Category: Mexico

Missionary Talks 59 and 60

I looked back over my posts recently and realized that I did not give an update when I posted episode 59 of Missionary Talks. That was an interview with Chris and Carol Woodley. They are missionaries in the Philippines working with the Deaf. They are a couple we had met about 6 years ago and enjoyed getting to know them. We were able to be in a conference together a couple of weeks ago. You will enjoy hearing their passion and love for the work they do.

Tonight I uploaded an interview with a missionary to Mexico, Tim Strang. He grew up on the field and has been back there for the last 12 years serving in smaller towns and villages. Many of the missionaries I talk with are in the bigger cities. Some will even make an issue as to why we should do our work in the larger areas. Tim is very much interested in the villages and has a love for where he is serving the Lord.

Enjoy these two episodes of Missionary Talks. I have a couple more interviews already recorded with a couple more scheduled. Looks like things are headed in the right direction for a while.

We are “home”

After a week of traveling, we arrived in Pensacola Sunday morning about 4:00.

Tuesday
We did our final packing and and were ready to hit the road about 11:00 am. We planned to have breakfast with some friends. Because their phone was not working, we never did get caught up with them. So we had breakfast by ourselves then swung by their house to say our final good-byes.

As a travel day, we did well on Tuesday. We did not make it as far down the road as we had anticipated, but we also left a few hours later than we wanted. After 10 trips through the city, we finally found the hotel district of Villahermosa. We have stayed in various expensive hotels on the periphery of the city, but this time located the cheap hotels near down town. Getting our truck and trailer into the parking lot was a bit of a challenge, but we were thankful for a gated parking area.

Wednesday
Because of our late departure on Tuesday, we were about 2 hours behind schedule on Wednesday. We made that up by getting on the road early. We arrived in Poza Rica, or planned destination for the day, and found a hotel with a nice parking lot. We drove around looking at hotel parking lots and then decided if we wanted to check on the price of the hotel. The one we stayed at had a very large lot where we were able to park our truck way back in a corner and not have to worry about losing anything.

This was a sad day for us as the hamster that was traveling with us was not able to make the trip. We had read that they can easily be stressed. Apparently the stress of traveling got the better of him. He was the younger, stronger, healthier of our two hamsters. We left the old one with friends and took the young one on the road. He did not get a proper burial, but we did the best we could at the gas station.

Thursday
We made the final leg of the Mexico portion of the trip just fine. We had no problems on the Mexican side of the border; we just had to fill out some paperwork to cancel our immigration and vehicle paperwork. The US side of the border was a different story. We waited in a long line to get to the Customs officer. She had us pull over and unpack the truck and uncover the trailer. Everything passed inspection, even the rabbit.

There were friends waiting at a restaurant for us that evening. We were glad to spend time with them. They were 2 missionary families working with the Deaf in Mexico. One family lives at the border and the other happened to be passing through at the same time as we were, so we enjoyed the evening together.

We celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary by crossing into the US.

Friday
We drove from the border to Killeen, Texas to visit with an old friend. She is someone with whom we had worked for several years, but it has been 6 or 7 years since we saw her. She had a pleasant surprise for us when we arrived. A mutual friend was passing through at the same time and she invited him to spend the night with all of us. We all previously worked together and enjoyed sharing stories of days gone by as well as catching up on our current ministries. All of us are still doing the same type of ministry we were when we worked together, just in different locations now.

Saturday
We lingered at our friend’s house too long, but enjoyed every minute of it. We anticipated being in Pensacola between 10 pm and midnight. By the time we got through Houston, we knew that it would be closer to 1:00 am on Sunday, but not much of a problem.

Starting in Houston, we noticed the long line of cars headed west. This very packed traffic continued steadily from Houston to New Orleans. However, we, headed east, did not have any traffic to deal with. At least till we hit just north of New Orleans. At that point there was no one headed west any more, they were all headed east. Traffic then crawled from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. The normal 3 hour drive from New Orleans to Pensacola took us 6 hours. We were part of the 1,000,000 people who evacuated the state of Lousiana on Saturday in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav.

Sunday
By getting to Mom and Dad’s house at 4:00 in the morning, we did not quite make it out of bed in time for church that morning. We also took a long nap in the afternoon and were even a bit late to church that night.

We have landed. Now it is time to find a house to rent and get settled in over the next two weeks while getting prepared for our travel year starting the middle of September.

On the Road!

We finally got everything packed up. Been working on it slowly for a couple of weeks and then my wife started beating me the last 3 days or so to get my part done. We were up until 2:00 this morning getting the final things packed and loaded. We are moving back to the US for 1 year.

