Life in the fast lane, where every lane is fast

As you know, I’m still not driving here. Truck is too big and the traffic is horrendous. Makes me long for Seattle at rush hour. I’m not kidding. We either take the bus or Ralph becomes the brave driver or the Mexicano driver, whatever the traffic calls for.

I remember someone telling me as I was learning to drive that “the lines are your friends”, meaning the traffic lanes. Here, the lines for the lanes mean absolutely nothing at all!! Drivers here can take two lanes and easily squeeze in four lanes of traffic, squeeze being the key word in that phrase. Then you throw in the pedestrians, the beggars, the window washers, the car dusters, the charity collectors, the people selling everything from sunshades, to peanuts, to toys, to cheese (yep, the Mennonites here stand in intersections and sell cheese) to just about anything else you can think of. Then toss in all the motorcycles and bicycles, the buses and semis. Quite a brew. We’ve had so many close calls it’s just flat amazing, but praise the Lord, we have come out unscathed so far and pray that continues.

Then you have the folks turning left from the far right lane and right from the far left lane. Motorcycles and bicycles who use red lights to move to the front of the pack. People who ignore lights and signs completely whether walking or driving.

Then there are the delivery motorcycles. These guys are really crazy because they are on a schedule!! Motorcycles are used to deliver food from pizzerias and restaurants, drugs from pharmacies, package delivery, tortillas at your door, even cans of paint from the paint store. The motorcycle guys also drive around our neighborhood with a stack of invoices on the gas tank, delivering the bills to residences around here.

And the riders have very creative uses for their helmets. They hold them between their thighs over the gas tank. They have them bungied down behind their seat. Often you’ll see them driving along with their forearm through the open face of the helmet and their hand coming out the neck hole, holding on to the handlebars. When they have them on their heads they often are over baseball caps and are unbuckled. Sometimes backwards, again, unbuckled. If they have a passenger, often the passenger will be holding the helmet because they are sitting where it would normally be stored.

They join with the much slower tricycle crowd and can quickly fill every crevice in the streets between traffic. The tricycle folks have a single wheel in the back and two wheels with a small cart in between in the front. They are kind of like the poorer mans pickup. The guy who does our neighbors garden across the street has one of these, filled with his lawnmower, weed eater and assorted tools of his trade. We’ve seen guys hauling their families around in them. One guy in the neighborhood sells pastries from his. A million uses for these little non-motorized vehicles.

But Ralph has adapted pretty well and Carmen has officially dubbed him a Mexican driver. He can weave in and out of the smallest gaps in traffic, he can read what’s coming from the other drivers. He’s got the shortcuts down. He waits patiently as all the motorcycles and bicycles that have crowded ahead of him get rolling once the light has changed. He has even learned to negotiate our big truck through the smallest, tightest little one way streets you could ever imagine. He even has the nice, but firm, finger wag down to wave off the window washers, et al, who come up to the car at every major intersection in town. It’s truly amazing.

Yippee, kinda, sorta

The yippee part being that we got the truck back at last and its running great. They even threw in a free vacuuming and car wash in the bargain.

The kinda, sorta part was that because of the changes in the value of peso/dollar recently we ended up paying a couple of hundred dollars more than we thought. So, all in all it cost a little more than $4,400 USD.

Thankfully, we had the vast majority of the money in our rainy day fund and our vacation fund, so no more rain and no vacations, and we ended up having to put some of the cost on the Visa card. Bummer. Lord willing we hope to pay it off soon.

Funny thing about paying the Ford dealer though. Mazatlan is a town of nearly 400,000 people. This is a huge, new, modern dealership complete with showroom, repair garage, body shop, parts store, the whole deal. When I went in to the cashier to pay and explained that I wanted to divide the payment between our debit card and our credit card she said no problem and I handed over the cards expecting her to swipe them and be on my merry way.

