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!!

Things have been hectic

We have been trying to keep up with church and associated activities, school and the associated homework. We also were squeezing in some time to visit a bit with my cousins who were vacationing here. Hectic fits the last couple weeks or so to a “T” and will also fit next week as well.

School has been going great and going fast. We have one more class on Wednesday next week and then we are done! Six weeks gone by in a flash. We are speaking more confidently than ever and understanding more than ever as others speak to us. We just need to keep practicing what we have learned, and we have learned a lot. Tons of new words!! Verbs and how to use them. Weird little conversational things. Amazing how things can come together with the right teacher!! We are so thankful for Javier!!

Church has been good, pastor and Emilia got back from their visit to Alberta Canada safe and sound. They REALLY enjoyed the time there, even though it was snowy and cold. It’s so cute to see pictures of them standing in snow, all bundled up against the weather…a problem they don’t face here!! Last Wednesday evening during the prayer service they had put together a slide show for the congregation and it was great to see their trip!! They visited several churches, WMPL Canada and the Canadian Lutheran Bible Institute. They were completely blessed by their time there, and they in turn blessed us all by sharing the adventure with us.

My cousin Donna and her son Tim visited Mazatlan this past week too and it was a blast having them here. They stayed at Torres, a really nice resort at the north end of the beach and also at La Siesta an older hotel at the far south end of the beach. They also spent a couple of nights in La Casa Irey, not as classy as a resort, but the proprietors are pretty nice.

We did take our day off and go up to El Quelite and to La Cruz. El Quelite is a really pretty, very tiny pueblo just north of here on the free highway and Donna LOVES to take pictures so it was a match made in heaven! The houses there are all brightly painted, have lovely flower gardens and broad front porches, very picturesque. The plaza next to the church is very shaded and tropical and the trees there are filled with song birds so it’s just fun to stand there and listen to the music they make!!

We then continued up to La Cruz so they could see where we lived before and to have them meet Tom and Lidia and the girls who joined us for a nice lunch at Comida Mary’s, one of Ralph’s favorite spots to eat in La Cruz. We also spent a little time at the main plaza and then when out to Playa Ceuta and also visited the turtle refuge while we were out there. They have completed their new main building now and have begun moving their exhibits into it. It’s nice to see them improving this in anticipation of more tourism, but right now I think the lady that works there has one of the loneliest jobs! But she likes it and she’s very good about explaining all they do.

One afternoon after school Tim, Donna and I took the bus down to the market and bought some swordfish and a kilo of shrimp and Tim cooked a fabulous seafood dinner and served it with a plate full of mangoes, avocados and jicama! What a treat to have such a yummy meal served right in our own home!! He’s a great cook and is famous at home for his pickled asparagus, salsa, relishes and more.

We had ordered a coffee table from a furniture factory that Carmen had recommended and they called to tell us it was ready so after we dropped my cousins off at the airport we dashed out to get our new table. Everything from this shop is completely handcrafted, yet inexpensive. Not sure how they do that but the table is beautiful!!

Between the airport and the factory are many, many acres of mango orchards too…the promise of good things to come in a couple of weeks!

This coming week brings us Dia de los Ninos on Monday (a day dedicated to kids with parades and special parties to celebrate them), followed by Dia de Trabajo on Tuesday which is a day off for most workers, then our last day of school on Wednesday and Thursday brings La Santa Cruz, in which construction workers are blessed and they decorate their work sites with flowers. Then Mother’s Day is celebrated here on May 10. Our church workers meeting will be held on Tuesday May 1st at the church building in El Salto. Thursday and/or Friday we hope to nail down specifics of volunteering at Hogar de los Ninos and Cuidad de los Ninos. I’ll write more on all of this later!!

Thanks for your prayers!!!

Viejos estudiantes

Okay, we are considered old at school. We are older than all the students and most of the teachers. That being said even old dogs can learn new tricks and we are LEARNING! We have a great teacher, Javier, who really pushes us to not just speak but to read and write as well so that it sticks with us as we go along. He’s giving us all the connections that we’ve needed for the thousands of words we already knew, we just didn’t understand how to string them all together properly. We’ve even learned the Mexican alphabet…certainly helps to sound out new words and hear words when others speak when you know how the letters SOUND. Whew! We were beginning to think we’d never get it. Plus Javier’s now staying an extra half hour each class session to help us catch up with the other two students since we started late. What a guy.

