Update January 19, 2007

Buenos Días, Friends and Family!

Updates have slowed with the business of settling into our home in Mexico. The house is humble, and needs some repairs, which Joshua has been working on this week. He and our friend, Alfonzo, cemented the toilet to the floor in the outhouse, and patched some of the holes in the cement walls in the house. Joshua’s next projects are to tack down the sheet roof that covers the porch, as the wind has torn it up pretty bad, and to build Lacy a countertop in the kitchen with a real sink, no running water though. Dishes can be a pain, and a sink will be a blessing – a brother from the village asked if he could bless us with an old, used sink, and we joyously accepted! Dumping out water is a strenuous task after washing dishes or cleaning house, so we are grateful to be getting a sink with a drain! There are three barrels of water outside that are replenished every day through the village’s water hose system: The house water, the laundry water, and the outhouse water. We ladle out the daily water for specific needs, like dishes, clothes, housecleaning, and pouring water down the toilet so it will “flush.” Keep in mind though a toilet that flushes is a luxury we are happy to have. The task has become a part of our daily lives.

Mexico is usually cold this winter season. Winter lasts through January and the first weeks of February. The days have been in the 60-70’s, the nights in the 40’s. Joshua has been setting a fire in a small wood stove that we brought down here with us. We are very blessed – we are one of the very few who actually have a wood stove in this village. As you can imagine, wood is hard to find in this desert terrain. Acquiring the amount of wood needed for a good, small fire means a half day trip of searching out timber, cutting it down, and bringing it back to the Ejido (village). With limited time to do this, Josh searched the internet for alternative fuels. There was the answer, Goat and Burrow dung. We live next to a goat farmer, and a man who raises burrows for a slaughterhouse, so the dung is very easy to get, and is replenished every day! When it has set out in the sun for a few days, it becomes very efficient charcoal-like fuel. It burns hot and long and helps us not use as much wood. And, no, it does not smell.

60 degrees may not sound cold, but the people here are used to temperatures in the 100’s, in the summer, so 60 degrees in the winter is quite a shock to their bodies! Joshua and I are basking in the mild temperatures and giving thanks that we are not battling the icy winter in Indiana right now!

Lacy is doing well with the language change. She can hold a conversation easily with the people here. To those who we speak every day they say that her pronunciation and vocabulary are good, and many are patient and correct her grammar to increase her fluency. Many Mexicans have said that Americans cannot, or do not try to, speak their language; or they try to speak Spanish using an American sound, which makes the words nearly incomprehensible because the roll of the “r” or the flipping the sound of the “b” and “v” makes all the difference in distinguishing one word from another word. Although able to speak, Lacy still has trouble making out words she hears in Spanish, and is working hard at perfecting this skill.

Josh, on the other hand, is having a hard time. Our good friend and brother in the Lord, Alfonzo, agreed to teach Joshua the basics of the language. Alfonzo speaks very good English, and is a great teacher in conversations. He is a tomatio farmer (a tomatio is a breed of tomato that ripens in a sac rather than in a skin), and a Panadero (Baker). In his spare time, he is helping a Panaderia (bakery) get off the ground in another Ejido, and selling breads to the surrounding villages. Joshua is going to become his apprentice, learning to bake and speak Spanish at the same time.

Lacy has made plans to visit a nearby city, Los Mochis, at the end of this month and work with the daughter of a missionary in the deaf school for a few days. She has been helping out with the children at our church meetings, and one little girl has really stolen her heart. Her name is Pati, and she is deaf. In Mexico, sign language is discouraged; the deaf are encouraged to learn speech and lip-reading. Pati has only been attending the school for the deaf for about a year, and although she is 7 years old, she knows the vocabulary of a toddler. Pati’s grandmother, also her guardian, cannot communicate with her, but she has so much to say, and gets frustrated with the language barrier. Petra Wilke, the missionary’s daughter, spends most of her translations for Pati decoding a few words into an entire sentence! Lacy is learning the language slowly, because the concept of American and Mexican sign language are similar, but the trick is remembering that the language is in SPANISH. Lacy is looking forward to learning the language more. Once she has a decent knowledge of it, Petra has asked her to meet with Pati’s grandmother once a week and impart basic signs to her, so that they may bridge this language barrier.

Joshua has been visiting homes and brothers of the church with Greg Wilke, the main missionary here in El Ejido 21 del Marzo. They have also been making regular trips together to obtain firewood and work on construction projects for the families whom we fellowship with. Greg asked Josh to consider heading up the estimations for the construction of a Ramada (a roof on pillars with no walls), which a team will be constructing when they come down in a few months. With Joshua getting more busy and gone most of the day, Lacy has much more free time, and we are praying about how she may use that free time wisely. One missionary parent asked her to start teaching her daughter piano lessons, while another parent asked her to consider helping out once and a while with her son’s algebra. Lacy is praying that the Lord opens doors for her to converse more with a Spanish family, so that she may not only learn to speak, but also listen, in Spanish.

Petra approached us last week about helping with the children’s classes at the fellowship meetings. This has been, repeatedly, a direction the Lord has set before us: to work with children. Working with the kids has been a challenge, because of the language barrier, but children are very forgiving, and have been our teachers, laughing at us and telling us how to correctly form the sentence we are trying to say, or just looking at us with puzzled faces and saying “Que?” (What?) In Mexico, tolerance is a “virtue,” and therefore, parents tolerate their children in church services rather than teaching them how to listen to the word of God. Josh and I have been to three churches, and we have seen the same thing: children running around the chairs, across the stage, around the speaker, hollering and yelling and playing tag or hide and seek, while the parents are trying to focus on the teaching. It is a misconstrued virtue. Tolerance is acceptable, but discipline is necessary. It is an uphill battle for the missionaries here, because we do not want to be the people who “barge in and change the culture” in the way we see fit. Nevertheless, I am praying that with time, we will be able to help Petra, who has been overwhelmed up to this point with the children, and instill in the children the principles of prayer, study, church participation, fellowship, and a personal relationship with the almighty God. Please pray for us, that we will have wisdom, and that we will not overwhelm Petra with our presence. Pray that the parents will learn, through participation, the study of the word of God, and our example, the virtue of training a child in the way he should go, that when he is old it will be a daily habit in his life.

We pray that we continually understand our purpose in the Lord’s work here. We praise God that He has sustained us thus far financially through the work Joshua completed in Evansville, and the donors that are still supporting us. We have been very blessed to be here, and we trust that the Lord will guide us each day and tell us what we need to do and when. Please also keep us in your prayers, as we have experienced several attacks from the enemy upon our emotions. We also ask that you pray for all the families here from America, that we all can learn the language effectively, that we would be trustworthy and loyal workers in the field of harvest, and that our individual homes would be blessed with understanding, wisdom, and a desire to be unified on all matters. The enemy easily finds a foothold in a family when the husband and wife are not unified in their beliefs and convictions, and I ask that you pray for all of our families to find agreement on those issues that we have differed in.

Blessings to you all,
Josué y Lacinda Webb
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Joshua and Lacynda Webb