How time flies! This is my fourth weekend in Mexico and I can't believe how fast the time has gone by. Though my spanish is improving a little each day I have a long way to go before I am comfortable with the language (One good step in the right direction: I had my first dream in spanish last night, though I couldnt tell you what was said exactly...). I am excited to welcome the first of the American missionaries to join me on this mission to San Ramon! Chris Cole arrives on wednesday and it will be a total joy to have him here with me starting this week. So, to begin, as I said before, these are definately the Mayan lands. The Mayan culture pulses powerfully throughout the entire region and the vernacular is definately not a dead language. The people of San Ramon would much rather speak in their own comfortable maya unless they need to speak in spanish for some reason, and some of the folks here (like the family I ate with yesterday) never even bothered to learn spanish. Those 30 or older have mayan accents when they speak spanish and the children speak wonderful spanish and maya. Maya is filled with clicks, "ts" sounds, and pauses inserted into the middle of words making it fun to hear and brutal to attempt. The children (and adults for that matter) get an endless kick out of giving me difficult words and phrases to try to pronounce and when I feel like I am just getting it, they give me a playful look as if to say, "No, no, you´re getting it all wrong!" and then we all laugh some more. We have a good time with eachother and it is certainly a great mental challenge to learn a little maya alongside spanish.
Last week we worked hard to prepare the site for the beginning of the construction of the Church in San Ramon. This included digging foundation ditches about 4 or 5 feet deep. This seemingly simple task is actually a considerable challange given the yucatan's Limestone bedrock that lies only inches below the surface soil. This limestone bedrock, as you can see in the picture I included of the ditches we dug, is honeycombed and filled with holes because it is easily eroded by water (that is why cenotes - the curious underground rivers and lakes so numerous in the peninsula - are particular to the northern yucatan. There are no rivers above ground here). Our first task was to dig where we could and expose the large pieces of limestone that emerged from our excavations. Then, after two days of digging, the Mayans used a sledge hammer and a long steal pick to break the rocks from the path of the ditch. Those large rocks were then carried from the ditch to the rock piles nearby. Pretty tiring work but a lot of fun. Its also humbling to work with these folks. Most Mayans are under 5'4 with short arms and short backs that seem to allow them incredible lifting ability. Some of these guys can lift huge rocks and make it look like no big deal at all! All of this of course heightens their sport of watching me clumsily carry large rocks or work with their tools with no grace at all and then cracking jokes in Maya about the American kid. These guys are very good humored, and I have to say I am enjoying my time working with a barefooted Mayan construction crew of 5' strong men - certainly an experience I won't forget. I really do appreciate how these 10 or 12 guys are working on this Church for free, or at least at the cost of my pride. 
After we finished the ditches, we began to gather rocks for the walls of the Church. This job involved driving in the back of a pick up down a dirt road into the jungle to an area of road that is about to be paved. The side of this jungle road has been cleared by some large machinery leaving many rocks exposed. This is the only time I've seen these fellas wear any foot protection. They wore shoes to protect themselves from the scorpions, snakes, and large insects that have found their way under these unearthed rocks. My job with the six other missionaries from Cancun was to move these rocks (some of them easily bigger than my upper body needing to be carried by several people) into the bed of a truck, ride over to the construction site, unload them all onto a massive rock pile, load up into the truck, go back down the jungle road and repeat until the crew felt like we had gathered enough rocks for today. We did this for several hours and were ready for a rest afterwards. There is a picture here of the crew on the truck after unloading the rocks you see before us. 
I went to Valladolid with Fr. Raoul, Fr. Josepe, and the Mayan Commissioner of San Ramon to buy the construction supplies for the entire Church project last week. Vallodolid, a pleasant city of about 50,000 in the center of the Peninsula in between Cancun and San Ramon, is off the beaten track in the Yucatan with nearly no tourists passing through. This city is a very characteristic Yucatecan colonial city with 5 enormous Churches, and a magnificent Cathedral casting a long shadow over a beautiful park in the center of town. Our trip here was a funny situation overall. Suddenly I felt like I was in a Jason Bourne movie or something. Allow me to explain, here I am in Central America - I walk into an obscure "tile store" on a back street of a remote Mexican town surrounded by jungles. I am with two men dressed as Priests, each of them huge by the local standards. We, a curious crew, headed to a tiny back office where we were going to finish negotiating the price for the "construction materials", lets just say. The huge, bearded Fr. Josepe in his Franciscan habit on one side and Fr. Raoul, renowned for his incredible physical strength, in his Legionary Guayabera on the other, and me, a bearded American looking amazingly out of place and carrying a small backpack which, unbeknownst to everyone around, contained a large sum of money, in the middle... I felt like I was in some sort of drug cartel conspiracy or a James Bond film. But no, however curious we looked or movie-worthy, we were just trying to get materials to build a Church, which is exciting enough in its own rite! I have to admit, it was fun. In that back office we got a great price for the construction materials to build the Church, one considerably lower than we were originally quoted (people here are generous with priests and projects of this sort), and we had five people in the room and five different first languages represented: Fr. Josepe with italian, Fr. Raoul with French (he's from rural Canada and was raised speaking French), the Mexican business owner with Spanish, the Commissioner with Maya, and me with English. I am glad that everything went smoothly and that we bought from one source - that makes everything a lot easier and takes a large weight off my back to know that the money spent so far on the Church has been spent well with no room for waste. God is good and my prayers are being answered! 