We do have a long way to go still, but we are getting more confident with each session. We were even able to have brief conversations with Lidia’s mom when she visited even though we’d never met her before. Usually new people are harder for us to understand because we aren’t used to their cadence and patterns of speaking. But we understood a lot of what she was saying and could speak with her pretty well too. We’ve been speaking more confidently with the people at church too. Amazing. We may just get this yet!!

Thanks so much for your prayers for us as we sought the right school…we are thankful that you all hang in with us and are faithful to keep us in prayer. Bless you.

On the bus

I think Paul Simon had a song a few years ago: it’s all happening at the zoo. Well, I’ve got news for him…it’s all happening on the bus.

Any given day you have a new experience on riding the bus here. We have had people selling all kinds of things, pirated CDs and DVDs, many different kinds of food, fruit and sweets. Chocolate is a biggie though I can’t see it in the heat…you’d think it would get all melty and weird. Then we had the sweet little girls, two of them, all dressed up in white dresses who were riding along with their mom. They struck up conversations with us and as they departed gave us each a kiss on the cheek. One evening a full grown man got on board with his guitar, not unusual, however as soon as we got rolling he burst into song. Loud, off-key song. He sang two or three numbers as we rolled along, then took a break and tried to get donations for his performance. No takers, so thankfully he sat out the rest of the ride silently. Then we had the little guy, about four, who got on with his mom and took a seat right in front of us. He then turned around and burst into song…at the top of his voice. His mom tried to hush him up, but he wasn’t having it. He sang on for miles! The guy with the metal filigree cross taller and wider than him. The lady with the large wheelie cooler full of who knows what.

Then there are the drivers themselves, all of them nice to us thus far. But there’s one who’s entire bus is drenched in a bright pink ad for some beauty service. Can’t help but think he takes a ribbing from his peers on that one. One guy had his girlfriend on the bus with him and she rode in the seat behind him, hugging on his neck for several stops and then when she was ready to depart paused to give him a rather long kiss goodbye. Had most people chuckling. There’s the guy with a couple of rows of plush seats, like out of someone’s Honda. Standard issue are molded plastic seats, so catching this bus and finding those seats free is like a bonus. There’s the guy who’s bus is SO clean and graffiti free that you wonder how on earth he does it. There’s also a guy with a little steering wheel complete with a suicide knob. Think those have been illegal for years in the states, haven’t they? Some of the drivers have Jesus and/or Our Lady of Guadalupe all over the bus, some just stickers or laminated cards, but some are really elaborate, large statues or portraits. Lots of rosaries. Lots of diamond tufted leather/vinyl accessories, custom leather covers for the gear shift. Custom coin carriers. Their own boom boxes so they can play their tunes as they drive, and share them with all the passengers. One guy even has a small black and white TV to catch his telenovellas!! They have their own fans so they can keep cool…nope the average city bus is NOT air conditioned. Only the large green tourist buses in the Golden Zone are air conditioned, and for that you pay double to ride.

Since the drivers pretty much know one another, they will on occasion stop in the middle of their routes for a quick visit, blocking the street in both directions while they have their little chat. Even had one ride where the drivers were obviously angry at one another, and they were passing each other and cutting each other off on the narrow city streets, trying to rob fares from each other…that was a little on the wild side. There are also drivers who will stop to pick you up even though the bus is full. So you stand, holding on to the railing above your head until a seat opens up. Sometimes a gentleman will give up his seat for a lady or someone older (sometimes I qualify in both categories), but most times not…you just have to wait your turn. Luckily for us it usually clears out pretty well about five stops down the line, so we don’t have to stand for long. Gives your muscles a workout though!!

All in all, a lot of entertainment and transportation to boot, all for just four and a half pesos per person, each way!! Come on down, we’ll take you along for the ride.