I must have completely lost track of where I am. No swiper here, no indeed. She needed to call for the authorization number, spent 15 minutes on hold and then when they answered and found it was a foreign card they switched her to someone else. She finally got the authorization number and then had to dial another number for the other card, pretty much the same result. Lots of time on hold, ooops, foreign card, hang on again. Then finally, numbers in hand, she rummaged around in a drawer for the card imprinter and the little receipts to put in it and took the two card impressions and had me sign them both and after more than an hour we were on our way. An hour to pay by credit and debit, gotta be a record.

Even funnier was that it took about twelve days for the transactions to hit the bank. Sometimes we have to really wonder at that “newly industrialized country” status. Sometimes it seems pretty third world still. But we are thankful that there was someone here to fix it, the parts were available, that we had the money to pay most of it and that it is running fine. Praise the Lord and thanks for your prayers.

Cuidad de los ninos

We’ve been volunteering at this orphanage for a while now, and we are loving it!! It is such a privilege to work with these amazing kids and with the sisters who care for them so lovingly. There are just over 40 kids living here, from little babies a few months old to kids in high school, so it’s a pretty diverse group.

Elementary kids:

We often just visit with the kids, which we all enjoy, we have also done one little translation project regarding some poison oak/ivy/sumac lotions that were donated, but all the instructions were in English. We have also been teaching English in two different classes, the elementary kids in one and the middle and high schoolers in the others. What a blast!

Two of the high school students have scholarships from the local Rotary club and will be traveling to California to live and study English for a year. They are Angel and Aida. The rest of the kids want to learn English for varying reasons from future work, to just being able to better communicate with the North Americans that visit them on occasion.

A few favorites have struck us for various reasons. Jesus Andres is Ralph’s favorite hands down. He’s 9 months old and just a cute and funny little guy. Luis and Martin are 10 and 11 and are very fun loving. They enjoy roller blading on the broad patio at the orphanage and they also enjoy bouncing on the trampoline. They are always laughing and being silly and generally enjoying life.

Llesica is a quiet little girl with a great sense of humor and she also enjoys the trampoline. Luz Maria is my personal favorite, a sweet, shy little six year old who struggles a bit in school and in the English class, but she is bound and determined to learn. We try to give her a little extra help when we can. She just can’t write things down as quickly as the other students and is hesitant to ask for extra time to finish her writing.

Dulce and Gloria are what we would call in the States “tweens”, not little kids anymore, but not quite teenagers either. They want to be in the limelight always and will often jump in and answer questions posed to the others. Little Daniella is a cute little toddler whose favorite thing is to ride around in a little plastic foot powered car…she has invaded our classroom on more than one occasion to see what’s up. She’s just afraid she’s missing something!

This is where we feel the most fulfillment as far as work here goes and where we feel like we are operating in God’s will. God is truly at work there and we are just blessed to come along for the ride. We are thankful!!!

Rejoice with us!!

Our new little great-nephew, Evan, arrived Tuesday afternoon! He’s 20 inches long and weighs 8 pounds. Both he and his mom have fevers and infections, but they are being treated with antibiotics and are both doing better today. We are so excited for our niece Billie Jo and her husband TJ!!! Their first child! Praise the Lord!! Here are a couple of pictures of little Evan.

Truck transmission blues

The transmission in the truck went out a week and a half ago, so we’ve been afoot a little more than normal. Amazingly, it hasn’t affected us too much, since we take the bus a lot, however there isn’t any real bus service to the orphanages. So perhaps there was a Spiritual aspect to the breakdown as well, who knows. But, undaunted we’ve taken a taxi to Cuidad de los Ninos for the three classes we’ve taught over the past week, not a problem because they are pretty cheap here. And we don’t have anything in stone yet with Hogar de Ninos, so it’s not a problem for them if we come back when we have the truck back.

Thankfully, we had shopped the day the truck broke down so that hasn’t been a problem either. We’ve been using the fruiteria that’s walking distance from the house to keep up our stock of fresh fruit and veggies and yesterday we walked about 10 blocks to the Bodega, a big grocery store near us, to pick up some things from them. It was a lovely, cool, overcast day, so it was perfect for walking!! God is good!