The construction materials have arrived in San Ramon and we are ready to go! We did very little work last week because a tropical storm blew through that lasted 2.5 days making it difficult to work. The Architect, a good man from nearby Tulum who is also working on this project for free, was not pleased with the work we did last week and has requested that a construction engineer be hired to come twice a week and check on things in order to make sure that every thing is done exceptionally well. The Architect said that this Church is the hardest project he has ever designed because it is modeled after some traditional Mayan buildings (more on this later) and requires a meticulous construction crew. The engineer will come for the first time tomorrow to help guide us in the right direction and then construction on the Church's structure will begin in earnest. Finally, here we go. Pray for this Church please! So, that's how work has been going! Otherwise, the food is still great, the people still friendly, and the soccer games at night are fierce! Playing soccer with a bunch of little barefoot Mayans who are three times quicker than me is unbelievable. If you've seen the movie "The Rundown" and can recall the scene where the Rock gets beaten up by a bunch of little guys who are fighting with "crazy tarzan jujitzu", thats what I feel like all the time. Even the little kids are amazing soccer players, doing bicycle kicks, kroifs, and rainbows and, again, getting a kick out of the big slow American. I´ll tell you, God is working on my humility down here! Still, the good humour of these guys keeps me simple and cheerful and I really do enjoy playing late night soccer games with wooden goals and my team mates and my opponents speaking in the language of the Movie "Apocolypto" - truly frightening to consider that my team mates' ancestors played a game similar to soccer in their city squares just like we're playing now, except that the losers of our games have to buy the winning team a large cold coca cola; the losers of games in the Mayan city squares were killed on the courts and their hearts promptly removed. Glad this is now and not then...
Besides working on the Church, Fr. Josepe has me teaching english and guitar between 5 different pueblos, sometime teaching four classes a day in three or four different towns. These little towns, San Ramon, Tepich, Francisco May, Francisco Madero, and Tac Chivo, appreciate the attention of the missionaries and the children enjoy something to learn like english or guitar. We usually teach in the thatch roofed rooms designated as the Church. I end up learning maya in my english classes and inevitably am asked to play "La Cucaracha" by the students in the guitar classes. It is fun teaching these children and its very easy to connect with them and entertain them despite the language barrier. As tiring as it can be to teach, it is rewarding to laugh with the kids and, strangely enough, hear them laugh at me too! 
As I was waiting for a class in Francisco Madero last week I noticed that a young Mayan behind a near by house was holding a strange creature by the scruff of its back and trying to tie a rope around its neck. I felt bad for staring but couldn't take my eyes off of the funny looking little thing and the terrible trouble it was giving this young Mayan. It looked like a cross between a ferret and a raccoon and had a long striped tail. As he was struggling to get it under control, the creature came loose, bounced around all over the ground, avoiding his grasping hands, and then zipped up his leg almost faster than my eyes could follow, leapt on the young man's hand and bit the daylights out of his index finger. The guy screamed out loud and grabbed the critter (called a 'Tay Homme' I was soon to discover) and began taunting it by waving his finger just out of reach of its snarling mouth and then giving it a rough whack on the head. Right about then he looked up and noticed me staring at him through the trees and we both, or at least for my part, felt a little embarrassed. No matter, we struck up a conversation which began with me admiring the little animal, now somewhat calm and wandering at the end of the string leash the fellow was holding, and asking about how he found the little guy. This young man ended up giving me various fruits and juices to try, none of them had I ever seen before, and then he took me and my friend Antonio, who was with me to teach Catechism, to a nearby cenote. This Cenote was awesome! I attached a few photos so you can see how cool it was. The mouth of the cenote is a humungous circular hole in the ground, about 30 feet deep, surrounded by jungle. However, it is difficult to see the large hole while approaching the cenote because of some sizable banana trees that are growing out of the bottom of the cenote that look at first glance like jungle brush. There is a wooden ladder that lands on a latform with another ladder that finally brings you to the caverns ground level. The bats in there are pretty big, the stalactites over the water are huge, and the caves in the walls look forbidding... I loved it. All this went to confirm my new love for cenotes and gave me a desire to see many, many more before I leave the Yucatan in a few months. There are some pictures here of the sign approaching the cenote, the entrance into the abysmal looking place, and a view from the interior. 