Today we were able to get out of town a bit before noon (but had to be up by 6:30 to do so) and traveled 7 hours to the city of Villahermosa. We have been here many times and have not found a hotel we are totally cool with in a price range we like. Today, since we got here a bit early, we drove around until we found the hotel area and found a nice place. Parking the Suburban and trailer were a challenge. They have a very small parking lot, but we were able to get them in.

We are taking one of our hamsters and our bunny. They have survived so far, but this is a big trip for both of them. We hope they do well.

Two more days to get out of Mexico and then two days to get to Pensacola.

A week in summary

This will be a catch up post. I was out of town most of the week. Can you believe we did not have any Internet access where we were? None! Barbaric.

We were in a little village not too far from the big city doing another camp for the Deaf. This time it was just the Deaf from our church in Merida. We would like to expand this to include all of the Yucatan Deaf. But at this point we are the only Christian ministry for the Deaf that we are aware of.

Camp
Tuesday
Before picking people up to head to camp, I had to swing by the immigration office to fill out the paperwork to cancel our visas. We will be leaving the country in less than 2 weeks. I got out of the immigration office much later than planned and started my rounds of getting everyone to the church.

Camp started well and we were able to run some events and give out medals that first night. We had an obstacle course. I was not in the competition for a medal, but I did run the course in the second fastest time. I lost to a 17 year old. I was pleased.

We had a good service that night with Bill, the pastor of our church, speaking.

Wednesday
I preached both services on Wednesday. We had some good games with no major injuries. That is always good.

Thursday
Bill preached both services on Thursday. We took the whole group to the beach. The girls went to one side of the world’s longest pier and the boys went to the other. I have never been to the beach in Progreso when it has been so nice. There was hardly any wind and the water was clear enough we could see our feet. That is special.

Friday
I preached the final service. My son took the Gold medal in scripture memory. We gave out Gold, Silver and Bronze medals for the team competition. By doing that, we were assured that everyone would get a medal. We happened to have 2 Golds left over so we gave them to the cooks.

Running
Wednesday
I ran 4.66 miles. It was from the town we were in, Chablecal, through the town of Dzibilchaltún and just a little past that. Then turn around and back to camp. I did not sleep well that night before. In fact, it may be better said that I did not sleep. I was pleased with my distance and pace despite the lack of sleep.

I noticed that there were a lot of bikes and few cars that I saw on my trip back to the village where we were in camp. They were headed to the big city where we lived.

Friday
I did not really plan to run on Friday, but would do so if I woke up in time. I did, so I did. I ran just 2.32 miles. It was the same route from Wednesday, but I turned around earlier. This time, though, I took note of the number of vehicles I saw on the road. There were 23 bicycles, 9 motorcycles/scooters, and 6 cars. You can tell from this that we were not in a very wealthy place.

I took my camera and snapped a shot of the road I ran on. It was very narrow.

Bananas
We have 2 bunches of bananas growing in the field next door. I chopped one bunch down yesterday after we got back from camp. There are close to 200 bananas on it. The second bunch will have to be harvested after we leave.

Camp for the Deaf in the south

Earlier I wrote about our camp in the northern part of Mexico. Next week we have our camp for the Deaf in the Yucatan peninsula region. Currently it will just be our church, but in the future we would like to see Deaf from all over this region of Mexico attend.

We are going with an Olympic theme for obvious reasons. We have a few events that we will borrow from the real games to play out in our own setting. We also have medals that we will present the winners. The medals are all identical, but the ribbons will indicate Gold, Silver and Bronze.

We will use a hula hoop to play discus. This should be pretty easy for the less physically capable.

Shot put might be a bit tougher. The shots will be water balloons. There might just happen to be a few people who get hit with these. Certainly a lot less painful than a 16 lb. shot.

Archery will be performed with darts and balloons.

The Triathlon will be a combination of three common items: jump rope, hula hoop and baseball bat. The jump rope will be used to jump while moving from one point to another. The hula hoop will be rolled along a designated path. The bat will be at the end of a run. The contestant has to put their head on the bat and spin around 10 times and then try to make their way back to the finish line. A timed event of course.

One of the unique events we will be doing is a team standing long jump. This will be a relay type event. The team members will be in a line in which the person at the front of the line will take a standing long jump. The rest of the team will move up to the landing spot and the next member takes their jump. This continues until all team members have a chance to jump. The team that jumps farthest overall will win.

There are a few other events planned, but that is the idea of our games.

We are expecting about 20 people at camp to make all this happen.