Up to the mountains

Last weekend Bruce & Katy Dockter and I drove up to a pastors' meeting in the small town of Rancho Alegre. The picture above is of the meal served to us after the meeting was over. I had been to this town once before and that was nine years ago. It was interesting to see how the town has grown and changed since I was there the last time. The biggest, and most important in my opinion at least, was the fact that now the town has a bathroom! The last time I was in Rancho Alegre, we also had to walk the last 20 minutes from the nearby town of San Mateo. There is now a dirt road to Rancho Alegre. It was interesting to see that progress has come even to small mountain villages.
After the pastors' meeting we drove about 20 minutes to another mountain community. The town of Xagacia has the first Covenant church (picture above) in all of Mexico. It was incredible to talk with some of the older people who had been founding members of this church almost 57 years ago. Neighboring town people also told us stories of being persecuted for being a Christian and how God had miraculously protected them.

We slept in one of the Sunday School rooms in the church and woke up for a 5:00 a.m. church service. The service was fairly well attended. There was a time of singing, Bruce gave a short meditation and we ended with 30 minutes of prayer---while kneeling on the cement floor.

This photo is of me preaching at the 10:00 a.m. church service. You can see the women on one side of the church and the men on the other side. The women all have their heads covered with their rebozos (shawls). This was a very traditional congregation. However, you can also see the drum set and the large speakers from the sound system which brings this small church into more modern times. I was interested to see whether younger women also covered their head and it seemed that there was a definite generational gap--women under 30 did not cover their heads and/or wore their shawl only around their shoulders.
After the 5:00 a.m. service Katy and I joined the church women in the kitchen. They were making tortillas for the meal after the 10:00 a.m. service. Each women came to the church with a small bucket of masa (dough). They then combined all of the buckets into the giant pile of dough on the table in this photo. We laughed as the women taught Katy and I how to make tortillas and as we attempted to get them to come out round. From this photo you can see that I did not succeed very well!

While making the tortillas the women also taught Katy and I how to say "God bless you" in Zapoteco, the indigenous language of this town. This also caused some very funny moments as Katy and I tried to get our mouths and tongues to pronouce the sounds of this language. We did manage to say this phrase in a somewhat understandable form. Phonetically this phrase is pronounced "Dee - os - gah - kleh - neh". I was able to greet the congregation at the 10:00 a.m. service with this phrase and most people understood me--or maybe they were just polite when they said they did!

We returned back to the city of the Oaxaca on Sunday afternoon enjoying a beautiful drive back down the mountain.