Supposedly, the parts will be in tomorrow and they hope to have the truck back to us on Saturday…a very spendy repair for parts and labor, but we are thankful it could be fixed rather than replaced. Again, God is good.

The service adviser who was helping us was struck down by a seizure and hospitalized the day after talking with us about the truck repairs, however, he is recovering nicely at home and is expected back at work soon. Please continue to pray for Ruben’s recovery.

Thanks for your prayers!!

The patio

In the front yard of the house we have the covered cochera where the truck is parked and we have another area that is meant to be a garden or patio or something, but was just dirt. It created a lot of dust with every little breeze and we were concerned about it being a giant mud pit come the rains. We’d have to walk through there to get to the house…not a pretty thought. But our landlady had told us they had plans to fix it before the rainy season and true to her word they did! But what a process. A day and a half and a whole lot of work for three men!!!

First, two guys spent half a day digging out the extra dirt and hauling it off, then leveling the remaining dirt and placing bricks here and there to act as leveling devices. They used a clear piece of tubing and siphoned water into it as their level.

Day two dawned with the early morning delivery of six bags of concrete and a pile of gravel and another of sand…then the workers arrived. They began by shoveling the rocks and sand into a little circle in the street and then covering it with two bags of the concrete and slowly mixed in water, using their shovels to mix the concoction.

Then they dumped the mixed concrete into the wheelbarrow and dumped it into the patio area, first in three strips about a foot wide each, and then continuing with the wheelbarrow filling in between the strips.

All of the leveling and smoothing was done by board and trowel. And all the finish work was done with my broom. Voila!! Patio!!!

The next day we just had to water it down and that was that. It has really knocked down the amount of dust in the house and an added benefit is the radiant heat from the concrete helps dry my laundry MUCH quicker!! Bonus! All this and no mud pies during the rainy season. God is good!

Things are changing

Change for the sake of change can be a bad thing, but sometimes changes are good. Some people tolerate change better than others and they learn and grow from the changes. For missionaries about the only constant thing in your life is change. I know that really doesn’t seem to make sense but it’s very true. Our lives are constantly changed by God, by circumstances, by the people He puts in our path.

The church here in Mazatlan is changing, little by little. For the first time since we’ve been in Mexico the Apostle’s Creed was spoken in church last Sunday. Wow! And two Sundays before Communion was served with Lupe explaining that they will be doing this more often because the churches he and Emilia visited in Canada celebrated Communion frequently! They likely had Communion more in the three weeks they were there than they did in a whole year or more here. During the year we were in La Cruz the church there only had communion twice.

But even though I say Communion was served, what happened in the Mazatlan church was quite unlike any other Communion we’d had. When the announcement was made and the verses from the Bible read, everyone rushed forward to the front of the church at once!! Some were even elbowing to the front of the group. Ralph and I were so surprised that we kind of sat there stunned for a moment. We finally went forward and stood at the back of the group. They began passing the tray of wafers and the tray of wine around and everyone took and ate and drank as they got theirs. No Body of Christ broken for you or blood of Christ shed for you was spoken to anyone. We were sort of taken aback. Not sure how Communion was taught here and what is appropriate for here, but it was a change for us, and a strange one at that. We didn’t know how to feel afterwards.

And the church here is also changing as far as outreach goes…they haven’t done much of it at all in the past, yet in the last year the youth group from the Mazatlan church has twice gone north to the churches in Ceuta and La Cruz and to the camps there and have performed music and dramas and given their testimonies to the people they have encountered. The youth were also going to the church in El Rosario once in a while too, but they got stranded out there one Sunday and haven’t been back since. The church has also been working on a the possibility of having a home for elders who either live alone and can no longer care for themselves or who are living on the street. They had hoped to get a surplus building donated that they could convert into a home, but recently had a setback on that dream when the building that was offered turned out to be really rundown and in a very drug infested and dangerous area. Not a good spot to place vulnerable elders! So they are back to square one on that one.

