Hurricane Lane

Just thought we’d put out a quick note since this hurricane is in the news today. When John came through a couple of weeks back several of you were concerned for our welfare, and we appreciate that and thank you for your prayers and concerns!

It looks like Lane will miss us, and will go straight up the Baja much as John did. We’ll likely get some wind and rain from this, and that’s about it. Please keep the folks on the Mexican coast and the Baja in prayer. We hope that Lane takes a turn out into the Pacific and breaks up.

If you want to keep track of the hurricane’s progress here’s the web site:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

Scroll down past the Atlantic - Caribbean storms and you’ll find the Easter Pacific storms to see the charts available for Lane. We tend to use the five day warning cone and the tropical storm wind speed probability charts. These are updated several times a day. To locate where we are find the tip of the Baja, we are across from the tip and slightly north.

Love and blessings,

Ralph and Chris

Cranky and sleepless

I'm having one of "those" kind of weeks. For the last three nights I haven't been sleeping well, two of the three nights I was up from two a.m. on and nauseated to boot. Not fun. And the weird thing is that I can't even catch up with a nap in the afternoon. I lay down, but no luck. Then this morning our water didn't come back on...so I officially caved into crankiness. No sleep AND no shower??? I made do with a sponge bath and then treated myself to strawberry yogurt for breakfast.

We've been frustrated in our attempts to make an appointment with the oncologist for Ralph too...every time we call, no matter what time of day we got this brief little message saying we'd reached the doctors office and thanks. Huh? Nothing about leaving a message to call back, nothing about being out of the office. Couldn't figure it out. So today we talked with Lidia about it and it's one of those cultural learning opportunities. They do not answer the phone at the clinic. People know they need to leave their name and number and they will get a call back. Okey-dokey then...Ralph just did that! So now we are waiting for a call back. We may get this all figured out or we may not...so much to learn all the time. Please pray for a quick call back and clear communications for the visit.

And speaking of learning, I think that both Ralph and Tom have now passed me by in Spanish learning. I have been feeling so stuck lately and they both seem to be moving forward. I've been asking for the gift of Spanish language for about a year now, and have made some small progress, but still have such a long way to go...and I get frustrated. When I paid the phone bill at Letty's this morning the guy couldn't understand me when I said my phone number and I had to write it out for him!!! That's bad! There was a guy named Manual standing next to me and he said he understood me, be he wasn't the one taking the money! He encouraged me to hang in there and not be discouraged, that the language would come in time...please keep our language acquisition in your prayers.

We've had another change in the weather too after a couple of weeks of ever decreasing temps, from hovering around 100 to blissfully down to the 80 and low 90s!! It was a wonderful break. But now we are now back up into the high 90s for this entire week. We've had no rain at all for about five days, so it makes us wonder: What happened to the rainy season? Ralph said yesterday this is the first time in his life he's been looking forward to having summer end!

You know that when we have big storms we have several power outages each night caused by the storms. One night last week our power went out every hour on the hour between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. It would come on anywhere between five and 20 minutes before the top of the hour and then would go out again!! Weird thing was we were not having a storm...the sky was perfectly clear and the moon was shining brightly...still, multiple power outages! No one has a clue about what might have caused it.

The whole town is gearing up for Independence day celebrations coming this weekend...Saturday is Independence Day in Mexico. We already have decorations up in most of the businesses and in both major squares and on the municipal building. We have at least three street vendors selling flags, drums and little ornaments from push carts. Looks like the celebrations here will be a very big deal for sure. Can't wait to see how things go.





Friday we were blessed with a "care" package from my co-workers in Washington! What a treasure it is too...chock full of all kinds of goodies!! All things we can't get here!! Straight cheese crunchy cheetos, Skittles, chocolate chips and baking chocolate, craisins, salty nut and sweet granola bars (my fav!) Motor Trend and Car and Driver mags for Ralph and paperback novels for both of us!! Plus a huge jar of extra crunchy peanut butter, which we can get here, but we have to vigilant and it comes in tiny little jars! Goodness, what a blessing it was to get all that stuff. We are thoroughly enjoying everything and are truly thankful. Thanks a bunch guys!

Thankfully, today was our day to worship together and break bread (tortillas, actually) with the Lumppios!! Thank the Lord. We had a nice time of worship together, Tom led a great study and we had communion. Then we had a nice meal that Lidia prepared. I brought dessert...international magic cookie bars: Minnesota graham crackers, Washington chocolate chips and the rest was local ingredients! It made for a really nice time. It helped me lose my crankies and when we got home our water came on within minutes. Praise the LORD!

