We made it to Xalapa!

Hello again, one and all! We are all (well, all except Erica, who will come tomorrow) finally in Xalapa. We were supposed to leave on Thursday from Queretaro by bus and go to Puebla and then Xalapa, but Corey was still sick. So, the decision was to send Sally, Jimmy and Natalie on, and have Corey stay another day. Since I haven’t been feeling 100% myself, I volunteered to be the one to stay with him.

We had a free day of rest, and I slept for at least half of it. I also spent some time helping Hannah Leah teach one of the local boys English. He’s taking classes in school, and he’s in 8th grade, so he’s not a beginner, but we were working on present tense, past tense and past participle. It was so different to think about someone who speaks spanish having trouble learning to conjugate english verbs, but I guess it makes sense, because english speakers often have trouble learning to conjugate spanish verbs. It’s funny how our brains get programmed in one way, so we have trouble thinking about it another way. Or, we get into such a habit of speaking the way we do when we do, that we don’t ever even think about using past tense v. past participle – it just happens naturally, and we know when to use it, but we can’t explain why we use it when we do. Now that I’ve got my English certification, it was cool to think about how to teach English grammar to an english language learner, v. teaching it to someone who knows english, but may not always know why they do what they do. I also got to give Hannah Leah some teaching tips to use in the future, to help make sure that he (I forget his name) gets the most from the hour-long tutoring sessions.

Yesterday Corey felt well enough to travel, so we rode a bus from Queretaro to Puebla, and then to Xalapa. I felt like those bus trips were longer than some of the 20 hour trips that I’ve taken, but it’s possibly because I couldn’t sleep. Sleep usually makes trips go a lot faster! We watched a few movies on the buses, and some were even in english. The areas that we drove through were so beautiful, that I often found myself more interested in looking out the windows than watching whatever was on the tvs. I’ve been amazed at how green Mexico is! Even when I’ve driven through east Texas, where there are more trees than anywhere else in Texas (that I’ve ever seen, anyway), it’s nowhere near as green. And there are mountains everywhere – usually covered with trees.So beautiful!!

Anyway, we arrived in Xalapa around 9 or 9:30, and were greeted by Bryan Fox (the missionary who lives in Xalapa), the rest of our team, and some of the jovenes, most of whom are college-age or right out of high school. Apparently they’d had a party, but we missed it. We did get some amazing beef for fajitas, though – with homemade tortillas! Placy (Bryan’s wife) is an amazing cook!

Sally, Natalie and I are staying at the Fox’s house, and Erica will be staying with us when she comes. To see where we’re staying, go to Bryan’s blog and see his video post with a tour of their house.

This morning we had eggs, chorizo and potatoes, plus fresh tortillas. And coffee, of course. And then we hit the streets around IBUC to tell the locals about the church and share the gospel. Unfortunately it was around the hour where everyone is either cooking or eating lunch, so we didn’t get to talk to many people very long, but we did pass out papers that are essentially the bridge illustration, plus lots of key verses, along with the information about the church (contact info, address, when the service is, etc). We broke into four groups, each with at least one Mexican, some with two. My group was me, Sally, and a guy named Carlos.  We met several people that were interested in possibly visiting, but that’s really as far as we got. Most people didn’t have time to sit down and talk to us. After about an hour and a half, Sally and Corey, who was in another group, went back to take a break at the church, since Corey still isn’t feeling well. So I went with Carlos and two other jovenes to talk to more people. Around 3 we all met at the church and then had lunch.

On the way back, Bryan was talking to us about how even though we may not feel like we’re doing a whole lot, since we didn’t lead anyone to Christ and didn’t really even get to share the gospel much, However, Bryan was really excited that we’d done it, so that the local neighborhood can know more about the church, can know that they’re there (some of them had no idea, since it’s not a separate church building, but an address in a big row of connected buildings), and so that some of the jovenes could go and possibly share the gospel. Most of them are kinda wishy-washy with church and their faith in general, and so Bryan was really excited to hear about them taking initiative to talk to people (because we couldn’t easily carry on a conversation in Spanish without them). We’re all still pretty wiped out, so after lunch, we all came back to the Foxes’ and took naps! It was raining pretty hard, and I enjoyed listening to the rain against the concrete houses.

News for later on in the trip: we may not go to Tampico… there’s a hurricane down there right now, but we’re praying that things will clear up by next weekend. If not… what we’ll do is TBA (which means unknown). =)

Final thoughts to sum up the past few days: Despite sickness and uncertainty, God is good!!!

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