St. John's

Here's the recent update from Mexico:

The 5 of us (Patti Schmidt, Becky Schmidt, David Schmidt, Brian Pipkorn and Derek Yogerst) made it here, El Paso, TX, safely and without a hitch.  Although a little loopy from the early morning and subsequent flights, we were so excited to catch up/meet Chris and Erin, that we stayed up to chat after getting settled.  Right away Wednesday morning, we were up for Rita's fabulous breakfast and packed up the van to head across the bridge from El Paso into Juarez in Chihuahua, Mexico. Literally built upon a garbage dump, after turning off the major road, the only paved one around, the bumpy ride through the sand, junk and potholes began.

Our site is about 2 blocks from the church where we lived last year and about 4 blocks from the home we built previously.  The coolest part of this location though is that it is at a much higher altitude, so you can see a lot of the city when you look out from the "front porch" of the concrete slab.  (There is 1 picture of this that we sent)

Day one consisted mostly of structural work, building the house skeleton and putting it up with a single interior wall.  We finished off the day by tacking up a few rafters so the building wouldn't blow over that night.  Day two, we put up the rafters correctly, then the girls took over putting on the roof while the gentlemen worked on the electrical and drywall end of things.  Day three, today, a group finished up the entire roof while the others completed the interior drywalling.  Everyone then took part in the mudding and putting in the windows.

Tomorrow will be another day of sanding and mudding and hopefully installing lights, doors, etc.  Then there are some jobs around the mission that we'll help out with like tiling the church floor, filling holes in Bear and Ninja's fence (Chris's 2 beautiful dogs), etc.  A few other things we're looking forward to are church, a Mexican church service, and checking out the market, sledding the sand dunes...

The border crossings have all gone very smoothly for us, with the longest wait of only 20 minutes, which fortunately for us was just long enough to find the poleta (Mexican fruit popsicle) man.

We have mandatory visual passport checks by Erin before we leave from the mission every morning, and we stop every day after work at a corner store in Mexico for a Manzana Lift (amazing apple soda that is WAAAAYYY better than anything you could have in the US). 

Can't wait to tell more stories!
God Bless,
The Mexico Team