My friend Dana sent me this little movie and it's something that Pastor Andrea taught on in July of last year. She called it "A divine appointment". Both messages encourage you to make the most of your "dash". The afternoon Pastor Andrea preached this message, one of our church family who was always making the most of her dash, tragically died in a motorcycle accident. This is a great little movie, very beautiful. Thanks Dana for reminding me to make my dash count for something...

http://www.thedashmovie.com

Love and blessings,

Ralph & Chris

Birthdays, camps, Pastor Lupe, hurricanes, immigration and doctors!!

First of all, Happy Birthday Marina! Today’s your day!

Additionally, my brother Randy’s birthday is the 10th and Savannah’s 6th birthday is on the 19th (party on the 16th, we get to participate a little via live video over the internet!) and then Lidia’s birthday is the 27th!

The guy’s visits to the camps last week had mixed results. We were really encouraged to find a wonderful working model of a camp church already in place in Campo Cinco. The guys were invited to come and observe the service and it was great. There were about 100 people in attendance (the camp will have about 2,000 people when it’s at full capacity) and there is a pastor in residence at the camp! He holds services twice a week in a building provided by the camp owners no less! What a blessing. It would be wonderful to duplicate this success in the camps that we visit and we’ll be doing a lot of praying in the hope that the Lord will make a way for church services in ALL of the camps!

The visits to Campo Santa Lucia and San Juan were the usual little bit of run around…they were told by the folks in the office for those two camps that they’ll need to have a card in order to visit. Never needed one before, and they actually visited both camps on the same day as the office visit and were never asked for the card. Oh well. The camp officials asked them to come back in November to get the card, perhaps they’ll require it after that. Please pray that the camps would remain open to visits.

Several of you wrote after hearing US reports about hurricane John’s path…and for a couple of days it was projected to come near us, but as things do with those weather systems, things changed and it moved away from us, praise the Lord. We did get some heavy rains and winds (and a little water in the kitchen again) on Thursday night, but then it did a left turn and went out more to the Baja. Thankfully, as it traveled up the Baja it lost speed and was downgraded to a tropical depression. It did drop a lot of rain on the Baja though, 20 inches in some places and that is a total desert environment so there was a lot of flash flooding. Overall there wasn’t much damage because it’s pretty sparsely populated. The storm pretty much skirted around the resort communities on the tip of the Baja. If you ever want to track storms you hear about, here’s the web site that we use: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ You’ll want to scroll down to the Eastern Pacific information and the maps that we tend to follow are the tropical wind speed and the 5 day warning cone. La Cruz is just opposite the tip of the Baja peninsula and slightly north.

We had lunch with Pastor Lupe and his wife Emilia in Mazatlan last week and had a good time getting to know them a little better. We just tend not to see them too much. They are doing fine, and are excited to go to Alberta Canada to speak at a church there during Holy Week this coming spring. They are also involved in the local organizing for the Billy Graham television broadcast that is coming in November, hoping to encourage as many people as possible to watch the broadcast. Please pray that the Mexican people would tune into this broadcast and hear the message of hope in Christ.

Pastor Lupe also did the newest required letter for immigration and it’s now in their hands…and of course they couldn’t say if this was all they would need or when we might expect the visa. Ralph is thinking we’ll give them a couple of weeks and then give a call, hoping they have it worked out at last. Continued prayer on this issue wouldn’t hurt!

My cousin Donna did well in her surgery on Thursday, praise the Lord. I talked with her and her daughter Julie on Friday and both seemed pretty chipper. They’ll get the biopsy results this week, and Donna should be able to leave the hospital later this week too! Then several weeks of home recovery and she should be back on her feet. Thank you for your prayers.

And speaking of biopsy results, Ralph’s are back and the lesion that was removed from his scalp was malignant after all. So Dr. Maldonado has referred him to see an oncologist in Mazatlan. That will happen in the next couple of weeks. Both the doc and Ralph feel it is a precautionary visit, just to be on the safe side. Ralph has had many skin cancers removed over the years, a few of those have been malignant and have not required treatment because of all of the cells were removed by wide margins when the original surgeries were done. As the doc says about this one, he went deep and wide to remove all traces of this thing, but he wants to be completely sure nothing more is needed! Gotta love that kind of follow through. Please pray for clear communications and a clean bill of health. It is somewhat more difficult to communicate medically in Spanish than in every day conversations. It’s really important to be clearly understood and to clearly understand!!

