Dear friends,
Once again we find ourselves closing in on the end of the year. It's
been a very busy year, especially the past 4 to 5 months. We have been
doing close to two trips a month to Lajas. I'm sorry this update is over
a week late. Upon returning from Lajas last almost 2 weeks ago, the
church we are involved here in the city has been having a series of
conferences in which I was involved.
The trip into the village with Brent the builder went really well. Our
goals were to put on a new tin roof and cement the floors in the three
rooms. Our first day out there we finished the first floor. I might
add, this is mixing cement by hand. Brent was able to get a great finish
on the floor, but we had almost completely exhausted our supply of sand
and gravel. Water was also proving to be a problem. Things weren't
looking good for the other two floors. The following day the Lord
provided Marselo. He offered to fill sacks with sand and bring them up
from the river. Meanwhile, Brent & I concentrated on the roof. This, in
the end, took us two days, but gave us more time to get sand and gravel.
Marselo, after a full days work, said he had exhausted the supply of sand
from the river and he was quite exhausted himself. We only had half of
what we needed for the next floor. In the end we had to spend an extra
day getting more sand. It required making several 2-hour trips over some
fairly rough road down to another part of the river. We would fill sacks
with wet sand from the riverbed and carry them 400 yards up the ravine to the truck. Hard work and quite taxing at 6500+ feet. However, praise
Jesus, with all the sand and gravel we were able to haul, over the next
two days we were able to get all the floors finished. A number of
Tepehuan friends helped and we paid them for their efforts. We also
were able to get some extra jobs done, and Brent was able to help me
plan for our next onslaught in February. We plan to put in a ceiling,
fit windows and a new door, plus hopefully get running water and maybe some sort of bathroom set up. So now we still have a rundown Indian house, but at least it has a good roof and floors. Between now and February I would like to render the interior and exterior walls. This at least should stop most of the bugs and other nasties from coming in.
The more we find out from the village as we renovate the house, the more
we are coming to an understanding of their suspicion and the uncertainty
of wanting us there. It seems that what really needs to happen is the
village needs to have a meeting, and we need to be there so that people
can question us and hopefully some of their suspicions and uncertainties
can be relieved. The current governor is too old and too shallow to be
of any help to us in this. He simply is a puppet and does not want to
rock the boat. The new governor who takes office December 25th is much
younger. His name is Julian, so pray that sometime in the new year a
meeting can be organized, and we can be present to represent our team.
Another opportunity that has opened up that goes along with this - the
Mexican teachers in the school in Lajas have asked us if we would be
interested in teaching English in the school. We are keen, and this
may be another means of getting into the village to live. Pray for this
possibility to develop.
Finally, we have a VIRTUAL U.S PHONE NUMBER!!! You are thinking what on earth is that??? I won't bother with a full description but suffice to
say, we have signed up with an internet broadband phone company that
send an adaptor that connects to our internet broadband cable, and
enables us to connect our regular telephone and make calls through the
internet. Along with this we get a U.S number as if we were living in
the U.S. Our U.S phone number is: (330)-259-1249. This happens to be a
number from Youngstown, Ohio. Simply because my cousin and family live close to there, and it will be a local call for them. What it means for
us is that we can call family in Canada and friends in the U.S utilizing
the 500 minutes we get free each month. We can call family in Australia
for .04 cents a minute (much better than the $2 a minute we would
normally have to pay from Mexico). Anyone calling us will only pay as if calling the U.S. Much cheaper than calling our Mexican number. All of a sudden we are much closer. Oh, by the way, if you are interested in this setup, let me know and I can refer you and I receive a free month of calls. I can't take any glory for finding this setup, Scott is the computer geek, and he figured it out. It works great!
Oh by the way, our email address has never changed, it still is:
Until we changed over to a cable server here, some of our bulk mail was sent out through our old dialup internet provider under fergfam@prodigy.net.mx. We no longer receive email through that address. If you want us to receive your emails, we can only receive them through our yahoo address.
Thanks so much for all who have prayed for us. Be assured we need and
appreciate your prayers, and God is hearing and answering.
for Jesus,
Andrew and Anne Marie Ferguson
...
December 2004 trip report
