Frozen Chosen

Kevin writing...

The singer of a band in my university wrote a lyric, When did it get so cold in California/When did it start to snow in Los Angeles. Well it has snowed lightly in Los Angeles and all California readers of this can attest to the fact that it can get pretty cold in CA, but the readers who have not spent much time in CA see it as a sunny, beachy place where people walk around in shorts and tank-tops and what-not. The misperception is the same for Mexico. Most people think that it is hot where we are...but at thousands of feet above the sea level, surrounded by snow-caped volcanos (which were beautiful and we saw two of them yesterday!) it actually gets pretty cold here in the D.F. When the thermometer read 43 degrees...it did not read it at the stifling hot degrees Centigrade (which would be over 100 degrees Farenheit (sp?)). You from the Midwest might scoff at the high temperature of 43 degrees, but keep something in mind...our Indiana/Michigan friends here in D.F. get pretty cold. How can that be? one might ask...well we do not have heating in our houses or in most of the buildings. Fireplaces are generally out of the question because if one house goes up in flames here, it will destroy two city blocks. How do we heat our selves? Well our hands get warm by drinking plenty of hot drinks and our bodies are layered with 4-5 layers. Still we can rarely get quite warm enough.

On the positive side, though we have frozen the past few days, we have had some very exciting visits with some ministries and are getting a lot closer to fitting ourselves into one or two. This is very exciting as we have waited now over two months to get placed with full-time positions (or possibly two part-time positions). There is a lot that God is doing here in Mexico City, but the helping hands of volunteers are always needed. Through the support of family, friends and our church, we are able to provide consistent hands for many hours, and can help get projects off the ground. These organizations have dreams, but lack the man-power to carry them out. Most people in Mexico cannot volunteer long hours of the day to help at orphanages or tutoring centers because they themselves need to survive. Thanks for the support for us to be able to contribute a good amount of hand-power to the realization of dreams for these ministries.