just a little over two blocks from church and only a little more than a block back to catch it home. Easy!! Sometimes Carmen and Genaro give us a lift home.

The people here are a bit harder to get to know than in La Cruz, they are friendly, just busier, not so much time to chat. That will take a bit of getting used to. And I do miss the little things of a small town. Nobody on horseback here. No horse drawn veggie cart coming door to door. No tractors on main street that’s for sure. We miss seeing Kitzia every day. We miss seeing Tom and Lidia and the girls.

But, our neighborhood here is MUCH more quiet than in La Cruz. No big dump trucks, farm trucks, farm equipment and beer trucks lumbering by at all hours. And our streets are paved. Don’t have to dust and sweep nearly as much. That’s definitely a plus!! And we do have great neighbors.

Henry (Enrique) and Maribel have had us over for BBQ, it was great!! And Henry helped Ralph learn how to change the water filter…although neither of them knew that the casing had a crack that had been sealed to prevent a leak, so when they unscrewed the casing to change the filter the seal was broken and the leak began! We had quite a mud pie when they were done. In the end they put in the new filter and sealed it all up with silicon. End of the leak, and we likely won’t be changing the filter again soon, as we discovered that the tinaco on the roof doesn’t have a lid. No sense in filtering water from the street into a storage tank on the roof that isn’t sealed. That’s a project for another day (or week or month).

We also have been trying, rather unsuccessfully to find a language school here. There are about a half dozen in town, but trying to get unbiased information has been tougher than we thought. We want to choose carefully. Please keep this in prayer.

This week also brought the great blessing of a visit from our friends and prayer partners Grant and Ronna and their family. We dropped in at the timeshare they were staying at and took them grocery shopping. Then they opted to ride along with us when we went to La Cruz to pick up the last of our stuff from the apartment and they were able to meet some of our neighbors/friends from there, Yolanda, Judith and Ivana and Maria and Eva. We also celebrated Grant’s birthday (and his sister-in-law Brandee’s) with a sunset dinner one evening. It was wonderful that they included us in this event. They also brought a wonderful care package for us (including my favorite dark chocolate and my favorite pickles!!!) and some great stuffed animals for the kids in the orphanages! Thanks guys!! You are a great blessing to us.

Also made our visit to Immigration…ah yes!! We must notify them of our change of location. We went with a bit of trepidation after our woes with them last year. However, Betty, the wonderful woman at the front desk told us “Cambio de domicilio is facil”, meaning it’s easy to change residence. It really was!! Within an hour we had completed two forms each, gone down the street for the 10 photocopies we needed and were back in the office. We are to go back tomorrow to pick up our corrected visas. Yippee!

Church in Mazatlan has been pretty nice. The people are wonderful and the services are filled with music and good preaching. We’ve been going to the Sunday services, which are from 5-7 p.m. and also to the Wednesday prayer service from 6-7 p.m. We’ve also been to a couple of meetings there as well. We hope to get out to the church in El Castillo soon and visit the folks there as well.

Today was a holiday, so we used our day off to go with Carmen, Genaro and Fanny out to Carmen’s family home in Potorillos, a very small town about an hour south of here near El Rosario. What a day…we had never traveled south before and we drove on two lane blacktop through dozens of small farms, an egg ranch and acres and acres of mango orchards! It was very cool.

Carmen’s family is just as warm and wonderful as she is. Her brother Poncho and his wife Marta were there (they live here in Mazatlan) and we also met two of her sisters, a sister-in-law, her dad and loads of nieces and nephews. One of the nephews was celebrating his birthday. We had a great comida of carne asada (BBQ beef) with freshly made roasted tomato and pepper salsa, tortillas and frijole charro. Never had beans made that way before, chorizo (spicy sausage), ham, bacon, hot dogs and beans. Really yummy. They gave us each a big soup bowl full and I immediately thought it would be too much, but we both ate the whole bowl full. Then for dessert they served their family tradition: leche dulce. It was an amazing sweet custard, very simple, very yummy and laced with raisins. Needed two helpings of that!! When they were all kids at home this was always served for every birthday, and with 10 kids, you had it often! What an awesome treat. Way better than cake. The littlest celebrant was baby Emilia, 8 months old, but I thought she was much younger, maybe two months, she was so tiny…here’s Tia Abuela (Great Aunt) Carmen with Emilia.

Carmen’s family has lived on this small rancho for more than 80 years…it’s a rare feat for any family these days. You really felt the sense of tradition while you were there. They treated us as if we were family too, which was a wonderful blessing to us as we hadn’t met most of them before today. They cooked and joked and played and talked together and you could just see and feel the love they have for one another.

The Lord continues to bless us mightily as we settle in here…and we are thankful. We hope to get language school settled out this week or next with your prayers and we also hope to begin volunteering in the orphanages here in April. They won’t need us until later in that month when all the snowbirds go back home. They seem to have an abundance of help while the north Americans are wintering here.

Thanks so much for all of your prayers and support…love and blessings to you all.