The first week of school is upon us here at the UNAM, after a summer of interns and trips and retreats!

Currently the new class of 35,000 is getting settled in while the other 140,000 reconnect with familiar surroundings. A few tens of thousands are at home this week, wishing they could have scored just a few points higher on the entrance exam.

Please pray for us as we connect with students at the beginning of this semester: for students that we know from RUF and the English Club, for students that we don’t know that are coming in from the churches, for students that we would like to know as they see the flyers for our semester activities. Pray that the Lord will bring us the students he wants us to minister to this semester and that we will be ready to receive them!

PS - You might read a quick review of our retreat over at Josh & Amy’s blog - here is the link.

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This past week, in addition to English Clubs and intern studies, we were at the Salvation Army Orphanage with a number of students putting on a vacation Bible school. We had about 30 kids on the first day, and about 60 kids on the last two days. It was a great time with puppets, crafts, games, movies and hangout time as we learned about how God made us, God loves us, and God listens to us. You can see LOTS of pictures at my smugmug site. When we left, the kids said - “next time come back for a week, and sleep over!” I hope that we can do that; it is a very needy place with some really wonderful kids, some of them without parents, some of them whose parents couldn’t afford to keep them. In one of the crafts, the kids got pictures of themselves - seemed like for a lot of them it was their first time to have their very own personal photo.

On Saturday, we went to El Rollo, the infamous water park where I got six stitches last year. This time it was great, though, and we had about 20 to 25 people in our group zooming down slides and bobbing up and down in wave pools. I’m pleased that El Rollo lived up to its billing (as a quality certified ISO-9000 approved water park). Pictures of folks on the trip to Jojutla (try and say that: ho-HOOT-lah) are up at smugmug as well.

This week we have had a few visitors (maybe more on that later) and have had good English Clubs and hangout time. Yesterday we played soccer after the club, and just after we had tied 2-2 and were walking to the chemistry faculty to eat, we almost got struck by lightening. Glad we stopped when we did! After eating, we watched and briefly talked about Gattaca - maybe you have seen it? Lots to talk about there. Tomorrow we will have the last English Club of the semester and the farewell of our two summer interns, Abby and Meredith, and then we will have a sleepover so that we won’t have too much hassle taking them to the airport at around 3:30 AM. Ouch!

In the news for the near future - studying for next semester next week, then we have a team retreat in Acapulco, then RUF staff training in Atlanta for a week, then a visit to a supporting church in Athens (Georgia, not Europe), and then finally back here for a retreat before school starts and then school. Should be a full, fun, and exhausting rest of the summer.

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There are a couple of new galleries up at Smugmug - one gallery is from our trip on Saturday to the pyramids of Teotihuacán, and the other is from our taco and game night with the English Club last Wednesday.

This week is going to be full with English Clubs Monday and Friday and a vacation Bible school we are doing from Tuesday to Thursday at the Salvation Army orphanage. On Saturday, we will celebrate by going to a local water park, El Rollo, where the last time I was there I got six stitches!

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I haven’t posted much lately, and what I have posted has not been that interesting! If you want something more scintillating, I suggest…

Update on visit to orphanage at Josh and Amy’s blog.

Updates on intern thoughts at Abby and Meredith’s blogs.

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In addition to the normal activities…

Today we receive 2 summer interns for six weeks.
Tomorrow we are visiting a local orphanage after church to play/teach/craft with 60 or so kids.
This week I’ll be hosting some folks who are coming through on their way to the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico’s Church Planting Conference.

Should be fun!

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We have a couple of summer interns coming in for six weeks starting today! Pray for Abby Shackleford and for Meredith Cooper as they adjust to the culture and settle in for an intense few weeks of learning and serving here in the glorious Federal District.

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I commend to you the blog of Josh and Amy Oettle, where you can read about our recent earthquake experience as well as see shots from our first talent show. Check it out!

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We had a good time with the group from Trinity U in San Antonio last week, and I hope they enjoyed their time of learning and serving here as well! Because there were no classes (Spring Break = Holy Week in Mexico every year), our rhythm was a bit different than usual.

We started each morning early helping a community service/outreach program that our local church does every year called “extend your hand”. We probably helped serve about 1200 breakfasts over the course of the week, and got to know a lot of the neighbors. Some people came for the first time to the breakfasts, while others had been coming for more than a decade! I met people from the neighborhood behind the church, parents whose children were in the local hospital, and a whole lot of police officers toting their machine guns and shotguns. Each of these groups is part of our local demographic.

Next we headed to my apartment, where on Monday and Tuesday we had a “mini-retreat” for our RUF students on “relationships”. We had decent participation, and Justin’s talks and especially the question and answer times helped clarify a lot of questions, from what it means that marriage is a covenant to the difficulties of leaving and cleaving to the role of emotions in dating and tying the knot. On the other weekdays during this time, people rested and spent time meditating on Scripture and praying, and then we talked through the story of scripture from beginning to end.

In the afternoons, we did English Clubs, and in spite of there being no classes in session, we had a really good turnout - 50 the first day and 30-40 for the other days. We had good topics and good discussions (Amy Oettle really has become the queen of English Clubs), and afterward had long hang-out times playing soccer or capture the flag with those competitive gringos (myself included!), visiting at the Oettle and Dishman apartments, eating tacos, and going to the tourist market. Holy Week is nice (and exhausting!) because no one really has to go anywhere, so you can talk the hours away.

So, that was our week - long, a little intense, a few health issues, but a lot of learning and growing because God is at work, by and with his word among his people and beyond them. It would be great if any Trinity U folk wanted to comment on what they thought of the week since I have just scratched the surface here!

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We had a great time with the students from USF and now we have another group from Trinity University in San Antonio for Holy Week. May the Lord bless you this “Domingo de Ramos”!

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Is apparently going to make it into our Napoleonic judicial system should this legislation pass.

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