The study was supposed to begin at 9:30 PM. Rod told me what the real schedule would be. He and I would arrive at 9:45 and would be the first ones there. Others would begin arriving at about 10:30 and would all be there around 10:45. We would begin at 11 and would be back home around 1:00 AM. He might as well have printed a program. That is exactly how it played out. I thought teaching Men's Fraternity at 6:00 AM was a challenge. My brain is fried by 11:00 PM. But we had a great time. Rod translated and improved on what I offered.
That was the evening we had no water. Water runs to homes in Oaxaca only twice a week, and that is not entirely regular. That is, you cannot always know which days it will come in. It fills the tanks on top of your house that feed the house by means of gravity. So when the water is gone, you have only two choices: do without or call for a water truck to deliver 1000 gallons for $30. This is not pure water -- it can only be used for washing clothes, showering, and flushing toilets. You buy water for drinking, cooking, or coffee in large bottles for your home. When Rod and I returned around 1:00 the water was running and we were fine for Thusday. (We had been without electricity for about 3 hours the night before.)
Thursday after class we went to the home of Rod's sister, Mary Elva. She and her husband, Vicinte, serve as independent missionaries in Oaxaca as well. They will soon be taking an assignment in France. Vicinte returned to Oaxaca the day after we arrived, returning from a mission trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mary Elva, like Rod, is a native Oaxacan (oaxaquena), and, like him, is a great cook. She prepared red mole for us. That is not an animal. It is pronounced MOH- lay. It is a thick gravy or sauce made with about a thousand ingredients, including a large amount of chocolate. This was prepared with chuncks of chicken in it and eaten with rice and tortillas.
Thursday evening Melinda and Jenna went with Maurie, the IMB missionary, out to a village to teach a cooking class for Pastor Marcelino's church. But there was a funeral in the village and people could not attend the class. Instead Marcelino took them to the home of some new believers and about a dozen of them worshipped together with music and prayer. I stayed at Vicinte's house with others and watched The Bourne Identity. Well, I wasn't invited to the village. It was a cooking class and I don't have any business helping in one of those.
We had to move our quarters Thursday evening. Another team from the US is coming to the mission house, so we reluctantly moved to the elegance of La Casa de Mis Recuerdos, the B&B where our mission team stayed last fall. It is an absolutely beautiful refuge in the city, and was my first experience with quietness since coming here. It is close to our language school and it will be our home until we leave on Sunday morning.
The second B in the B&B is my favorite. Nora serves an beautiful and delicious breakfast to her guests each morning. She serves 30 different entres, so you could be there a month and not have the same thing twice. This morning it was fresh fruit with yogurt, pan dulce (sweet breads), hot chocolate and/or coffee, fresh squoze orange juice, scrambled eggs with chiles and tomatoes, and homemade tortillas. She had four other guests for breakfast besides us -- a sociology prof from California (Pat), a retired furniture restorer turned world traveller from Australia (Rupert), and a Jewish couple from upstate NY (Herb and I forgot. I know I could make up a name and you wouldn't know, but the truth is I forgot.) Herb is an athiest and an interesting conversation partner.
We graduated from our Spanish classes today. We received certificates indicating we had completed 27 hours of classes, more than half a college semester. In my second hour today the conversation turned to spiritual things as it did the second day. I have been looking for a way to talk to my teacher about Christ some more. During the conversational part of the class she asked how we celebrated Christmas in our country and in our families. Four of us are in her class: Jenna, myself, Courtney Johnson, and Frank, a 29 year old German who is taking a year to tour the world with his wife Sandra. They fly some, but do much of their travel by bus. So far they have been to Laos, Thailand, Figi, L.A., and Oaxaca. They're on their way to Guatamala, Honduras, and Belize. Eventually they will cross the border at Matamoros and come to Houston, where they'll get a plane to NY and then return to Germany. It will be several months before they come to Houston, but they may stay with us a while when they do. Frank has admitted that he is "not religious."
Anyway, Frank described Christmas in Germany and then we described an American Christmas celebration. Frank left. His four hours of class are up at 1 and our three hours don't end until 1:30, so he is gone for our last half hour. When he left, Zoroia, the teacher asked me how we celebrate Easter. I explained our church's celebration of Holy Week. When I told her that on Good Friday we read through the passion story, she asked whether I had seen the movie, The Passion of the Christ and what I thought of it. We talked about the film. Then I asked her: Para ti, quien es jesuchristo? (Who is Jesus to you?) She told me what she thought of Christ as a messenger of God and asked me who I thought he was. I told her what I thought. Then she asked what I believed about who God is. We talked about that. Then she asked how I thought people who had no faith in God could live. We were beginning to talk about that when the bell rang and the class ended. I am glad that no one who really speaks Spanish could hear this conversation in such poor and limited Spanish with this patient teacher/learner who worked hard to decipher meaning out of what I was trying to say.
It turns out that Zororia is good friend of Mira, a woman who runs the coffee shop a couple of blocks away. Mira, whose shop I visited, of course, is a member of Rod and Connie's church. Pray that Mira will be able to take Zororia's searching heart further on her quest.
Lunch today was at one of Oaxaca's best restaurants, La Escondida. It is an enormous buffet of a wide variety of Oaxacan dishes. I do believe Oaxaca has more kinds of foods than any place I have ever been. We were well fed.
Tonight we will skip supper (for obvious reasons) and walk back to the plaza at the Soledad church for one more helping of the nieves (fruit ice cream). Tomorrow we will visit the ruins at Monte Alban (these were built about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah -- by the way, I do hope you are staying up with reading through the Bible.) We will also visit an orphanage in the afternoon. Then we'll pack up and catch an early flight out on Sunday morning and will be home about the time you Sunday morning people get home from worship. Looking forward to being back home for three weeks before setting off for Africa. I have been to Africa before. I will probably not include many culinary reports from there.
Blessings,
rrc
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