Life Goes On

I've now been in Mexico for more than 2 months and i still love the land of the tortilla, even though I've now for the second time experienced an earthquake here.

The Earthquake

A small concert with a christian band. Our friend Daniel is
the newest member of this band "Antes Ciego" and this
is his first concert with them.

Today at 12: something we had an earthquake here in Mexico City. It was pretty strong compared to the ones they normally have. News reports says that the epicenter was in Gurrero which is a few hours driving from here. It was measured at somewhere between 7.6 and 7.9 which is pretty strong. Here we clearly felt it. I was trying out the stability of shelves for food  that some from our team bough this morning when my leader said something about an earthquake. First i thought he was talking about the shelves that they could withstand it, but i quickly felt that the whole apartment was moving. so everyone ran down to the street where people quickly gathered out of fear that the buildings would collapse. It lasted for a few minutes and afterwards people started going back in their buildings.

Afterwards we talked with our landlady who told us that our building survived the horrible earthquake in 1985 that destroyed many buildings, so i think that made me feel a little bit safer.

Later we were doing ministry in the city talking with people. When walking around I saw a few places where some cement/bricks had dropped down from the buildings, and one of my friend said he had seen a store being closed with large cracks in the walls, but otherwise life goes on. Although throughout the day we have been hearing more than normal sirens of police cars and fire trucks.

Cooking like never before

Lupita with her little brother Paul. We're trying to raise
money (5000 pesos) so that he can go to do a
"Verano de Fuego" (1 month mini DTS) this summer.

The last week we've been assigning different roles to everyone, and i got the responsibility of cooking. I really love it, but it's also a big challenge at times, especially because here in Mexico you normally eat warm food 3 times a day (I stand corrected by Lupita, only 2 because dinner is usually just sweetbread and coffee), but here we decided to have warm breakfast 3 times a week. Luckily I don't have to cook every meal, but i plan all the meals and shop for them, and then i'm also prepararing/cleaning dinner with Alejandro my Mexican friend. I especially like cooking when we have guests (which happends quite often) then i like to make a bigger effort to make it perfect.

So far i think that we've been eating good, tonight we had Swedish sausage dish which people seemed to like a lot, although they had all sorts of suggestions of what to put in to make it perfect, like cheese, fries, small pieces of pizza :)

English practice in University
Last week on Friday we went to a university. We had been invited by some Christian students in an university who wanted to do an event where some people who spoke English could come so the students could practice their English, and that we could have a chance to talk about good values and also what we believe in.

The event was like 2 - 3 hours and we both had some things all together and some in smaller groups where we talked with the students in English. We weren't the only foreign Christians they had invited, they also invited a group from another christian school here in Mexico with people both from Mexico and USA.

It was a good day with a lot of students coming to the event (maybe 100 - 150 people) and we got to meet other Christians who lives in this city.

Reminders of Denmark
Even though i'm thousands of kilometres from Denmark, i still often get glimpses of home. For example i have 2 friends i know from Mazatlan who currently lives here in Mexico City. They have startet a business with solar power. They are working in getting the contracts and outsourcing the work to the right people. Last time i met them they told me that they had been in contact with a company from Aalborg (my rather small city in Denmark) that produced things for solar power installments. Of course i offered my service if they needed any translation but they haven't needed it yet :)

Also I've met several people who as the first thing when i present myself as from Denmark thinks of Kashmir. Apparently Kashmir (danish rock band) is really popular here in Mexico and a lot of people know and like them. It is crazy how small the world is sometimes.

Lupita translating for 2 girls who talked about human trafficing in the University (they came to hear some english, but most only knew the absolute basic). This was before we moved to another place with more space where also more people came.

This was a night that we had YWAM Pacauca and their DTS visiting us. They are the nearest YWAM base around 2 - 3 hours away from us. Here we just finished cleaning after a nice meal of cheese/avocado chicken with rice, steamed broccoli, homemade salsa and fresh tortillas :)

Life in the city

Now i've been here in Mexico for a little more than 1½ month. Things are still going great and the DTS just graduated. We had our last day of ministry on friday, and since then it's mostly been debriefing, so me and Lupita have had time to do some other stuff that needed to be done while the DTS talked about thier experiences and about going back to thier normal lives. Now that the DTS is over there is DTS staff debrief that we're part of some of it, but not all since we aren't real staff on the DTS.

Fun at the roof of out appartmets

Getting connections in the city
Sometimes you are amazed how things turn out. Some weeks ago we did sign ministry in the street, i wrote about it in a earlier post. That day a lady came up to one of the teams with a sign that said "I love you" in spanish. She asked what they were doing and they answered that they were just trying to make people happy, then she asked if they were christians, and when they said yes she asked if they were YWAM'ers, and yes again :) This lady who currently lives here had been in a ywam base in Chile. Since then we have kept the contact with her and through her we got a chance to hold a night for a very traditional church she is connected to, and through one of her friends also with connections toYWAM we got 2 really nice couches for free if we just picked them up, so now we have 2 couches :)

Last saturnday she invited us all (19 people) to eat with her and her family. It was a really great night, and we also met some of her friends that also had been connected to ywam. It was especially interesting to talk with this guy from switzerland who is married to a Mexican and have been living here for 12 years. So i think it's kind of amazing that all of this came just from a random meeting on the street :)

Lupita was really excited about seeing the penguins :)

oh, and as a side note we keep meeting people here. Just a few days ago we had the house full of a Christian group (half Mexican, half American) that were doing ministry in the city. It was a guy from the base (Daniel) who randomly met them and invited them over to see our base, we had a good talk with them, and i think there is potential to do something together with them in the future.

Visiting a highschool

Lupita, her little brother and I spend a day in Mexico
Zoo, sadly the gorilla were hiding that day

Our last day of ministry with the DTS was at a high school where we had been invited to spend 2 hours with them talking about relationships and other things. First hour went with some introduction and then 8 or 9 small dramas with couples (preformed by all of us) that didn't do well, the bad relationships had names like "osama bin larden", "microwave" and "chicken mom" maybe you can guess from the name what the problems were in those. After that Lupita and I talked a bit about what it requires to be in a good relationship, and i used the movie "twilight" (Lupita's favorite movie that i've had to endure :) ) as an example of how you shouldn't be in a relationship. The next hour went with some testemonies, a little more talk, and a few different small activities. It was a good day and they said they wanted us to come again. (I'll hopefully have a picture or 2 up of it next week, we had a mexican friend who took a few pictures that day, but i'll have to get them first)

DTS graduation

Yesterday the DTS graduated. We had a good night with a few from the staff in Mazatlan, where the DTS began. Now that the DTS is over we're going to spend the next time with figuring out what we really want to do here in the city (along with some other events we're planing) and then we also need to connect with the around 12 people who currently have expressed interest in joining our first school here in July. So we're going into an exciting time with alot of stuff to figure out now.

The day of the graduation we had a meeting with the base leader in Mazatlan. He was giving us advice and we talked about different things and challenges about it. At the moment we're still a base under YWAM Mazatlan so he will be visiting us some times to see how it goes and guide us in this whole process of starting a base.

Along alot of very usefull advice he said one thing i've been thinking alot about, it was:

"Give effort, not excuses"

I think it's a thing we need to remember in all phases of life, we should do our best and not bother with excuses, it's a waste of time.

From the DTS graduation. We did it in the basement of a church that i also stayed in during my outreach. They were really nice and cooked delicious food for us :)

Lupita and her best best best friend Montse on the roof of our building. In my relationship with Lupita I quickly learned that it was a packaget deal since they are really hard to seperate, but it's okay because she is nice, but also a little crazy.