Adventures in Mexico!

Hello everyone! We've had an

other amazing week in Mazatlan. Here are some of the highlights we want to share with all of you! Sorry that its taken so long, blogging is harder to figure out than I thought! - morgan

Tuesday (2.3.09) afternoon Jose and lilia needed some help moving bricks behind our apartments. Piles and piles high, load after load, we moved them from the first floor to the second floor. it was quite a job, but we finally got all the bricks upstairs! Jose, Oscar (the carpenter), Kyle and Preston helped moved our new washer and dryer combo machine to where the bricks were previously. That thing looked heavy! Good job guys! Our hard work paid off because Jose and Lilia invited us to join them for dinner out on the town. We were so thankful that we had a night off of cooking! We went to a "little hole in the wall" and had the most amazing food ever. We all agreed that it was the best Mexican food we have since we arrived. We will definitely be visiting there again! After dinner, we walked to Burger King to get ice cream. You can't have a mean without ice cream of course! It was a nice treat!

Wednesday (2.4.09) we were with Johnny. He cracks all of us up! We love him very much! Wednesday's are the days we fast our lunch to pray for the city. Around 1, Johnny picked us up to go pray for the city of Mazatlan. He drove us to an amazing spot where we were able to see the entire city. Johnny was helpful because he informed us of the main prayer points for Mazatlan. Afterwards, Johnny drove us back home and we rested for the rest of the night! A little side note about the day: While we were praying a bird came and pooped on Preston, it was quite hilarious, so the picture below is Johnny taking a napkin with a little spit added to it, to wipe off the poop!! We all laughed hysterically!! 

Thursday (2.5.09) was a wonderful day! Alfonso picked us up and we ventured to a orphanage/children's home, called The Salvation Army. There was a huge, weed eaten baseball field that we cleaned or at least made some huge progress on...next Thursday we are going to finish it up and play a little baseball with the kids! About half way through the kids came out and helped for a while, they were all so cute and so appreciative of us cleaning their field. Later that night, we went with the youth group to play a little soccer or in Mexico we call it futbal; this is an outreach that they do every Thursday to reach out to the community and have fun at the same time!!!! Another thing we forgot to mention about cleaning the field was the machetes they gave us to use!!!! and after we were all done, we set fire to the piles we made of all the weeds!!!

Friday (2.6.09) We went to the church Espiritu Y Verdad to clean with the youth pastor, Carlos. It looks like all that cleaning at the church on Fridays paid off!!! Later that afternoon, we came back to the house to do a work project. The wall across from our apartments was needing a little TLC, so the boys got their scrapers and sanders, the girls got their brooms and dust pans and so began the work. During the process, Kelsey found an ant home under one of the flower pots. That was a surprise for all of us! There were so many little ants crawling around after that! That night, Jose and Lilia invited us to have dinner again! We had Mexican, beef tamales. They were so good!

Saturday (2.07.09) morning Johnny came to pick us up bright and early for a children's breakfast in a poorer part of Mazatlan. This breakfast is their best meal out of the whole week, so we were excited to serve them and talk with them about the love of Christ. Later that night we went to youth. They had a guest speaker and unfortunately through poor translation, we were a little bit confused as to what was going on! However, the night was very powerful for the youth and we were able to pray for them!

Sunday(2.8.09) morning, we were very blessed to have a translator. The message was all about unity and bringing together the body of Christ as one; sounds familiar, doesn't it? For lunch, Kelsey treated us to pork tacos!! Yea! On the way home, we drove by a circus that had live animals for all to see! So of course, we had to turn around and visit with them!  There were tigers, leopards, giraffes, lamas, camels, a buffalo, goats, zebras and one panther!! We never knew camels were so large. Later that night, we went back to the church to hear Jose speak for the night service. We really enjoyed it, the only thing was we didn't have a translator, but from what we gathered, it was on unity also.

We are all growing in love, in grace, in unity, in servanthood, and in humility. Thank you for all your faithful prayers and we will update later! Love you all!! - GBC