Odds and ends for March

Gosh, in a couple of days we will have been in Mazatlan a whole month. Doesn’t seem possible. The time has gone by so quickly it’s just been amazing. But we are really feeling settled in and are adjusting pretty well to life here.

Pastor Lupe and his wife Emilia left on Monday for a two week visit to Alberta Canada. They’ll be speaking at some churches and also visiting the Canadian Lutheran Bible Institute for a talk there, and will also be at the annual meeting for WMPL Canada. So their plates will be full. They have a couple that will be interpreting for them during the whole visit, former Mexico field missionaries, the Gomez family. We’ve met the Gomez family a couple of times when they’ve visited here and they are really nice. Lupe and Emilia were very excited about the trip, they’ve never flown before and never been to Canada. They were a little concerned about how cold it was going to be though, but were excited and happy just the same. Please pray for uneventful travel and good opportunities to share about Mexico and the Lord’s work here as they visit our northern brethren!

We did go back to immigration a week ago to get our revised visas and we could not believe the crowd there, more than 35 people in the work area and more loitering about outside. It was pretty crazy. But we still got our documents in less than 45 minutes, not sure what the system is, but there were still about 35 people there when we left too, many of them the same folks as when we got there. But we were thankful to have the visas back with a minimum of hassle and no expenses at all save for the cost of 10 photocopies! Praise the Lord!

Our biggest achievement this week is that after much searching and praying we have found a language school and enrolled…we’ve already had a couple of classes and think it’s going to be great. We’ve learned quite a bit already and we have a wonderful teacher who is quite patient and who has a grasp of where we are and where we need to be language-wise. It’s a very personal approach to teaching, and there are only two others in the class so we all get the attention we need. We couldn’t be happier. Praise the Lord!

The afternoon we enrolled in school we needed to go down to centro to purchase books for the class, the only place in town that has them is a small bookstore near Plaza Machado. So off we go on the bus and then walk from the bus to the plaza only to find the bookstore was closed!! But we discovered the whole plaza had been taken over by booksellers and people lecturing on books!! So we hunted for the stall of the bookstore we were interested in and she happily went down to her closed store and got the books for us. Yippee! Nice to not have to make another trip and also nice to be able to explore the book fair a bit as a bonus!

We were blessed to be able to go with Carmen and Genaro this past Saturday as they visited and evangelized in a neighborhood near here called Valle del Ejido. They are so good at what they do because they are so down to earth and so grounded in the Word!! This little neighborhood will eventually be home to a new mission church, and getting to know the folks here is part of the process. We had some really touching moments and a really funny moment too when one of the ladies we were visiting with suddenly asked Carmen if Ralph was her dad. After we all laughed a bit about it she explained that no, he wasn’t her dad, but a friend and brother in Christ!! Ralph was thinking he wasn’t old enough to be her dad and was about to feel insulted a bit when he did the math and realized that YEP he was old enough to be her dad after all. Pretty funny. We also had an age related comment from our instructor at school too…he thinks it’s just wonderful that folks our age are learning a new language!! We must be getting up there!!

This week also brought farewells as the Jacksons packed up to head north to Nogales, then to Minneapolis for debriefing and then on to Lake Stevens, WA for six months of furlough. They’ll return to Nogales to work with the churches there beginning in the fall. They gave a lot of stuff away, sold a lot of stuff and ended up packing the truck and trailer twice before they got everything down to the essentials of life and were ready to hit the road. Sounds like us in January of 06!! We made a couple of trips over to their house and back with truckloads of stuff for Carmen and Genaro…and also to take them to lunch before they headed out of town. We’ll miss having them around and are praying for good rest and reunions for them and completely uneventful travel as they make their way to the northwest.

And we finally got our taxes done this week…I started them in January, but we were waiting on some docs to arrive from the states, and then you throw in moving and they really got on the back burner. More than a bit I guess. But they are done now and we are thankful. Not sure when I would have found the time now that we are in school.

Last but not least Benito Juárez Day was celebrated here on March 21, and we had a little parade through our neighborhood with all the little girls who were vying to become queen of their various schools…brightly decorated pulmonias were their mode of transportation. Lots of music, horn honking and the setting off of more than a few car alarms…they made sure you knew they were in the neighborhood!