All decked out to go after the weeds with a backpack sprayer
Do you remember your elementary school days when riddles were so much fun and so very intriguing? I do. Let me try a couple of them on you:
Riddle: When are eyes not eyes?
Answer: When the wind makes them water.
Riddle: When is a door not a door?
Answer: When it’s ajar.
How about this one: What is yellow, weights 1,000 pounds and sits in a tree and chirps?
Answer: Two 500 pound canaries. Okay, okay, it was a bit lame even when I was ten, but I thought that it was hilariously funny at the time.
So, how about this one: When is a sixteen acre farm a five thousand acre spread?
The new children's center in Buenes Aires
Answer: When you are fighting every weed, tangling vine and invasive grass with a backpack sprayer and a machete in order to get an upper hand before they take over the new growth sugarcane crop.
Yep, that is where we are right now. We had a wonderful harvest. The field has had its first cultivation and the new shoots of sugarcane are coming through. But so are the invasive weeds and grasses. It will be a battle for the next while until we can get on top of the weed issue. The trouble is that it is 100% labour intensive – even when we use the herbicides that are so prevalently used here. But what would we have to do with our time if we didn’t have this? Lord willing, we will prevail!
I anxiously wait for notification that the paperwork to import our disk has finally completed its slow way through the government channels. It has been well over a month now, and we still don’t have the needed permits to bring it across. But I suspect that this will happen sometime in January, after the government holiday shutdown that usually lasts much of the month of December. The disk will help us so much in being able to control the weeds.
The children meet for the Christmas party
Theresa and I had a quiet Christmas. We were invited out to eat at the home of friends of ours on the night of the 24th. Christmas Eve is the main celebrating time here in Mexico. Usually there is a meal, gifts are exchanged and opened, and the festivities generally go on into the wee hours of the morning. We had a lovely time with our host family until after one o’clock in the morning and then came home to a karaoke party outside our bedroom window.
If you know Mexican culture at all you know that it is warm, open, loving, friendly, and very, very loud. There is absolutely no concept of there being a problem with noise, or any notion of thoughtlessness in placing your speakers into the street and cranking up the music so that all can “enjoy” it with you – at any time of the day or night.
Our immediate neighbours have a large extended family and they thoroughly enjoy times together as a big, happy family group. Unfortunately they also adore karaoke and the sound of their own, and each other’s voices. They cheer and clap loudly with, and after each rendition. To our chagrin however, there is not one of them who can hold a tune,
Children intent on their Bible lesson
and the style of “ranchero” music which they love is, well, lets just say, not our style! But it is lovingly belted out at cranked-up volumes until the windows of our house literally rattle – until the early hours of the morning.
So to use the term “a quiet Christmas” is somewhat misleading. The quietness was certainly not in the sense of volume, but rather in Theresa and me just kind of kicking back around the house for Christmas day itself. We got in some phone calls to the kids and to friends and family. We had some folks drop by to visit, and just enjoyed the day together.
On the Saturday before Christmas (the 22nd) we were invited by Javier and Cristina to participate in the dedication of a little “galera” which they had just finished building in Buenes Aires. This village is where they have one of their mission outreaches, and where they have a very active children’s ministry complete with feeding program. Several friends of the ministry were able to make a special donation of funds to help them in buying the posts and corrugated roofing to put up the building to house the children’s ministry. There is still much missing, including chairs, tables, walls for the kitchen – actually anything other than the posts and a roof – but the ministry is growing fast and the children keep coming in greater numbers every day.
Coloring their pictures from the class
Theresa and I were blessed to be a part of the dedication time and the Children’s Christmas program with the village children. Cristina and Javier had received some used toys which were given out to the children after the Bible lesson, breakfast, and Christmas party. A piñata made the party complete.
I can’t help wondering sometimes if we have lost the joy of simplicity. I was talking with our son and daughter-in-law after Christmas and we were discussing some of the after-Christmas-gift tweeting that was posted on a certain site. It all included the griping and rude statements of kids who were burned because they just got an iPhone or an X-Box, or what have you, and not the gift that they had told their parents that they really wanted.
When I watched the children receive their used toys – some of them more “used” than not – and the joy and excitement that they brought to their faces, I couldn’t help but wonder if my life would be fuller with less. We have been so very blessed.
In the new year Theresa’s sewing classes will begin again. In January she will be organizing it into a much more formal
The children receive breakfast after the lesson
classroom style, beginning to teach the women how to make clothing and other more complicated items. To date it has been pretty much an introductory-type of setting since most of the women had never used a machine before. Now they are at a level where they can be challenged to more complicated things. The ultimate goal is that they will be able to use their skills to teach others, and perhaps to develop a home business. Most of the women are doing very well indeed, and if they begin to get down on themselves Theresa is quick to point out to them “from whence they came” only a few short weeks ago. Her classes are a great success.
We also need you to be praying with us concerning the new year. As I have been writing in my last blogs, we are facing the uphill climb now concerning the need to begin building at the Training Center land, and the lack of finances to do so. Theresa and I are probably looking at spending some time traveling in the States so that we can visit churches and friends there in order to present the needs in person. This is not something that I find easy to do. I am rather a “man of the trenches” than of promoting for finances. Nonetheless, without the latter we cannot move forward. Please pray with us for wisdom in this, as well as for open doors and open hearts if indeed we are to go.
Their Christmas tree
Unfortunately the friends that I mentioned in my last blog have been unable to come down to visit after all. We will miss them. I think that for New Years Theresa and I will go to a little mountain city about an hour south of us called Xilitla. It will be an occasion to get away and do something different for a couple of days. And anyway, as we learned last year – our neighbours’ karaoke on New Years Eve literally goes on all night. Last year I don’t think that we slept more than an hour or two all night because the windows were rattling until about eight in the morning when they finally packed it in. So, a little trip out of town looks like a good idea on every count.
Xilitla is really a very interesting and beautiful little colonial city. It also has a wonderfully crazy collection of surrealistic structures built by Edward James, a very rich and eccentric Englishman. If you are interested, take a peak at the following website and you will see why we want to go and explore Las Pozas again. All you need to do is click on the blue below and it will take you to the website. It will give you some good pictures of what we will see:
Well, I will sign off for now and probably will not post until next year.
May you be blessed, and have a wonderful New Year.
With our thoughts and love
A party is simply not right without a piñata
Your friends,
Steven and Theresa
