From Pig Pen to a House

About a month ago we started helping a local pastor and a few other guys build a house for a lady in their congregation. Apparently she's been through a lot and is struggling to take care of her three kids on a basically non-existent income. Her husband died about three months ago, and as soon as he was on his was out, his first wife came in a swooped up anything that was of value. This left his second wife with nothing and to top everything off, shortly after her husband died, their house fell over. These kinds of things have become apparent as a sad reality of the Mixtec region here in Mexico.


We went out originally to take the materials from her old house to make her a new one on the tiny piece of property that she got when her husband died. Come to find out though, that she didn't have enough materials to make a proper house so she had to go and rip apart some of her pig pen so she could have a roof on the house. I can't even imagine having to do something like this and it was a pretty heart breaking thing to witness. Here are some pictures of the pig pen and the house under construction. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the completed house, but it did get finished about two weeks ago. If you want to pray for her and her family her name is Yolanda and I'm sure that she could use it.

Blogs?

I've never blogged before, I'm going to try and get the hang of it so that hopefully those of you who read this will get a better idea of what's going on down here in Mexico. To start out with I'll just give a little back-ground information to catch everybody up. I've been down here in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, Mexico for a little over four months in total now. I originally came down here this summer to participate in a two month internship helping out the full-time missionaries with short term trip participants. These participants ranged from high schooler's all the way up to grandmothers bringing down their grand kids on their first missions trip. I enjoyed this experience so much that I decided to stay down here for the eight month school that is offered. The school's main focus is to train people in how to present the gospel to unreached peoples in all different kinds of cultures and countries around the world with the end goal of planting self-sustaining churches. We've just started our third month of the school and so far it's been an awesome experience and one that I would recommend to anyone-even to those who aren't thinking about doing missions long-term.

Just to sum up what I've been doing so far, my days consist of class in the mornings and then the afternoons are dedicated to learning the language and just making new friends with locals. We've been doing this by playing basketball, working on building projects, and various other community developement projects. So far it's been good. (I wrote this about a month or two ago and never posted it but I'm about to write a new one so don't worry).