Category: Mexico

“You did pretty awful. Didn’t you?”

Today I volunteered to help one of the local interpreters (sign language) with an assignment. The program was to have been 3 hours long. Certainly she needed help. No other interpreters were available. While I understand I am not qualified to interpret under the standards of RID interpreters, there are no such rules here. An interpreter doing their work for 3 hours straight is not proper. Besides, I love interpreting. It is one of my favorite activities in my ministry.

So, I told her I could jump in and relieve her every so often. She was certainly grateful for the help.

When the program started I knew I was in trouble. I did not clearly understand the man’s speech. On top of that, he was, of course, speaking Spanish (not my native language) and I was interpreting into Mexican Sign Language.

After the interpreter had been up there about 20 minutes I stepped up to relieve her. I did not do so well. She jumped back in after a 5 minute break. I let her go another 30 minutes before I jumped in again. This time I did better since the subject matter was a bit simpler and I had had almost an hour of listening to the man. I was up about 10 minutes the second time to wrap up the lecture. Thankfully it did not go anywhere close to 3 hours.

The older Deaf and the teachers at the Deaf school said I did a good job. Not great, but “you will get there.” One of the Deaf girls (yes, the same retarded girl I mentioned before) met me with: “You did pretty awful. Didn’t you?”

Thanks for the encouragement!

Thanksgiving Run

Since today is a day off, I thought I would put in a longer than normal weekday run. Not that this morning is really any different for those of us who mostly work in the evenings. I have treated this morning as time that I don’t feel pressured to accomplish anything productive. That allowed me to get up late (still before 7:00) and lounge around until breakfast. I normally run before I eat a real meal, though I have a small bowl of cereal most mornings before running. Today I had bread pudding and piled a caramel sauce made with goat’s milk onto the bread pudding.

I was thinking that the goat’s milk caramel would make a great running gel. It has about the same consistency. In some aspects it is good, in others, not so much. Packed with carbs and calories. Twice as much as my PowerGel packs. But no sodium to speak of. But the carbs/calories must have done something for me. I had a great run, even extending it beyond my planned mileage.

After breakfast I lounged around to let the food settle. Since it has been so cool in the mornings, I saw no danger in getting out a bit later. It got down to 55 degrees last night. Second night in a row. I ran at about 65 degrees this morning.

Because of having eaten a bigish breakfast and it not settling completely, I felt kinda sluggish early in the run. Until about mile 3 I was not sure if I was going to do my full 6 miles I had planned out. But somewhere around mile 3 the sugar must have kicked in. I felt great! When I was getting close to home I decided to add at least one more mile onto the run. Because I had told my wife I would be home in about an hour, I did not want to go too much over that. I ended up with a 7 mile run that felt like a short maintenance run. Great stuff.

The dogs around here must all be imported from the USA. In México this is not a holiday since Thanksgiving is a US holiday. But the dogs were taking the day off. I did not have a single dog chase me (very rare). The few that did bark were behind fences. The only dog that was not behind a fence that barked at me was the cutest little schnauzer puppy. He only barked after I went by and he thought I was a safe distance away.

Or, the lack of barking/chasing could have something to do with the fact that I was out an hour later than normal.

But, I think the real reason lies in the fact that most were humiliated. They could not bring themselves to act like dogs this morning. “Why’s that?”, you ask? Well, they were wearing T-shirts. The last two days there have been an increase in dogs in T-shirts running around the streets of Mérida. It got down to 55 degrees the last 2 nights. And everyone here knows that a dog cannot survive in those extremely cold conditions unless you humiliate them and put a shirt on them.

So, I stick to humiliation as being the reason the dogs did not bark or chase me this morning.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Where were you in 1621? Probably not in Plymouth, Mass. Or wherever they celebrated.

About 4 years ago we were in Plymouth and got to go see the rock. I am not sure if I have any pictures of it. I do remember that it was very cold. I don’t remember the time of year, but I think it may have been late October or early November.

Being the nerd that I am, I called my school principal (from 15 years previous) and left a trivia quiz on his answering machine. I said I was looking at a rock with the year 1620 carved into it. I wondered if he knew where I was. When he called me back, he knew. Can’t even get any satisfaction out of trivia on old school teachers.

While out running this morning I saw a Pilgrim’s Pride food truck. I knew it had to be Thanksgiving.

We are going to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. Should be about 30 or so people there. Mostly US people. There will be a couple of Canadians with us.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Ice bath for runners

The runners in the audience will understand what an ice bath is. Helps to cool the muscles after a race. Keeps the DOS down (delayed onset soreness). I usually make pool cleaning time right after my runs. This allows me to get the pool clean and cool the legs off. Not as cold as an ice bath, but much cooler than nothing. And it feels good too.

Today I had an ice bath, but not by choice and not after a run. Yesterday we discovered that we were out of LP gas. This was in the morning as we were getting ready to head out for a pretty full day’s worth of activities. Since someone had to be home to let the gas guys in and up to the roof of the house, we had to put off calling them. We decided that we could probably get them to come out in the afternoon.

Plans changed and the afternoon/evening became totally free to have the gas guys come out. But this also meant that we did not rush right back home after the morning events. By the time we got home and I called the gas company, they had stopped their delivery for the day. They won’t be able to come until Monday.

Tonight I got to a point where I could not stand my oder and needed a shower. So it was off to the ice bath for me. We have our water holding tank on top of the house. This is usually nice and heated by the sun. Today was overcast and only got to 81 degrees. Last night’s temp was 57 for a low. So the water was not overly warm.

I visualized myself having just finished a nice long run and pretended that the water felt great on my hot body. Of course the inside the house temperature was 70 degrees, so it was hard to convince me that I was overly hot.

They don’t make heaters in these houses and with the windows closed, you still feel a pretty good breeze on a cold night.

Definitely a different culture

Today I was teaching about John the Baptist in Sunday School class at the Deaf church. He is not the John who wrote the book of John nor First, Second and Third John or the book of The Revelation. John, the author, is the one we refer to as Saint John.
John the Baptist however was a cousin to Jesus and was his “forerunner.” He went around preaching that Jesus was coming. John attracted some attention. The Bible says that he dressed in camel skins and ate locusts and wild honey.

The insect that the Bible calls locusts are what I called grasshoppers when I was growing up. I think that is pretty common in the US. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about locusts and shows that they are capable of the destruction of “biblical proportions” that has been attributed to them.Desert Locust

In Spanish the word for locusts (or grasshopper) is langosta. If you are up on your seafood in various languages, you will know that langosta is lobster as well. I did my best to describe lobsters for them. Though they are teens and fairly well educated, they are Deaf and do not know all the names of animals that do not affect their lives regularly. After my great description of a lobster and they knew what I was talking about, I asked them if they liked lobster / langosta. Basically…no. It was “OK,” but nothing too exciting for them.

I then told them that what John the Baptist was eating was not lobster anyway. He was eating an insect by the name langosta. They did not know what it could be. So, I pulled out some pictures that I had of grasshoppers. They got excited. One blurted out (in signs), “Oh! Those are really good. Especially with chocolate!” They not only knew what they were, but could tell how best to eat them!

After we were done being grossed out and amused by their excitement I said that John probably did not eat them with chocolate. But the Bible does say that he ate wild honey. So perhaps he dipped his grasshoppers in the honey instead.

Just because we don’t understand something that the Bible says, does not make it untrue or unbelievable. Maybe from our perspective we cannot wrap our heads around it, but it may just be a matter of experiencing a new culture to get an understanding.