One month :)

Time is moving fast and it's now only 1 month until i'll get married to Lupita. This is very exciting but we have tons of stuff to do but we're sure we will get ready for the big day. We just hope that Lupita will get better from her sickness soon. Aside from the wedding preparations we have enough to do here at the base.

We have 3 nights a week designated for family night to
strenghten our relations here at the base. One of the nights
each week is creative night where you can do whatever you
want as long as it's creative, so we paint, draw, write, play
guitar, take photoes and much more. This is my rather
strange picture from last family night. 3 elephants.

Yesterday we got the Mazatlan outreach team back from Brazil. The team will be staying here almost 2 weeks and do different ministries. This means that we currently are 20 people on base, which then means a lot of work for me planning the food. Especially it's a challenge in the kitchen which isn't very big to cook for 20 people. On top of this we will be having another team sleeping here in a few days (no eating as far as i know) which will bring our total number up around 30, so we will be more than full :)

Otherwise our time is going with preparations for the upcoming DTS, and the last 2 weeks we have been spending a little time making some notebooks by hand. This actually didn't take as long as i expected (a family night with 8 people working as a machine helped a lot). The reason for this is that we will have our students write about what they learn every week in these journals, and really want the students to put personality into these journals. Therefore we thought it would be cool if we put time into it by making them ourselves so that the students would be inspired to really use it and not just be another cheap notebook somewhere. The picture has the 10 notebooks we have made and we expect to put some fabric around them so they will look nice, and we hope that the students will use their own creativity to decorate them on the outside and on the inside so that these notebooks can be a place of reflections, thoughts and ideas from the teachings.

The notebooks waiting to be covered with fabric and
decorated, one book probarbly takes around 1½ or 2
hours to make when in training

My little brother is coming soon :)
Now that Lupita and I are getting married Filip my little brother will be coming here to Mexico a bit in advance. He will be living here on the base with us, and helping with different things. When he arrives the current team will stil be staying here, and when they leave we have another team shortly. So there will be enough to do, and we can hopefully show him a little of the city. Also i'm sure he will get chances to go be a part of some ministries like playing football or other things.

Lupita's little brother is here :)
This last few weeks we have had Paul living with us most days (he sometimes needs to go home). We think it's really good for him to be here instead of wasting his time at home, and he is really helpful when we need an extra hand. I have had him help me and Alejandro cook a lot and i think that is also good for him since he has never really cooked before. In Mexico it's very uncommon that boys ever cook in their home. This was also true for Alejandro, who i had to teach a few basic things in the beginning like not using the same cutting board for vegetables after cutting raw meat.

But it's good to have him here with us, and surprisingly fast he is starting to pick up on a lot of the English we speak (and i get to practice my Spanish). I think this is really good thing for him since English opens doors so he hopefully in the future can avoid the bad/low paid jobs which there are enough of here in Mexico City.

My finances
The last few weeks I've been sending mails around to some people, and i still have a few i haven't send to yet. This is because I've been asking for support to be able to keep working here in YWAM CMC until Febuary 2013 as Lupita and I plan.

Everyone in this organisation (YWAM) are unpaid. This means that everyone has personal supporters. So far i've been able to live on earlier savings and a my really generous and helpful parents, but now is the time for me to find someone who will support my work here.

Therefore I've been looking for 11 people to support me with 200 a month (the next 8 months, which will cover my living expenses) and I've gotten enough to cover around 4 of the 11 i need. I'm super thankful for this support, and i hope and pray that i'll get the last people so i can keep doing my work here the next months.

If you are interested in supporting me, please write me, and also we're still trying to send Paul to "Verano de Fuego" (summer camp) and we're a little over half way, so help for that is still more than welcome especially now that we see him enjoying being here with us we think it's a very important chance we shouldn't let him pass on, a chance for him to do and become different than the millions of other teenagers here in the city.

Here we were doing a drama in a youth service last Sunday. It looks really empty but there was around 150 young people. The event were from 16 - 20 and in the end the church had prepared some really good food for us. We did 2 dramas, some advertising for our upcomming DTS and a short message.  This drama I were on Facebook in the right side of the scene.

Curtains finally!

This week we finally got the last of our curtains put up here on the base. They were donated by a friend of the base 2 weeks ago, so now every room have curtains. This might seem like a small thing, but I feel it's an important step to make the base feel more like a home, like our home :)

Just relaxing in a park in Tlahuac close to where Lupita's
family lives. We went there with them to "celebrate"
mothers day.

This morning I was trying to remember what has happened the last few weeks. I feel like time goes fast, and most of the stuff i recollect is our wedding preparations. Lupita and I have started pre-marriage counseling with an American pastor and his Mexican wife, they are an amazing couple, and they don't waste the time with empty talk. They have 10 years of personal experience with what difficulties that are especially prone to cross cultural marriages. The pastor's name is Josh and he has said yes to marry us which we feel really good about.

Other than that we still have our other things here at the base, and during the last few weeks we have as always had lots of things going on.

More life in the base

Lupita's niece Adrianna with her dad (Lupita's brother)

A thing that we didn't expect living here in the center of Mexico City is all the people interested in living with us. These are people who most of them has been in  YWAM and now work/study in Mexico City, but would love a place to live in the center with a community of other Christians. Right now we have 3, but in a few weeks we will have one more. In the beginning we weren't sure how to deal with this because we're a school and not just a place for people to live, but we enjoy the extra life on the base, and the people who are living with us always loves to be a part of many of the things we do when they are free to. (worship, ministry, family night) 

So we see it as a chance to provide a (hopefully good) Christian community for Christians here in Mexico City who has other things to do than being full time in YWAM. 

Getting new contacts

Around 2 weeks ago we visited 2 American girls who works with different ministries here in the city. One of them had 6 years here the other 2 years. They gave us lots of contacts to different projects, and they could tell us a lot of stories, especially about homeless kids on the street since that were one of their focuses.

In the park i also tried jumping with elastics, and wow, it
was fun, but also frightening, especially because the
elastics felt really old.

The 2 girls also told us lots of things about working with street kids, and one story i thought was shocking. It was of how some of the street kids they regularly visited actually weren't sad when they found out they had aids. This was because as they said it would protect them against people wanting to steal their organs. I think it's sad that people have to live in so horrible conditions, and i think all of us as their neighbors (in the Christian sense) ought to help them, or as a absolute minimum use the knowledge of their life and suffering as a catalyst for living a life in thankfulness for the blessings each of us receives every single day. It's hard, but i don't believe it's impossible.

Lupita and I standing at what used to be a lake in the park. After the first big earthquake we had here in Mexico 2 months (Biggest in 7 years) ago all the water disappeared down in the ground. Now there's no way of getting the water back and the 1 - 2 million people who live in this neighborhood will have to live without their lake. To the left of us a lot of boats was stranded that will probably never be used again.

Here is a image for our web page i made Friday afternoon for our evangelising day. This is something started in YWAM and on the 2nd of June people from many different countries will go on the street and make God known. The image is one i took on my outreach of the cathedral in Zocalo where we're going to meet that day.