Traveling Adventures

Hi guys!

So, I know I  just posted a couple of days ago, but I had a bit of an adventure on the way home from the D.R. so I thought I would share the story :)

So, we left our hotel in the D.R. on a bus, and made it about 3 minutes down the road before one of the ladies on the bus realized that she left her passport in the hotel safe. So back we went. Then, on to the airport! Everything was pretty uneventful on the two flights (in fact, somehow I ended up in business class on both of them. No complaints there!). However, once we arrived in Mexico City, at about 11pm, we then proceeded to wait about 45 minutes for our luggage because they were having their dogs check it all. Oh fun.

After that we proceeded to share a taxi/van with another couple that our teammates know. Once we arrived at their house the plan was to drive us to the house where we were staying the night with another lady. Unfortunately, they had been required by their state to get new license plates (which weren't ready yet) so they weren't able to drive us in their own car. Instead they were borrowing a friend's car, so we were good! Except...the battery on that car was dead. Oh well, we got it jumped and were able to make it to the house and to bed by about 3 am.

The house where we stayed the night was also where we had left our teammates' car while we were in the D.R. Well, we did a bit of shopping while we were in the city, and then headed on our way to make the final 3 hour drive home. About an hour and a half in...the car overheated. So we sat and let it cool down for a little while, then drove a bit farther...until it overheated again. This time, it happened to die right in front of a mechanic shop/truck stop/hotel. The mechanic was unfortunately closed, but the car had now locked itself down, so we weren't going anywhere else. So we stayed the night in the hotel.

Thankfully, we were only about 15 minutes outside of the city at that point, so our teammate was able to call a friend who came and picked us up. After feeding us breakfast, he then volunteered to drive us the rest of the way home. Well, about 20 minutes into the drive up the mountain...his car overheated. I'm not even kidding. So, he let it cool down a bit, and then drove us back down the mountain to the bus stop. We rode the bus up to the top (the bus only died once), and then walked from the stop to the house. And we were home!

All of that to say that traveling is an adventure, but God is protecting us always!

Home.

This past week I have had the special blessing of being a part of a meeting in the Dominican Republic that included people who are serving all over North, Central, and South America. I met a TON of people! There are a lot of different things that I could talk about from this week, but in order to be able to finish this post before it is time to head back to the land of limited internet, I'm just going to stick with one thing: the definition of home.

Home is a word that I used to think represented a specific place for each person in the world, that everyone had that one place that would always be home, no matter where they are. Well, I am finding that that isn't always the case. After spending a week with all of these incredible people, and hearing them talk about where they have been and where they are going, I found that so many of them had multiple places to call home. They had homes in the United States (that they saw rarely), they had homes in the former countries that they had lived and served in, and they had homes that they were headed to at the end of the week. No one said, "Well, time to head back to the country I'm working in. Only a few more years until I get to go home!" Yeah, that definitely wasn't said. Instead, everyone said, "I'm going home!"

The craziest part of that for me was that I understood the feeling. Despite having only been in Mexico for about 3 weeks before leaving for the DR, as the week there wore on, it was Mexico that I was ready to go home to, not Arkansas. Not that I don't miss Arkansas and everyone in it, and not that I'm saying Arkansas isn't my home anymore, but God has made room in my heart for my new home as well. I am so grateful to God for making Mexico my home. I am so thankful that He has made me able to settle into this new place that He brought me to. Once again proof that if God calls you to do something, He will make you able to do it. :)

Making Friends

Hey Guys. So today, God did a pretty cool thing. Candace and I were talking last night about how this beginning part of our adventure is feeling a bit overwhelming and discouraging, mostly because we’ve been in our village for almost two weeks, and we have met practically no one. People have been really friendly, but we haven’t found anyone who we have been able to just sit and talk to for a while. Since our job for the first yearish that we are here is learning the language, we really need to find people who are willing to just sit and help us out.

Well, this morning we decided to go walking down the road to attempt to figure out at what point we can get some sort of cell phone signal. (Something is messed up with the phone that we have at our house, and we haven’t had service since thursday.) Well, as we were walking I just asked God to let us meet one person today, even just to learn someone’s name. Almost immediately, a woman stopped in the street in front of us, and starting asking us about where we were from, and why we are here. She was friendly, but then she walked away (after she laughingly asked us if we had any “dolares” from the U.S. Well, we kept walking, but couldn’t get any service, so we decided to just turn around and walk back. As we passed by the little house/restaurant that she went into, she called out to us again, so we went across the street to see what she wanted. She invited us inside, and gave us coffee and some pork and tortillas covered in SPICY salsa. (FYI, that was breakfast food). She then proceeded to sit down and talk with us, and she taught us a few words in our language! She even found an old 1st grade textbook in the language we have to learn, and she gave it to us as a gift! After refusing to take money for the food, she invited us to come back any time when we have more words we want to learn. 

I know that what she did wasn’t a big thing to her, she was just being friendly and curious about us, but it was a SUPER encouragement to me. Little by little we will learn our language, and meet our people. God didn’t bring us here and then leave us here alone. He has a plan for the two years that we have with these sweet people, and He is the One who will make things happen, in His timing. 

Beginning...

Hello friends! Well, we have officially survived our first two weeks in Mexico! It has been a bit chaotic, but things are finally settling down a bit. 

Here is a summary of what I have done so far:

Traveling (and almost missing my connecting flight!). Visiting the Teotihuacan pyramids in Mexico City with a U.S. team that was visiting, working to get Bible stories into Mexican Sign Language. Traveling by bus from Mexico City to Puebla, where we then met up with another missionary couple who brought us our car. Then we drove from Puebla to Veracruz, where we checked into a hotel. 

For the next three days we stayed in the hotel, and were given a tour of the city by a local believer. Finally, on day 7 in Mexico, we drove out to our village, only to discover that the house wasn’t quite ready to live in yet. So we drove to a nearby village where our teammates live, stayed the night with them, and then drove back to work on our house the next day. 

We arrived to find that a water line had been left open, and half of the house was flooded. What an adventure! Thankfully nothing too important was damaged, (although one rug was soaked, and we had to take it outside to dry…and it’s the rainy season…). Unfortunately, most of my clothes were in a duffel bag on the floor, and the washer and dryer weren’t set up yet, so we got to make a makeshift clothesline to save them! Despite the flood, we were able to get everything livable enough, and we got to spend our first night in our new home :) 

Since then we have just been unpacking a bunch of boxes of random things that were sent to us from a mission house that was just sold, so we found a lot of very interesting things that we are still trying to find a home for :)

We have been blessed with some wonderful neighbors here. Our house is right behind a little shop, and the owners of that shop have been so kind to us, answering all of our random questions and showing us around the village. They even invited us to their daughter’s birthday party on our second day here! We are so grateful to them for their help, and are praying that we have the opportunity to be witnesses to them over the next two years. 

We are still learning what our lives will look like while we are here, but I know that God will provide the things that we need, including a language tutor! (The language is a BIT more complicated than Spanish…) We are blessed to be able to be here, and are praying that God will use us however He chooses.