¡Viva la Vida!

Still in Pre-Orientation

Jan, the illustrious and much-feared (by the guys) Dean of Women, poses with the student leadership group.

          The college faculty are quite the bookworms, aren't they?

Student Arrival Day

Today's the day that all the Bible school students return to campus.  It's a day of new faces getting acquainted with their new home and returning students reacquainting themselves with one another.  There's a buzz of excitement in the air!

  2nd Year students reuniting.

                Our first meal together

  Professor Greg with some of the incoming 1st  Years as they are registering.

One of the great wonders
of the gospel
is that a heart like this:
~~~stone~~~
can be transformed
into a heart of tenderness
by the power of
God's lifegiving spirit.

amen.

Shopping

I think I have mentioned this a bit already, but do you know how happy I am to be able to grocery shop in an actual supermarket?

This picture is of one of my favorite stores, Soriana. It is a Mexican owned chain giving a lot of competition to Walmart in the area. Just the electronics and the furniture sections are comparable to Walmart, but the food part is much better than any Super-Walmart I have ever been to. I mean, the bakery is actually sinful! Rows and rows of fresh baked breads and desserts. The deli section is a full counter only for cheeses and another counter for al the deli meats. I enjoy my trips to Soriana immensely, but I haven't let the boys accompany me there yet! (too tempting for them)

Power Outage

We live in a little house on the property of the ministry here. Apparently, the electrical system needs upgrading and new cables and such. Our power has been out since yesterday evening.  Last night we got home from dinner at midnight to a dark house, so we went and spent the night at our friends house with running fans. Tonight we are bedding down on mattresses on our office floor. The reason?? Air conditioning and internet! Could life really be much better when you can't sleep in your own bed? (Our office also has a bathroom with a shower and a phone!)

Shouldn't be too bad, just as long as one of these don't decide to come and visit us in the night!

Cultural Differences - Nicaragua and Mexico

Ok, and now to explain some of the differences we've noted between Nicaragua and Mexico...

The food - Mexico is a culinary delight.  Food-wise, this place has got to be the France of Latin America.  We have enjoyed eating traditional Mexican dishes as well as the vast selection of sweets and pastries.  However...one word of caution before you drop everything and come here with fork in hand...Mexicans love their food picante (read:  HOT!). 

The schedule - the eating schedule is different.  The Nica eating schedule is the same as in the states - breakfast early, lunch at noon, and dinner around 6 or 7 pm.  Here in Mexico we eat breakfast mid-morning, lunch (the main meal of the day like in Nicaragua) around 3 pm, and then dinner at 9 or 10 pm.  Mexicans are night owls, staying up late into the night.  Whereas Masatepe is pretty much asleep by 9 pm, here things are just getting started. 

The language - Mexican Spanish is so different from Nicaraguan Spanish!  We've had to learn a whole new vocabulary because many words we learned in Nicaragua don't work here.  For example, in a restaurant if you ask for a straw (pajilla in Nica.) the waitstaff will look at you with blank faces.  The word here is popote.  Of course some Nica words are outright vulgarities here - we could cause an international incident just by calling someone "cheap" (the word for this in NIcaragua is innocent and used quite often but here the exact same word is one of the worse 4-letter word insults). 

The climate and landscape - northern Mexico is arid and desert-like.  This has been a big adjustment from lush, tropical Nicaragua.  Monterrey sits in a valley of the Sierra Madre mountain range, whose jagged peaks reminded the early Spanish explorers of a saw, thus the name sierra (saw).  In this place with very low humidity we've learned to drink LOTS of water.  The air just sucks the moisture out of you.  You can hang wet clothes outside and they will normally be completely dry in less than 2 hours.  From personal experience I've learned that one shouldn't touch many of the plants here because almost everything has thorns, bristles, spikes, nettles, etc.  The desert landscape is especially beautiful under the setting sun as illustrated a few blog posts back.

The development - This is has also been a huge adjustment.  Monterrey is a modern city of over 3 million people with plush air conditioned shopping malls, U.S. chain restaurants and businesses everywhere, brand new cars on the streets, etc.  Mind you, there is still plenty of poverty in Mexico, but one can easily see that Mexico is a much more developed, progressive, and prosperous nation in comparison to backward, poverty-stricken Nicaragua.  The difference is that here there's a sizeable middle class whereas in Nicaragua the division between the rich and poor is more stark.

The kiss - everyone greets members of the opposite sex here with a kiss.  It's a normal part of social interaction but something we're not exactly accustomed to.  It's still somewhat awkward for 6'1" me to bend down to kiss a Mexican woman on the cheek but I'm getting better at it all the time.  T´hat sounds weird, doesn't it?  Welcome to Mexico. 

The mountains in the background are the Sierra Madre range.  Mountain climbers come from all over the world to climb the peaks behind me.

I'll just stay right here.

           Poolside (the only way to stay cool!)

The Orphanage

This is the orphanage in Hidalgo.  It's still in the construction process - a Canadian team of 40 volunteers are here this week working.

Currently there are twenty in the home - all between the ages of 2 and 14.  This morning they were working on their multiplication tables.

Sarah and Elizabeth, summer interns from Alabama, are helping out.

Our new home

Our front door
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Our little kitchen ==>

Jan and our "dryer"
<==

The boys' bedroom
      ==>

A Very Close Election in Mexico

Having been in Mexico for exactly two weeks, we're still very much in the learning curve in understanding this new nation and culture.  Mexico held its presidential election this past Sunday and it was amazingly close.  In this country of 103 million (the world's most populous Spanish-speaking one), 41 million citizens voted and this was the outcome:

Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), the candidate on the political right, got 35.89 percent of the vote while his opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) ended up with 35.31 percent.  Now that's a close election.

Generally speaking, the wealthy and middle class support Calderon and the nation's poor support Obrador.  This political division between rich and poor is only exacerbated by the outcome of the election - Obrador's supporters will, because of the incredible closeness of the results, believe that the election was robbed from their candidate by the ruling party (Calderon is of the same party as current president Vicente Fox), and Calderon, as the next president, surely knows he does not have a mandate from the people to govern - something he'll definitely have to earn.  We're praying for this country and for God to bring healing to these political and class divisions that the election has brought to the surface.