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| Eating at a buffet in McAllen TX |
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| Shopping at La Ropa, Kinda like an unorganized Goodwill. |
Feliz año nuevo, (happy new year). A lot has happened in our lives since our last post in our personal lives. Not as much at SI since they have been closed most of that time. On Jan 1st, Karen and I left at 1:30 for the Santo Domingo airport to visit my folks in Edinburg, Texas. We, along with my three sisters and one brother-in law, surprised them for a 5 day visit. Barb and Beck stayed with them in their house and Gerald 's and Karen and I stayed at a local hotel. It was really a good time to be together. It went fast but we all enjoyed our time there. We went to Padre Island, Mexico, heard a southern gospel group perform at their church, had two family movie nights, and Karen and I were even able to make a Walmart run and pick up a few things that we can't get here at home. By Saturday evening we realized that our chances of flying out on Sunday and Monday were most likely not going to happen so Sunday noon we took our rented van and drove to Houston where Karen and I flew out on Monday morning and the rest flew out on Tuesday morning. All 6 of us made it back to our homes safely with a ton of great memories.
We had a lady from SI stay at our house with our girls while we were gone. It was nice to have time away by ourselves but as always it was even better to return home and be a family again.
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| Marcy and Amy (Dr. Fernando's daughter) playing on the computer |
Marcy and Janae continue to have friends over to play sometimes. It makes the vacation time go by a little faster and without groups, it seems like we never see the SI staff and their families. We have our first outreach coming this Friday evening. We are all excited about that.
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| Nina blowing out her candle for her birthday. |
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| The rest of the family SKYPEing my folks on Christmas day |
We
celebrated Nina's 18th birthday also on the 28th of Dec. It is hard to
imagine that she is already 18 years old. But then I also had my 52nd
birthday on Jan 1st. Time keeps going faster each year. But I do have to
say that it moves slower here.
One of the advantages of being a missionary in this day in age is the technology that we have access too. SKYPE has changed that so much. We were able to SKPYE my parents on Christmas day. Seeing them and hearing their voice is not the same as being with them but it sure helps.
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| Janae and Davíd (Dr Fernando's son) playing memory |
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| Corroded Copper pine in the floor. |
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| Water leaking through our ceiling on our main level. |
About four weeks ago we started to have water come through our porch ceiling and I figured it was bad flashing where the porch meets the side of the house. After a while, we noticed it coming in our dinning room and living area. By then I realized that it was not rain water but a broken pipe somewhere in the concrete wall or floor above. Not as easy to just take off a sheet of drywall and fix it. Luckily there was a plumber here in Jarabacoa that, after about 30 minutes of looking over the situation, realized that it was in the floor and somehow knew exactly where it was. It is now fixed and we are waiting to fix the floor until we know for sure that the repair job is not going to leak. It made quite the mess before we were able to locate and repair the problem. With everything thing being concrete, it is a real job to repair things like that.
We ending up getting water damage on the ceiling in three different rooms and the front porch. Once we know that the leak is fixed for sure, we wait 4 more weeks to make sure that the concrete is good and dry before we can repaint. I figure it could have been much worse. We were very fortunate that they found it as soon as they did.
I now look forward to having Gerald Lee and Dave Wenger from Shore Mennonite come down to help me with a couple of construction projects I have to get done. It is always such a huge blessing to have people from our home area come stay with us. It gives us the chance to show them first hand what we do here and how God has used our whole family here int he DR. One more time, thanks for all the support that we get from all of you. It means a lot to us and to SIDR.