I was also blessed to see at least the beginning of an authentic Mayan fiesta. There is one day per year when all of the women from the surrounding pueblos (towns/villages) come to San Ramon to pay taxes to the government for schooling the children. Their families follow and people sell products of their daily work - there are carpenters selling chairs and tables obviously carved with their own hands, mothers and daughters selling necklaces and bracelets, farmers selling produce, and little Mayan Abuelas (grandmothers) selling their famous dishes. Every one pitches in to buy a huge bull to slaughter and feast on, as well as some large pigs and turkey too. The day was rained out within the first few hours, but not before I was able to eat some delicious tacos, to witness several hundred Mayan women dressed in their beautiful traditional dress (a simple one piece white dress with handsewn flowers of incredible color sewn around the breast and bottom of the dress) and to see the gutting of a very unhappy bull, which they slaughtered by hitting it on the head with a sledge hammer. Yeah I know, I was pretty amazed also. In the photobelow you can see a little girl wearing one of the traditional Mayan dresses the women wear for special occosions, and sometimes just in general! These are the kids I get to teach. Aren´t they beautiful? They are joyful, that's for sure! 
I was preparing a lesson for one of my english classes two days ago when five Mayans passed by my window and encircled a small tree outside my room. I walked outside, curious to see what they were up to, only to find that they were trying to light the tree on fire, or so I thought. What they were actually doing was smoking out a bees' nest that was twice the size of a basketball. One of the guys, wielding a machete, went right into the middle of the swarm of bees and began chopping at the branches the nest was attached to. The other guys were all chuckling as they watched their buddy get "bee'd" pretty badly, apparently saying something to one another along the lines of "Boy am I glad its not MY turn this time! Tha´'s gotta hurt!" That unfortunate Mayan had at least five bees in his hair and many visibly stinging him all across his bakc and belly, but he took it like a champ and just smiled with good humour at his friends, laughing at himself just as they were laughing at him. These people are tough. Within a few minutes the bees nest was out and away from the tree on the ground, the bees were confused and weakened by the smoke and the nest was then taken apart for the honey inside. Picture below of the men taking apart the nest... 
I was also excited to see my first few tarantulas this week. Now that I've seen them up close I'm twice as terrified as I was before! They sure are scary! I have to check my shoes every morning to avoid an unpleasant morning surprise of tarantulas in your shoe... Thank you to all for your continued support in prayer. There is nothing greater you can give me than the gift of grace through your prayers. Please pray for the morale of of the Mayan workers who are sacrificing a great deal to work on this Church without pay for several months. Please pray for the leadership of the Fathers Raoul and Josepe, and the guidance of the Architect and the construction engineer so that this Church can become a fruitful reality and a glorious place of prayer for this community. I need your help in prayer as all good things encounter bitter battles; I am convinced that God is blessing this project immensely and that makes this a good thing, so please pray for God's will to be done perfectly in the construction of the Church in San Ramon. Even more importantly, please pray that the Church is built in the hearts of the people. After all, what good is building a place of prayer if no one chooses to pray? So, this is the real prayer for my mission to San Ramon: that the Church be built in the hearts of the people, including my own and in the hearts of the missionaries, rather than solely on their soil somewhere close by. The Church must be constructed in the prayerful formation of souls so that the Church building can be properly used to give glory to our Creator, Who loves us with a love far beyond our ability to comprehend. Man, life is beautiful. Thank you all for everything! 
"Unless the LORD builds the house, in vain do its builders labor. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand in guard in vain.” - Psalm 127:1
"The Lord says, 'Heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. What kind of house are you going to build for me? Where will I rest?'" - Isaiah 66:1
"Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed," says the LORD, who has compassion on you." - Isaiah 54:10
Will write again in the next week or two! Peace and Joy be yours in abundance.
isaiah 54:10 --> thats whats up! love you bro!
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