February – 2011

 Greetings!

It has only been about a month since our last update letter but I don’t even know where to start.  Things here have been anything but boring!  So let’s see…

The month of February started slow enough with the Home’s annual Super Bowl party which was a blast even if the wrong team won!  We were staying out at the Children’s Home from Tuesday evening until Friday evening with Mary’s parents staying the other nights.  On the four days we did not live at the Home we went out to the Home and helped with the everyday work and projects, worked on our Spanish, and continued to work on getting our house in shape.  Mary started a Women’s Bible Study and I started teaching the youth group at Church as well as preaching occasionally. 

On the 8th of February Mary’s parents left for the states to present the Children’s Home ministry in several churches which left us in charge of the Home and the Church here full time.  This was the primary reason that we felt called to come and serve here while we learned Spanish.  The Children’s Home is severely underfunded and our being here allows them to get away and present to churches.  As you can imagine when you have almost 40 kids depending on you it is hard enough to get away for an evening let alone a couple of months!   While they are gone we are living at the Home full-time taking care of the kids, cooking, cleaning doing laundry, etc.  Overall things have gone fairly smoothly but there have definitely been a few bumps in the road! 

We did have a family, Josh & Brittany Roberts & kids, come down the week Mary’s parents left to help.  I went to the border to pick them up in the van and they stayed for about a week.  The trip back and forth to the border was interesting to say the least.  We had several problems but in the Lord’s sovereignty He worked them out for His glory.  It is so wonderful to know that we serve a God who is in complete control and it is so awesome to be on the frontlines seeing God work in such big ways first-hand.  I am so thankful for each and every one of you that pray for us.  When troubles and problems arise it is a huge blessing to know that there are Christians lifting us up in prayer!

A few weeks ago Mary started having contractions and was in severe pain.  I took her to the doctor and she told her that she was in pre-term labor probably induced by too much work (laundry for 40 people?)!  She told her that she needed to be on bed rest and to take medicine to stop the contractions.  Mary took the medicine but she has not been so good about the bed rest!  If you didn’t know she is a pretty stubborn woman and she doesn’t like to let little things like this get in her way!  Thankfully she is doing much better and her contractions have slowed down considerably.  Please continue to pray that Jack stays put at least for a few more weeks!  Around the same time that Mary started having contractions, Sam started having seizures again.  He was only having about one a day but we still were worried since he had been seizure free since starting his current medicine.  We finally took him to a neurologist in Zacatecas and he said that since Sam has grown he needed to have his dosage increased to maintain a therapeutic level.  He started his new dosage a few days ago and is scheduled to go back to the neurologist in a couple of weeks to have blood drawn to check his levels.  Please continue to pray that this resolves the seizures and that Sam outgrows them soon!  Also please pray for a boy here in the Children’s Home named Brayan.  He broke his arm back in December pretty bad and had to have a surgical pin to help it heal.  For some reason the arm does not want to heal properly.  He is scheduled to go back in to the x-rays around the 14th of this month to check the progress and the doctor said if it is not healed by then it may require additional surgery. 

Finally the last few weeks the we have all been passing around a couple of nasty bugs that cause fever and vomiting which is not very much fun under any circumstances especially with 40 people in one house!  This also coincided with our losing water at the Home about 10 days ago.  The pump in the closest rancho that supplies water for the home went out and we are patiently waiting on them to fix it!  We stuck it out as long as we could at the Home with no water, but we had no water for toilets, dishes, cooking, cleaning, etc. which as you can imagine with tons of puking kids is a mess!  On Tuesday afternoon we moved all the kids to our house in town were we have water and we are riding it out here until the water is fixed.  The Lord has blessed us with a large house we can use to put up church groups but with 40 people it quickly seems a lot smaller!  The kids are having a great time being in town with parks nearby and a change in scenery but Mary and I will be so thankful when we can head back out to the home.  Seriously though we are very grateful the Lord supplied us with a house we could use to take care of the kids and keep them clean and fed!  Please pray that the water returns soon!  We only have one washing machine here so we have quite a few dirty clothes that need washed! 

This month has been full of surprises, good and not so good, but we are so happy and thankful to be here serving the Lord and showing his love to these kids.  There is nowhere on earth we would rather be than right here with no water and 40 people in house, preparing for the ministry in Oaxaca.  We cannot tell you how much we appreciate what each and every one of you does through prayer and financial support to allow us to be here.  Please continue to pray for us as we labor for the Lord’s glory here.  Please be especially in prayer for Mary as she enters here final weeks of pregnancy that the Lord would give here the strength needed to handle to work at the Children’s Home and keep her and Jack healthy.  Also please continue to pray that the Lord would provide us with a vehicle that could handle the roads down here better as we prepare to make the transition to Oaxaca later in the year.

In Christ,

The Stanleys

“With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”  – Isaiah 12:3

Brayan and his broken arm:(

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *