La Gringachanaca Mexicana

Sometimes it seems like everyone and their pet rock is leaving the country for one reason or another, and I am still here. It is hard to handle sometimes. Ok, most of the time. But I am here. I don't know how involved to get in things (like church) since I don't know how long I'll be here still. For example, we're starting a small group ministry at church, and I'd like to be involved somehow, but I might only be here 'till May (which is like a month after small groups start) or I might still be here this time next year. I don't want to put down roots here, but I'm sick of not having a real place that I can. I've just kind of been lingering in this in-between-land for the past year since I moved back from California. I always thought that I'd be leaving now, or at least have a date set that I'll leave. But I don't. So I'm continuing to wallow in in-between-land of not knowing when the next thing will come. It's weird also to not be able to just randomly plan to go places. For example, several people from Honduras assume that I'll be there again this summer for a month or so - mainly around time for camp. Well, I wish I could be there, but this year I can't just randomly decide to go to Central America whenever I want to. So it's been weird not knowing when/what is next. But hopefully I'll be leaving soooooon! :-)

La loquita familia catracha

Does anyone read blogs? I read other peoples' (people I know) but I don't know if anyone reads this. Interesting......

Crayons

Sharing about the Querétaro minitry with others can be an adventure. Last night, I had my cousins and uncle over to my house to share with them (this = 5 young adults, one middle aged-man, and 5 small children). Children are interesting. Shortly after I had finished sharing with them, my dad noticed one of the twin girls (1.5 years old) trying to put a crayon in the metal front of our gas fire place. We took off the front of the fire place and found no crayon, all was well, and no more crayons attempted to go into the fire place.

Fast forward to 4am today. My dad and I have just gotten up (I had to be at work at 5am. yay.) We're sleepily eating breakfast in front of SportsCenter with a nice worm fire. All of a sudden, we both look at each other and say, "I smell crayons!" We turned off the fire place and removed the metal front and looked inside. There was nothing unusual to be seen. So after a few mintues of inspecting the fire place, my dad noticed this wet-looking spot about a foot inside the top of the fire place. It was the crayon, now a dark blue puddle. So I spent the first half hour of my morning trying to wipe blue crayon out of the fire place. What an interesting morning!

El Tiempo Raro

Freezing rain and record highs. Today, Salem broke the all-time recorded record high for the entire month of January ever with a whopping 64 degrees (14). Yeah, so 3 days ago, I was scraping a half inch of ice off the truck at 5am. I guess I won't have to go through that tomorrow!

Anyhow, this has been an interesting past week or so. I found out a week ago that my friend Heather (wife of the youth pastor at our church when I was in junior high) moved back to town. Rich (her husband, the youth pastor) is now youth pastoring at a church in the Salem area. It is really neat to hang out with Heather again - she was kind of like a mentor to me in junior high, and now it seems as though we're not so far apart in age! We laugh about the fact that she was a wife when I was in 8th grade, since we are more like peers now. (In fact, she is the same age as my friend Michelle (in Honduras) to whom I once mentioned that I am young enough to have been in her youth group when she was a youth pastor! And she does NOT seem old enough to potentially have been my youth pastor.) So anyhow, it's been good.

Then I was talking last night to another friend of mine from junior high - Lindsey. And we were talking about the fact that we both know that we won't be living in the Salem area much longer, but don't know how long it will be still, and that is a huge hinderance to making friends. I just didn't put much (any actually) effort into building new relationships when I moved home from school because I knew I'd be leaving..... even though I knew it would be at least a year after graduation that I move. So that was bad of me. Nice that I see that now that I have an undetermined time left here, but somewhere in the ballpark of 3 months to a year I imagine!

So I'm off to bed. Yes, it is before 9 pm, but that's the price to pay to get off work before noon! :-)

Quiero Volver a La Cuba Mia

I'm SO happy that this is my last winter in the Willamette Vally - home of Salem Oregon, the city of 200,000 that has exactly 3 snowplows. Not like they'd help today anyways. When I was little, we got snow every year, maybe like 2 to 6 inches about 3 times each winter. Then every 3 or 4 years we'd get a good foot of snow. So, there were like 5 years when we didn't really get any snow in the valley, so apparently the ODOT geniuses decided to sell 7 snowplows to Northern California. (Go figure.) Last year, the MAIN street bt my house didn't get plowed until about 5pm the first day of snow. And we had a big one last year - 18 inches, then came the freezing rain. Let me tell all you who live in the MidWest or somewhere where it snows a lot - you think that we're wimps, but you have NO idea what it's like to try and do anything in 3 inches of ice on top of a foot or so of snow. (by the way, I'm not mad or anything, my sarcasm just doesn't show through so much in writing! :-) )

So, today I got up at 4:30 - you gotta love working early on saturdays! - and the car was covered in freezing rain. My dad took me to work, and it never really did thaw out, but at least the streets weren't too slick.