Also changing is that the church leaders are making an effort to meet together twice a year for fellowship and planning. They are looking long term at the empty church in El Salto, and while in January they had decided to use it as a meeting/retreat center in the meantime people in that community asked if the building could be used as extra space for the school. Of course, Pastor Lupe said yes! It’s good to have the building in use and cared for by the local families. The church would need to have the space for their occasionally meetings, but otherwise the school could use it.

When we had the leaders meeting in El Salto earlier this month we arrived to find the school class there…a slight miscommunication regarding the date and time of the meeting. But people are flexible here and we just moved the class down to the shade of the gigantic and lovely tree that is on the edge of the property and they continued with their studies and we had our meeting. The meeting is really an opportunity to share about what is going on in each individual church and a time for the pastors to just unwind a bit. They hope to also incorporate some continuing education in the future. They still hope to get a congregation going again in El Salto, but the Lord has not yet provided a pastor for that church, nor the one in El Rosario. We are sure that will change in time.

Our work here is changing too. Pastor Lupe has asked us to attend the church in El Rosario (one hour south of here) once a month…no preaching or teaching though. We are just to be a “presence” there. We still evangelize with Carmen and Genaro on Saturday evenings and still attend church in Mazatlan on Wednesdays and Sundays, but we are now expanding out by volunteering in two of the four orphanages here. Cuidad de los Ninos and Hogar de Ninos. Cuidad has a little over 40 children from about 18 months to high school age. Hogar has about 15 children, mostly grade school to high school. The way things appear to be shaping up we’ll likely be at Cuidad three days a week and at Hogar at least one. That of course is subject to CHANGE!! This is, after all, Mexico and things are quite fluid here!!

We are certain that our work with them will change us and that their contact with us will change them as well. One young woman from Cuidad will be going to school in California to study English for a year, courtesy of the Rotary Club here. What a blessing for her! Her life will most certainly change!!

Mexico itself is changing constantly…there are many international corporations here and more every day it seems. Here in Mazatlan you’d recognize places like McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Dairy Queen, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dominos Pizza and shortly we’ll have a new Applebee’s. Can Starbucks be far behind? There’s a Wal-Mart Supercenter here, a Sam’s Club, Home Depot and Auto Zone. Soon we’ll have a new Costco on the spot where La Posta RV park stood for decades. Mexico is no longer considered a Third World country, but rather a Newly Industrialized country (NIC), joining China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines in that category.

And we certainly couldn’t talk about change without talking about the weather!! It’s definitely changing!! It’s much warmer, bumping up against 90 most days and while the humidity is anywhere from 30 to 50 percent during the day it rises rapidly to 70 and 80 percent at night. We actually flipped on the A/C in the bedroom for a couple of hours last night. Just too hot and humid to sleep! And we are officially in hurricane season again, May to November here! After last year, we are hoping that the weather changes back to it’s old pattern and that no hurricanes come ashore at all this year!! Let them all blow out into the Pacific please!

We’ve also changed a couple of links on the blog too…they are shown in the right column under the title Blogroll (sorry, that title is one thing I can’t change!) and there are now links there to the Eastern Pacific Hurricane information, Mazatlan weather and I still left up the video from Elota because it an interesting glimpse into the area where we used to live. Enjoy!

Timing

We think a lot about the Lord’s timing of stuff lately…

We are approaching the hottest, most humid months of the year and our A/C in the pickup quits. To say we were unhappy would have been an understatement and we had to wonder about the Lord’s timing. But Ralph took the truck over to a little place near here called Dakota and tried to find out what the damage was going to be. In the process he met a great family. They own and run the business and one of the sons that was working on our truck just works there as a stress reliever. So what’s his other job? Air Traffic Controller at the Mazatlan Center!! Yep, I’d say recharging air conditioning units on cars would be much less stressful than that. Ralph learned a ton about air traffic control while waiting for the truck to be fixed, such as the Mazatlan Center controls all traffic from the border to here, and actually monitors all traffic for all of Mexico. Pretty interesting. Every day here is educational in some way and there is another great family in our little community here that we know a little bit about and we got a bargain on the repairs too. Praise the Lord.

