I write this in hopes of starting something regular, looking back at our week, touching on highlights, showing what our week is typically like, and, hopefully being interesting. I’m pretty wiped, since I took Drew to a football camp in the morning (a missionary friend is running it in the community behind Pueblo Nuevo) and in the afternoon Comunidad Biblica had a ministry time in an orphanage, which involved a lot of soccer playing. So we’ll see how much gets written here.
Constitution Day
Drew had Monday off school, which was a good thing, since he probably wasn’t well enough to go anyway. He was just listless and not himself. So we hung out at home and did office stuff.
The school days off here tend to be different from the US. We just realized that with Easter so late this year, kids will probably have at least 1-2 days off every week from the middle of April to the end if May! That’s the stretch that used to be solid school when I was in school.

Pueblo Nuevo work
Things moved forward ok on this front. Tim had a meeting on Wednesday with the 4th-6th grade teachers to explain the computer class. The reception was enthusiastic, to say the least. So he’ll start on Monday. Hopefully this will be 6-8 hours a week.

Tim spoke with the neighborhood president last night to invite him to a dinner with a local university that had a development program for marginalized communities. This could be a good first step in a partnership with the community leadership as well as opening doors for us to figure out how to use groups coming down from the States. (Puebla is still pretty much free of the drug violence, so it’s safe here; we have a new governor now, too, for what it’s worth).

Team building
We took Dawn and Cindy, the EBM teachers at the Christian school (PCS), out to a mall to hang out and talk. It’s been really good to get to know them and be able to help them a bit with life in Puebla. We’re gearing up for our EBM Mexico retreat in Veracruz next week. It’ll be great to be together for intense workshops, long sessions of team building exercises, and, oh, we might spend some moments (fleeting) in the pool and at the beach.

Last night at the small group they were asking me, so when are we going to start doing ministry here in Pueblo Nuevo? That’s a very encouraging question to hear!

Pueblo Nuevo housing
This was a productive week on this front. Monday we settled with our old landlords to rent one of their other houses, right on the main road in Pueblo Nuevo. We’ll move in toward the end of the month.

We also met with a real estate agent on Wednesday to go over housing options. He’s a believer and a very impressive guy. On Friday Tim went with him through Pueblo Nuevo looking at stuff we’ve found. It was an encouraging time. We’ve looked at around 20 houses/properties and you start to get a good idea of what will work and what options are out there.

Thesis
Tim has Tuesday and Thursday mornings blocked off for this. That’s been good to have. Soon we hope the results start showing in terms of pages written!

Well, this is an insanely long post. But bit by bit we hope you get an idea of what life is like here.

Thanks for your prayers!