To our dear friends,
Well, I can hardly believe it but this is the last update that we will be sending from Mexico! Tomorrow, bright and early, Dennis Poulette (my PRIME mentor) will be swinging by the apartment to pick us up. We will be heading through an hour to an hour and a half of traffic to get to the airport four hours before our flight leaves, our first flight for about four and a half hours, which will take us to our one hour long layover…just before our second one a half hour flight…where we can then go through customs…….after that we can (thanks to my awesome in-laws) be driven the last hour and a half to Nicolle’s parents house………Either way you cut it, its going to be a long, long day. But, it will be well worth the stress to be back in the states to see friends and family for Christmas! To our loyal readers from Little Flock Fellowship Church, we shall see you next Sunday!
Some of you might be wondering what we have been up to in the week proceeding our departure. Well, to be honest, it has gone really fast. We tried to relax a bit when we could, but we didn’t really get the opportunity to do much loafing. We were invited to a few people’s houses for lunch or dinner; and in typical Mexico fashion, these affairs usually took the entire day. Also, there was the last meeting of our small group. For the most part, we spent our spare time cleaning and packing our things so that when we were invited somewhere we could accept. Our biggest adventure happened this last Saturday when we went down town with a few kids from our youth group. There is a big Christmas shin-dig in the Zocolo (see pictures from last weeks up date) that is always fun to go to. However, at one point on the way home, I almost died! You see, we were waiting on the platform for another metro train to come by….waiting and waiting….well, about 25 minutes later (about 23 minutes too long) one finally came. By this time there was well over a thousand people waiting to get on, and I knew it was going to be a mad dash for the doors. Well, luckily, the V.P. of Y.M.I. (Youth Ministry International, the world wide ministry organization that I am doing my internship through), Brent, was there. He is all of 6’2” and beefy. He plowed a way on for us and we made it. But that was only the beginning. You see, it wasn’t just that platform that was over crowded, but all of them up and down the line. So when we wanted to get off, we not only had to struggle to get to the door on the train, but to get off! I was the last one in our group trying to exit, and about the time I put one foot on the platform the buzzer started to ring, singling that the train was going to leave in less then 10 seconds. That was when it happened! The crowd of people that I was trying to beat my way through surged toward me in a mad struggle to get on the train! I was just starting to cut through them when I almost got pulled off my feet! You see, I had the camera around my neck, and through the strap I had hung my hooded sweatshirt. This combination hung down just past my knees, and it had gotten caught in the crowd moving in the opposite direction!!! It was all I could do to keep my hoodie from getting caught in the doors as they started to close. No one was holding on to them, it was just the pressure from being squeezed between the people as they piled onto the train! I was so surprised and scared! The whole time I kept thinking this was just the kind of stupidity and insanity that got that Wal-Mart employee killed…Oh, my………..
In other news, Nicolle and I made someone’s day! The youngest daughter of our Landlady, Liliana, has been wanting a computer for quite some time now. She has borrowed my laptop a few times since we have been here to do home work. Well, because Nicolle has a new/used lap top waiting for her in the states, and we are severely limited in the amount of stuff we can bring back with us (weight restrictions and such), we decided that it would be better just to give Nicolle’s old lap top to Liliana. She was soooooooo excited to get it and I’m sure she stayed up late playing around on it. Earlier today, I went upstairs to drop off some food and things that we would not need anymore and found that Lili, her brother and some friends were all up in her room goofing around on the internet with her lap top. Christmas came a little early for Lili this year, God be praised!

Please pray for: Jobs for when we return to Huntington; for a safe and stress free trip (especially in customs), for safety on the roads for Bryan and Michelle when they pick us up.
—Shalom.