Please pray for Lidia as well. We watched the Lumppio girls the other night while Tom took Lidia into see the doc as she’s been struggling with a chain of infections that have kept her feeling pretty crummy. She’s on a new treatment presently and is hoping that will get rid of everything once and for all! That’s our prayer too.

Thanks to Bob and Sue for a new set of Pastor Bill’s sermons!!! Love getting them…gives us a taste of our home church!

Thanks so much to all of you for your notes, cards, pictures, e-mails and prayers! They are so important to us!

Starting to feel fall in the air…

at least a little. Temps are cooler, which is a blessing, and we’ve noticed a few cars with wet leaves stuck all over them. Most shops in town and the MZ are stuffed with back to school supplies. Seems like the kids just got out of school, and some already started back week before last and the rest are back this week. It’s kind of fun to see them all decked out in their various uniforms again and back to their old routines.

And after waiting for the rainy season to come I think we are officially in the middle of it. Depends on who you talk with though, some people say we’ll be done by mid-September, others say it will go through October. Have to wait and see.

Funny thing about the rain too, folks just completely hunker down here when the rains come. They are not out either walking or in their cars, there’s no sitting out in the evenings, so it makes it much more difficult to keep in touch with folks in the neighborhood. It was raining pretty hard yesterday morning and when 11 am rolled around the church was still locked up tight. We figured for sure there would be no services because of the rain, but about 20 minutes later the rain let up a bit and Jose came and opened the church and the three of us had services for about 40 minutes.

This is completely opposite of northwest behavior…goodness, if you hunkered down there to wait for the rain to stop you’d never go anywhere or get anything done for months on end. Goretex baby! It’s what keeps the NW going!

For the first time we actually got caught out in the weather. For newbies we’ve been managing pretty well, trying to get a handle on what is just blowing over, what’s just overcast and what will actually produce rain. But on a walk to town recently we found out we still have much to learn. Nice, cool, overcast day so we decided to walk to town. We had a great time, and were just finishing up our errands and visits when it started to sprinkle. We headed toward home, but the storm just kept getting worse and by the time we got to the house it was flat POURING down rain and we were soaked to the skin. Thankfully it was still warm out, not like at home in Washington where getting caught like that would make you bone-chillingly cold!

We are still waiting to receive our visas that were promised for August 3! They still have no word from immigration in Mexico City, so we wait, we call, we wait some more. Then Friday they called and said that we needed another letter from Pastor Lupe in Mazatlan stating what we do, where we do it and for how long. And of course, the letter needs to be hand delivered to their office in Mazatlan. We have 30 days to get this done. We are trying to see if Lupe can do the letters and deliver them for us rather than having to make another trip ourselves, but we are still waiting to hear from him. And this applies just to us at this point, not to Tom. Lidia thinks eventually they will ask this of Tom too, so she wants to be pro-active and have Lupe do a letter for him now too, just to save a hassle later. Can this be more of a drama or what? Ralph said the other night that the next time he goes to immigration in Mazatlan he’ll either come away with the visas or an exit letters so we can leave! He’s really sick of messing with this. I think we all are. Please keep this in prayer.

We met with the Lumppios the other day to strategize a bit for the restart of the work in the camps. People will start returning in September and we want to work together more rather than completely separately, even in separate camps. We want to see where God is working in these places already and come along side that work. The longer we are here the more we learn about which camps have church services and which don’t and which have a missionary presence and which don’t. The guys are out this morning doing an informal kind of survey trying to get a better handle on things. Should be interesting to hear what all they find out.

We are already looking forward to our first field conference, which will be coming up right after the first of the year. It will be an opportunity to review the work here, report on our experiences, and look to the future. We are currently praying about that meeting, what shape it will take and when to hold it. Please join us in prayer on that.

This week we’ve learned that Ralph’s 93 year old Aunt Mickey in North Dakota took a tumble and broke her hip. She had surgery to repair it and is doing well by all accounts. She’s been living in an assisted living place since a similar fall a few years back. Please pray for complete healing for the break!

