It's beginning to feel a lot like home

Now we've been here for about 2 weeks and so far things are good. We have been doing lots of different stuff, and I'm getting a better feeling of our placement in the city, and what's around us. It still amazes me when we with a few minutes walk can be standing beside amazing sky scrapers, and huge monuments.

2 of the many sky scrapers few minutes walk from where
we live

I wanted to have more Photoes of the ministries, but I don't want to look too much like a turist and especially with the homeless it's better just to leave the values at home.

Famous Pastor Fermin
This Sunday Lupita, I and 2 other Mexicans went to a church called "Semilla de Mostaza" It's a huge church. Afterwards we went to say hi to the pastor, we talked a little with him before we went home. His name is Fermin Iv and he is really famous in mexico and also parts of USA because he was in a band called "Control Machete" and they were really popular when they played. They have made music to several big movies, like Crank, Land of the dead and Amorres Perror. The last which I've been wanting to see for several years now because it's one of the highest rated non-Hollywood movie and most popular Mexican movie to date. So i was really surprised to find out he made the sound track to that.

Pastor Fermin and Ivonne from the DTS

After Fermin became a christian he left the band (5 - 7 years ago) whose music is far from christian (very angry music) and now he has a wife and 2 kids and is the pastor of the church, where he seems to do an excelent (a word that i today learned that shakespere invented) job, so far I've really liked what I've understood from the 2 services we've been to.

Homeless Gringo in Mexico
Oh, and another story (i have many i could tell), around 10 months ago when i did my outreach here me and Daniel ran into this homeless guy, but unlike most he was an American from California, he couldn't return to the states because of some trouble, so he is hiding here in Mexico. Today we walked around and we ran into him again, exactly the same spot where we met him last time. We talked with him for some time and he still don't have a place to live, but he didn't seem that worried about it and he had been going a little bit to a Jehovas witness church in the city, but he didn't really know about all that religion. I hope we run into him again so we can talk some more with him.

Food for the Homeless
Today we did homeless ministry where we in the morning prepared "arroz con leche" a simple sweet rice dish that we took to a street with a lot of homeless 2 min walking from our appartments. There we handed it out in cups and meanwhile talked with the homeless. It was alot like my past experiences with homeless, that the people were really friendly, some because they were high, other just loved to stand and talk with us. One even showed me and a guy called Daniel around in his house that was build in the sidewalk of boxes, sofas and plastic sheets. (photo further down)

One day out doing some ministry in "zona rosa" a really
nice and expensive neighbourhoo

We also talked with this Girl, her name was Karin, she is 21 years old but was kicked out of her mother's house for doing drugs, now she lives here in Mexico city while her mother lives with her (Karin's) 2 kids in Guadalajara 8 hours away in bus. She was really broken she had been talking with some of the girls telling them how she needed love, she left and came back 10 minutes later, and i remember she asked us please not to forget her. We prayed for her and told her that she should stop getting high (she was huffing paint thinner). I know some of the girls want to go talk with her another day, but it's just so sad that this young friendly girl, who even spoke ok English which she learned in high school, can't get out of doing drugs. Even though she told us how much she wanted to stop it, and be back together with her kids.

I think it got some things in my life back in perspective talking with the homeless today. How small problems can become so huge and important to us that we don't realize how much we actually have. We have to be thankful for what we have. These people have no money, no food, no where to live, and worst of all, most of them are so damaged by getting high on paint thinner that any hope for a better future is unrealistic.

We have to remember to be thankful, but also remember our responsibility. Just because their lives are so different from our doesn't mean they stop being our "neighbor".

On valentines day we handed out around 500 hearts with encourgaging phrases and a pieze of candy to people in the street. In the evening we shut the girls out of the appartment and told them we were cooking for them, what we really did was calling Pizza Hut and have them deliver 7 big pizzas, but we were not that lazy, we brought stuff for the girls (princess crowns and boxes of candy) and we decorated the room with different things, like the toilet paper you can see in the top of this picture.

This afternoon I walked by the homeless street to take this picture. It was here that we in the morning handed out "arroz con leche". There wasn't a lot now but in the morning there were somewhere around 40 - 50 people. The first house one the left was where me and Daniel were showed around.