June III

We had an awesome first week of outreach for the summer!  Many Mexican pastors, young men, women and children were blessed, and decisions were made to follow Christ!  Kristy had the opportunity to visit the team in the field while taking pictures.  The team, from California, did an excellent job!  We also had a group of guys from Georgia come and build a retaining wall to prep the area where the next dorm building will be put.  Kristy also put together a slideshow for them and cooked staff dinners for most of the week.  Ron is still keeping plenty busy fixing things up around the ranch. 

We took a few people over to Grace Children's Home for a tour to see how things are run over there.  Remember that across the street, Grace Babies' Home is under construction.  We also took a tour of this seemingly quick-rising structure.  It's awesome to see the progress on the home.  When we left Tijuana last September, there was nothing but a foundation.  We are anxious to get over there and lend a hand.

This week most of our staff, the worship band and interns are forming an evangelistic outreach team.  They will be ministering to a local church in place of a team that had to cancel recently.  Ron will be continuing his work around the ranch and Kristy is starting to get back to work on the wooden signs.  We are eagerly waiting for materials and for a representative from Lazarian World Homes to take us to Mexicali and build a home.  We may not get much notice, just load up and head over to Mexicali for a few days.  Although we are hoping it will be during an "off week" so that we don't miss things going on here. 

Just a little over a month and our college team from WI will be joining us to build a home.  We are very excited about that.  We will be trying some things out for that week with some changes to the outreach schedule, etc., to see how we will want them to run for the future.  If you have a youth, college, Bible study, or really any type of group that would like to come down to Mexico and build, either in the spring, summer or for New Year's week, please contact us.  There are so many opportunities from home building & other construction projects, to the children's home & the children's/women's/sports ministry.  There are a couple of buildings planned to be built on the property here at the ranch.  Some funding and materials have been provided already to construct a kitchen/dining hall.  We mentioned above that a retaining wall was built last week for the new dorm building.  All that is needed are teams willing to donate their time and funding to help with portions of these projects.  We are very excited to see how the Lord is working!

"O Week"

Last week was Orientation, also known as "O Week", for the interns here on the ranch. This is a very busy week for them and staff alike. Everything on the ranch needs to be rearranged, cleaned, organized, etc. Ron spent the week fixing things, as well as a day helping one of the missionaries, Tom Coles, working on closing up a house that a team built and didn't quite get finished. Kristy helped get the YUGO Store stocked and ready for the summer and began working on making new wooden signs for all the buildings, etc. Brittany and William have been pitching in wherever needed. They've been a tremendous help.

One highlight from last week was that Kristy and the kids spent a day in Ensenada with the interns and summer staff. The interns had to do a scavenger hunt around a few block radius in downtown Ensenada, right off of the harbor. The kids enjoyed helping, while Kristy and Pam, the cook in training, tried not to help - due the fact that they both have some Spanish knowledge, as well as knowledge of the area. The idea was for the interns to learn to use their Spanish in order to ask questions, navigate around town, purchase some small items, etc. It's a good learning tool, and all in all a good cultural day for everyone. While there, we of course had some amazing fish (and shrimp) tacos! They are very well know for their seafood in Ensenada, and this was our first time experiencing it. We also took a short boat ride on the ocean. This was very enjoyable and was the first boat ride on the ocean for all of us. There are a ton of seals along the coast there, as well as covering one entire doc in the harbor. Oh, and walking through the fish market was a rather enjoyable experience!

One of the things we learned more about at the Ensenada Outreach Center while down there, is their "Baskets of Love" ministry.  This is a ministry that Kristy will start up and run at TJOC.  There are several different types of baskets.  Some of them include food baskets, Moses baskets and gift baskets.  The food baskets are mostly given to families when a house it built for them.  Teams purchase the baskets of food and sometimes sponsor that family for a year, giving monthly or bimonthly gifts of food.  The gift baskets are also given to families who receive a house.  The gift basket includes dishes, silverware, bed linens, pillows, etc.  The Moses baskets are for babies, filled with clothes, blankets, etc., and are purchased for families that pastors see are in great need.  We are really excited about beginning this ministry, especially since it sort of coincides with the home building ministry.

This week is our first week of outreaches for the summer, so we'll have an update for you at the end of the week.

Ensenada Week

We recently spent a week in Ensenada, which is about an hour and half drive south from the ranch. Together with a team of families from Memphis, we built a home for a Mexican family. The family consisted of a woman, her two children, her sister and niece. It was amazing to get to know the family a little bit, especially the children. The mom worked every morning, so she wasn't always around. When she was, she helped with the construction of her home, so that was really neat.

Ron worked closely with Juan, a pastor that works with YUGO as a foreman for houses being built Ron was able to learn a few helpful hints from that. It was also great for us to just see how another YUGO camp runs. It was helpful for figuring out some scheduling decisions for the ranch when there are building teams, for seeing how things run when there are multiple houses going up in one week, etc. Five houses were built that week in Ensenada, with a total of eighty-four homes going up this year. We are so excited for the day when we have multiple houses being built in the Rosarito/Tijuana area during the year, and Lord-willing, multiple houses going up every week during the busy seasons. We praise God for this awesome opportunity!!

June Prayer Letter

Well, we did it! We purchased a

7x14 trailer, put just about
everything we own into it, and
moved to Rancho YUGO in
Tijuana. It’s difficult to let you
know exactly what we will be
doing initially. We will be
spending a week in Ensenada

at the beginning of this month. While there, we
will be observing the operations at the
outreach center as multiple teams are there

building homes. This is something we are

really looking forward to – anticipating the

day when we have multiple builds happen-
ing at the same time in the Tijuana/Rosa-
rito area. But for this year, there is still
only one house scheduled to be built in
August (by the college/young adult team from our church in Fort Atkinson). There are still about fifty families on a waiting list for a home.

We are looking forward to field orientation and missionary training with the Hooples. This will include orientation to the Mexican culture and to the neighborhood in which we will be living, as well as training classes. YUGO outreaches in Tijuana begin on June 21st. Ron will be teaching the “Crazy Love” series to the interns that he taught to our college/young adult Sunday School class. Besides that, building the house in August, and other misc. construction projects, we don’t have all the details on what we will be doing for the summer. Of course, the home building ministry will be our primary focus. As it is just getting off the ground, we will be turning our attention to publicizing the ministry and recruiting teams. At the same time, we will figure out how God wants us involved at the bilingual church we attend in Rosarito, as well as other possible ministry extensions of YUGO.

Before we left, we had

the opportunity to spend
some time with family and
friends. We had a very
nice send-off from our
church, including a
commissioning prayer,
cake, and t-shirts for all
four of us that people
signed – very memorable!
We were given a large,
unexpected gift from the
missions committee at our
church that we used
toward the purchase of
our trailer.

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Sold Out (college/young adult) ministry from FCC

Brittany, Will, and a few cousins on our visit to Illinois.