No clever titles

I just came from my church here in Tepa...Cristo es el camino (Christ is the Way), and spent some time speaking with the pastor there. He is a wonderful man! We talked for a long time about what I am doing here and hoping to accomplish. I also told him where I am at and where I am heading from here.

In November we will be taking clothes, food and other items to Michoacan to a poor village to distribute everything and also to have a church service. Si & I will go along, and I'm really excited about it. We may stay behind a day or two to go to the Monarch Butterfly Reserve which is where 10's of thousands of Monarch butterflies migrate to for the winter to lay their eggs. It's a pretty amazing process they go through...but more on that another time.

Anyway, so I offered to sort and organize and wash all the clothes. I may have gotten in over my head....there are about 15 of those huge yard waste sized bags filled with clothes...and all very dirty...that I get to wash in my (rather small) wringer-washer (oh, about 6 hours a load) and then hang to dry and then get off the line and fold and organize back into the bags. PRAY FOR ME!!! We leave November 17, so I have only a few weeks to do this, in addition to everything else. Well, I'm just excited that I can help out, so it's all good.

I also will be speaking with the youth this week about missions and organizing them to deliver food with me. I did this last week and it was great. You cannot imagine what $500 pesos will buy! I went to the market and bought 12 kilos of tortillas (a kilo is 2.2 pounds), 6 kilos of beans, 3 kilos of pozole, and at least 2-4 kilos each of green beans, apples, bananas, oranges, lettuce, radishes, cactus, potatoes, 3 different varieties of peppers, and several other things that I can't rememer right now and are fruits and vegetables we don't get up in the States! It was over 100 pounds of food!! We drove around looking for people to give it to and ended up finding about 6 families, with a total of close to 50 people represented in those families. Sierra handed out candy and little toys to the kids (stuff we bought from Oriental Trading Company) and made up the bags of food.

I'm excited to get the kids helping, and I think they will find a real blessing in reaching out to others in this way. The pastor would like to expose them to missions, so I am also going to try to see if we can organize a trip to Chapala where there is Youth With A Mission (YWAM) campus. We'll see if that will happen, but I hope it does. Do please pray about these things for us and I will keep you updated on the progress.