Additionally, my cousin Donna will have colon surgery on Thursday in Olympia, so please keep her, her family and the medical team in prayer. Those of you who were at our sending from church have met her…she’s a totally amazing woman and a great photographer! She took the photos that are on our prayer cards and our mug shot for the blog page. She’s also a newly minted great-grandmother to Elleah!

Thanks so much for all your prayers and support…we love and appreciate all you do for us.

Friends and family update

So much is going on with our friends and family, including a lot of pictures so we thought we’d share some!

Aaron, Angie and new daughter Aly!



The Ekkas settling into their new home


Ethan’s 5th birthday!



Abby’s baptism!



Jonny and Marina in China


Rod and Sharon’s wedding:



Greg and the kids



Kiesha and Elleah



Amy and Daniel on the night they were engaged

It’s the little things…

that can get us down, such as:

We are pretty much up to our eyebrows in laundry these days because the onset of the rainy season has made it more of a challenge to get it done. The washer is on the low spot on the patio, and even though it is up on three-inch high bricks it still is surrounded by water most of the time, so you are standing in a puddle every time you use it.

Then just getting the clothes up on the line and dry is a challenge between storms. It took four days last week to get everything from one load dry because of the rains and humidity!! But I’ve followed the leader of my neighbors and I now hang shirts and t-shirts on hangers as they come out of the washer. Then I hang them on the line that way. Much easier to grab and run indoors with them when the showers come, and they are already on hangers so they can go right on the curtain rods in the shower and the kitchen to continue drying.

Then our water has been off again a lot lately, complicating laundry, bathing, cleaning in general. Tough to do with the water off. Japame says its temporary…it always is, but we are on day two of our latest outage, just not fun. And it’s all of town this time, not just our end, so we can’t sneak over to the Lumppios for a shower because they have no water either!

The latest storms have been doozies. The worst thunder and lightning I can recall. And for hours on end…the last storm parked itself over us from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and boomed and flashed the whole time. Of course, we lost power, so no air or fan, but the rain cooled it down enough to be tolerable with the windows open. But with the huge rain came a new channel in our road out front, moving closer to the house…we hope that trend doesn’t continue. And the wind driven rain made it’s way into the kitchen through the window and door frame and so we had minor flooding. Thankfully, the floor isn’t at all level, so it was contained to the “L” that forms the outside wall and the wall between the kitchen and the guest bedroom. Plus the guest room wall got wet again, same place, smaller wet spot!

We’ve both been bitten a ton from the onslaught of mosquitoes, flys and Lord knows what else…I bet I’ve got 30 bites on my legs alone, Ralph’s got more. We have just become food for these critters. We use bug spray in the house and apply “Off” and that does help, but it must be the rains that have encouraged them as we haven’t ever had this many critters about.

We even had a ant invasion. Got up one morning and noticed this gritty gray circle near the front door. On closer inspection it was full of tiny little ants…and the gray grit was the remains of the tile grout they had excavated in order to get inside the house. So I got my trusty bug spray and administered a good dose on the circle and the area where they came in. Instantly I had a huge outpouring of much larger ants and flying ants from inside the wall…hundreds and hundreds of them!! I kept applying the spray until they stopped coming out. Yuck! Had one more episode with them a few days later, but none since.

Then we had our first scorpion! It was a small black one only about an inch or so long, and outside, not in the house.

But even with all this we had one really cool critter made a temporary home with us…a big beautiful butterfly. Her wingspan was nearly as large as my entire hand, she was dark brown and spotted. She came inside and stayed all day…out of the 100-degree heat I’d guess. Night fell, she didn’t go out again, so we shut the house down and put on the air. Then came the big storm. She didn’t like the storm and fluttered about the house like a crazed mini-bat, wearing herself out. When we opened the windows we tried to encourage her to go out, but she was too freaked out. She finally made her way out the next morning.

But, even though all of this stuff can bug us and get us down, we also know how completely blessed we are to have a God who loves us and cares for us, and family and friends who do likewise. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers…those prayers keep us going from day to day and we are blessed to have so many of you helping us via prayer! Praise the Lord.

Various technical difficulties!!

These recent blog entries are going up with the date they were written noted because the date they were published is different. Several of you have written noticing that the blog site has been down a lot of late. WMPL has been hit with viruses that take the site down. It does come up and then go back down, and as of today, they think they have it resolved. It's been the whole WMPL site, not just the blogs! Wouldn't hurt to keep it in prayer as it could be a means of attack by the enemy against WMPL.