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 :)