So going back to when I said that Salem sold 7 snow plows to NorCal....... I have an interesting story that kind of relates to that. My last winter in Redding, my floor decided to go up to the mountains to play in the snow. I was the only one (out of like 10 of us!!) who had ever driven in the snow, but I didn't drive 'cuz I know how well my front-heavy back-wheel-drive car handles in the snow. Anyhow, it got to snowing really hard, so we thought we'd better go back to school. One of our cars slid of the road into a little snowbank (the kind that the plows make). The back end was in the snowbank, and the front end was sticking out and blockng the west-bound lane. The car wasn't damaged, but we couldn't get it unstuck. Thankfully, this 4X truck came by with some kind of chain and offered to try to pull us out. While we were in the process of attempting to move the car, a snowplow came down the mountain. The driver motioned for me to come over to the plow. He said, "ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to mave that car." (referring to the stuck car.) I told him we were trying to move it, and turned to go back to help. He yelled after me, "I have to get this plow throughand you're blocking the highway, so you need to move that car NOW!" I nicely replaied, "We have been trying to move the car for the past 10 minutes, so if you want it moved right this instant, you go move it!!" I don't know, I just thought it was hideous that he actually thought we could just move the car on command.

Anyhow, next year at this time, I'll probably still be cold, but lows of 40 degrees (highs of 70ish) with no heat in the house sound a lot better now that freezing rain! :-)

I'm off to watch Sabado Gigante...... like any good latino does this time on Saturday nite!

Support Raising, Salvadoran Missionaries, and Food!

So, I talked with Kathy, my advisor at I.T. today, and we kind of went over a bit of a plan for me for support raising. The whole thing (support raising) is scary, and one of those things that is absolutely essential, but I REALLY don't want to do it. But, yesterday, I got this email from Elsy, my friend in El Salvador who's planning to go to an asian country as a missionary, and I thought about HER support-raising venture. How much easier must it be for me to raise support when I know lots of people who have jobs who are interested in missions. Elsy knows lots of people who are interested in missions, but most of them can only afford to feed their families and pay their bills. And she has so much faith that all her money will come in very soon! The Tsunami has opened the door for her to get a visa, so it will be easier to get to this country when the time comes, and lack of funds is the only thing holding her back from going now. Anyhow, she is a real encouragement to me!

I wanted to put a picture of Elsy on here, seeing that this is the second time that I've mentioned her on here. So, below is a picture (yes, I realize my head is cut off - my camera is dumb). The other pictures I have of us are really old, so that's why this one is there. We're making tortillas! Tortillas got me thinking about pupusas since they look similar, and that made me think of Mayra, a catracha who taught me how to make my favorite Central American food! MMMMMMM, now I'm hungry!! Pupusas are like small, thick corn tortillas that have either cheese or chicharon (ground mystery "pork" meat) in the middle if you're in Honduras, or cheese and/or beans in the middle if you're in El Salvador. Apparently, a lot of ladies don't think they can make pupusas.... I only personally know like 2 who do make them. But when Mayra taught me how, it didn't seem very hard. I made them for my class-mates at I.T. training in October, and I thought they turned out reasonably similar to Honduran pupusas (with a little variation on cheese), and my class-mates liked them, so I'm not sure what the deal is on only certain people making them. Maybe mine would be weird looking or weird tasting to a Central American!

Anyhow, this is becoming a herkin' massive update about not much, so that's all for now!


Elsy and I making tortillas


Me and Mayra with pupusas that she taught me how to make!

Libertad

Libertad "FREEDOM: In my aguish I called to the Lord, He heard me and gave me freedom."

I got this little card in the mail today from my Salvadoran friend, Elsy (¡muchas gracias, vos!). Isn't it encouraging to know that our God cares SO much about every little detail of our lives?! I've been learning (and CONTINUE to learn) that it's really DUMB to try to use my own strength to accomplish stuff that God has for me to do, when HE is the infinite source of strength ready to pour some out for me when I'm ready to trust in Him! Now.... if I can just keep remembering that!!!