A Little Background

A few years ago, a wonderful lady named Maribel and her daughter, Amanda, attended our church.  Our emotions were mixed when Maribel married Marcello Fernandez, a pastor in New York City: happy for her and her new husband and sad that we would no longer be seeing them on a regular basis.  After a while of service in New York City, they volunteered to move to his native Mexico and pastor a church there.  She extended to us an invitation at that time to come and see them there.  After about 2 years we finally took her up on it.

This is the fourth installment in a series about that trip.

You may read the first three posts by clicking on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Monday, December 30, 2013

The next morning we slept in.  We had been busy and up late for a couple of days, so that was needed.

By the time we go to the restaurant it was lunch time.

I had a hamburger and coffee,

 but Steve still wanted Mexican Eggs (scrambled eggs with tomato, onions, and peppers), fruit, and a Coke.

We went and picked up our hosts and headed back to San Rafael, the town we had driven through the day before where I had visited the Pharmacy and seen Don Quixote.  Well, not him personally, but his statue.

We visited a large family in their home.  One of the adult sisters (of 10 siblings) had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and they had asked us to come by and pray for her.  This family was obviously very close.  It seems that in their social structure, extended family is their welfare, social security, and health insurance as well as filling many other roles socially.  They fed us an “appetizer” of fried pork slices, tortillas, beans, and a salad of lettuce, onion and tomato.  They probably thought I was crazy for putting my salad along with the pork on a tortilla and making a taco, but I did it anyway.  They don’t eat cold vegetables on tortillas.  This appetizer was more like a lunch and less like an hor d’ouvre, but that was good because dinner was to be pretty late in the evening again.

After our “snack” we headed over to the place we would hold service.  It was at the home of another family (the family that made the flan from the night before) and was in the bay where they detail cars.

They had chairs all set up as well as some very nice flowers provided by a relative who owns a flower shop.

Service started

and people continued to arrive.  Here I am playing my violin.

By sermon time, we had quite a nice little crowd.

Again, there was not enough room for a traditional altar call, so people prayed in their seats.  The young man on the far left hand side is a high school student who met us at the home we visited earlier in the day.  He is taking English classes in school, so I encouraged him to come to service and listen to the preaching in English that was then translated into Spanish.  He did come and listen and received the Holy Ghost during prayer time at the end.

INSERT VIDEO OF SONG IN SAN RAFAEL

I learned to play a few of their songs on piano in spite of not having any idea what the words said.  Here is a piece of one of them that we closed the service with.

When service was over, they moved several small tables into the area and served dinner.

This is the outdoor stove on the sidewalk where they made the ponche (fruit drink).  Next to the big pot were a stack of day-old tortillas for any passers-by to take and feed to their animals.

Besides having a car-detailing business, the family that hosted us also ran a small convenience store, pictured here.

This is the kitchen where these hardworking ladies prepared the meal.  Several of them were from the family that lived here and hosted us.

And these are some of the people who received the Holy Ghost during the services we attended in Mexico.