When our friends Grant and Ronna were here a month ago they left us with a bag full of little stuffed piggies for one of the orphanages here. We’ve been so busy with school, church and company that we haven’t had the time to take it over there. So we decided (do we ever decide or does God just do it for us?) today was the day. We got there just in time to greet Sister Ofelia and visit with her for a little bit. She was thrilled with the stuffed toys and as we were talking a little one awoke from a nap…just happened to be Jesus Andres. Cutest little boy you’d ever like to meet. So a gift sent from the US because of the love of Jesus arrived at the moment a little guy named Jesus was there to receive it. He happily accepted a little piglet and was excited at the great gift. You should have seen his face!!! Timing indeed can be everything.

And you know that our ceiling fans in both the upstairs bedrooms were broken when we moved in…one of them fixed by Genaro, Jr a couple of months back. But we hadn’t gotten around to fixing the other for lack of time…but with my cousins coming for a visit we thought we’d better get cracking and get the parts and take a stab at it ourselves. The landlady had already given the go-ahead to us so it was just a matter of timing. Finally we went to get the requisite blades and brackets and returned home only to discover that we also needed some of the tiny little screws to mount the brackets to the motor unit. So back out to get those six little screws. Alas…the store didn’t have them because, get this, they come with the units when they are sold. Guess they don’t want to have you repairing them, only replacing them!!

Undaunted we wandered around with our little sample screw trying to find something we could substitute or adapt in some way, and if you know us intimately you will know how truly funny this is. Handy we are NOT. But in the store, in the ceiling fan section, was a ceiling fan salesman putting together display models of ceiling fans to be put up in the store to entice people to buy. We explained our dilemma and he dipped into his tool box and dug around and found six spare screws of the right size and gave them to us…free!! Timing is everything. A different day or different hour we would have missed him entirely and would likely still be looking for those six little screws to fix that fan. Which, by the way is working perfectly!! Not bad for amateurs.

As we are waiting for the bus after church one evening along comes our neighbor Ema, who also attends Cristo Redentor but who normally rides home with her husband. This night she was taking the bus back and showed us that there are actually two buses we can take from the stop downtown to get us home, not just one…doubling our choices for a quicker return home, plus we get to venture into another new neighborhood and see what’s going on there! Timing and education! Ten minutes later and we’d have been on our regular bus and would have missed out on Colinas Del Real.

I needed to get my haircut and had wanted to wait until we went to La Cruz again so that Judith could cut it for me and we could get in a little visit, but that wasn’t working out, so I ventured over to a little shop about two blocks from the house. Timing, don’t you know. So I met Johanna and her little daughter and when I introduced myself she allowed that she already knew quite a bit about us. We are North Americans, we live in the orange house on the corner by the park, we drive a dark blue pickup, we are Christians, we have two grandkids and we have lived here a little over a month. Wow!! I thought La Cruz had a communication system bar none, but I guess even here in the big city news gets around. I was really blown away. Later when I commented on the similarity of the drawer pulls on her cabinets to the ones on our closets she said, oh yeah, the same guy that made these made the closets in your house! Now, if I had stuck to my guns and waited to see Judith in La Cruz I would never had met Johanna and learned that we were well known in the community already! Timing and education all rolled into one.

When we dropped my cousins at the airport last week Tim stuffed his extra leftover pesos into my hand. I tried to get him to keep them for his next trip, gosh, he even could have traded them back in for dollars, but he wanted us to have them. A few days later we learned that we (and many other WMPL missionaries) would have a short allowance for May. Six days before we learned about the short allowances God had already provided for us via my cousin and his extra pesos. Timing.

There’s a small mercado near here that we’ve wanted to check out for a while and have never taken the time to do it. The other day we finally stopped in and think we may have finally found the butcher we’ve been seeking for a year!! The great guys at Bastidas had the best beef we’ve had since we’ve been here. And the price was certainly right!! Plus this little market has a great fish monger and two different fruit and veggie stands…one stop shopping and about a mile from home!!

We are so thankful that we serve a God who is in all the little and big things in our lives!! Thanks for your prayers and support! Blessings!!