We noticed that water was leaking in around the air conditioner in our room and wondered how that could happen, but it was too dark to see. And the ceiling in our room was dripping…not a good thing either.
When daylight dawned we first surveyed the damage upstairs and there were leaks not only around the air conditioners, but in the ceilings in the upstairs bath, the stairwell, our bedroom and the big unfinished bedroom in the front of the house.
When we went downstairs we were looking a what remained of a little thin river that ran from the dining room, through the kitchen, bath, living room and then out under the front door. Not a pretty sight!
That is about a half an inch of water stuck in the dining room.
Notice the water marks on the wall behind the fridge and in the downstairs bath!
It was enough water to float the wastebasket!
We called the landlords and they came out within the hour and found the drain on the service patio in the back was hopelessly clogged, so the water had no where to go but into the house and also into the beauty salon next door. They started working to clear the drain and had the worst time of it, it just wouldn’t clear out, so they went next door to the beauty salon and opened up a foot square access in the floor and found it clogged with roots and mud. As they started digging away trying to find the opening for the drain several dozen rather large cockroaches zoomed out of the hole and into the beauty salon setting the girls screaming and running for their bug spray. Ralph stomped the ones that came our direction!!
As they worked away they finally got a hold of a large root from the bougainvillea in the neighbors back yard that had worked it’s way into the pipe. They yanked and yanked on the thing and finally dislodged this huge four foot long, three inch wide glop of root, mud, garbage, a yellow bouncy ball and more cockroaches…yuk! The debris from the pipeline filled two five gallon buckets! They then started on the much longer length of pipe from the beauty salon under our cochera to the road…and it was stuffed with tons of dirt, leaves, plastic bottle caps and mud. But at last they got it free flowing.
They returned on Saturday and put a protective coating all over the rooftop to prevent further leaking and to investigate how water could have leaked into the bedroom via the hole for the air conditioner. Turns out the house next door (which has been under construction for more than three years) added a vaulted roof that forces all their rainwater right down on to our patio wall and also right inside our bedroom!! Our landlord couldn’t believe it when he saw it. Guess it’s completely illegal to build that kind of roof unless it drains onto your own property. Can’t have it drain on anyone else’s. So looks like he’s going to make them change the roof, and he has his property rights behind him to make the change happen!! It will be interesting to see what happens with that!
In any case, we were blessed with just some wet and muddy floors, walls and ceilings and they are already drying out quite nicely. We are so thankful that none of our furniture or electronics were ruined by the little river!! God is good!
The year we were in La Cruz the church struggled mightily. Jose had health issues, the congregation whittled itself down to us and one other man. Finally, it came down to no one coming and Jose decided to close it.
So, the church in La Cruz joins the one in El Salto…shuttered. Of the four congregations that remain in Sinaloa, three are very tiny with only a few families and the one here in Mazatlan has about 25 families. Actually, there is one large extended family and all the brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins and perhaps two other families as well.
Please pray for Pastor Ismael in Ceuta, Pastor Juan in El Castillo, Pastor Ignacio in El Rosario and Pastor Lupe in Mazatlan and their congregations.
There is a railroad crossing that we pass several times a week in our travels, though we rarely every catch the train itself, perhaps once a month. The train crossing has lights telling you to stop because the train is approaching and has rather sturdy crossing gates to prevent you from trying to cross in a brave but stupid moment. The crossing gates are very heavy reinforced metal and are operated by counterbalance with a guy coming out to push them down and lean on them to force them back up again once the train has passed. There is a little building along side the tracks where there is someone on duty 24 hours a day just to work the gates.
Of course, while waiting for the train to pass all that empty space on the right of the traffic fills up with motorcycles and bicycles and they are the first to get across once the train is gone and the gates are lifted, beating all the backed up traffic by several minutes sometimes!
We have discovered of late that there is a book exchange in the Golden Zone! We sometimes get starved for English reading materials so this is really an answered prayer for us. The paperbacks are $56 pesos for new releases, $46 for older books, but only $23 with a trade-in and we have trade-ins!! So we recently went down and browsed their racks and came home with some new books to read. Yippee!
In our Spanish classes this Spring Javier encouraged us to read in Spanish as well, particularly the newspapers so that we can be aware of things happening around us as well as build vocabulary. It also gives us something to talk about with the neighbors! So we’ve been buying the paper more often, and now rather than taking the dictionary and a week to get through it, it now takes the dictionary and a day or so! Not too bad.
By reading the paper though we learn more about the bad stuff happening around us, like a breakout of Dengue Fever to the south of us, which prompted city officials to come to every home and inspect possible sites for standing water (mosquito breeding ground) and to make sure we had insecticide powder in every one. They also wanted to know if our tinaco (water reservoir on the roof) had a cover on it as they can also be a breeding ground for mosquitoes. We knew it didn’t have one because the telephone installer told us it needed a cover. The Dengue folks encouraged us to get it covered soon. Since we have no access to the roof and no ladder, we talked to the landlords and they have installed a spanking new cover for us.
There’s also been narco-violence aplenty and a plain old fashioned murder at a business near our neighborhood. But also lots of weddings, baby showers and quince anos, which is a huge party given for a girl on her 15th birthday. All of these are covered in the paper with photos and stories…a whole section of the paper devoted to them.
One of the famous Getty family recently visited to produce and debut a play he’d written. They are talking about starting passenger train service from here to Tucson. That would be pretty awesome if they get it off the ground. They are starting to think about the problems of traffic and access as they have a huge housing boom happening here and no real plan in place to deal with the increased traffic. Pretty cool to have a better working knowledge of what’s going on around us.
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.
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.
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!!!
