We had a good meeting with the owner of a small meeting area/hall on Friday night, and he agreed to a price that we can live with, so we will very likely begin meeting Sunday mornings as a church in a place where we can actually all be in the same room at the same time. Next week we have our annual Easter Sunrise Service at the Valtierras, so we’ll begin services in a new place the beginning of May.
Saturday we loaded up 25 of us in three vans and headed towards southern Mexico City and 6 Flags, Mexico. We arrived in good time, shortly before the park opened at 10 a.m., and stayed until 6:30 p.m. While there, I bumped into Caleb Blycker, and someone else mentioned they saw Meridith Hardy, with a PCS group from Puebla. I can’t imagine when they might have gotten home…because I know what happened to us!
As we were leaving it started to rain pretty hard. What I didn’t know is that in Ixtapaluca, it was already raining, and hailing too. We made it almost the whole way home in a little more than an hour, but the last 5 miles were…memorable. It took us almost 2 hours to go about 3 miles on the highway that borders the neighborhood were we live. It was…a testing experience. I still had wet shorts from a “Wild River Ride” that my son David talked me into going on for a second time that afternoon. Finally, after 3 hours, we finally got home.
I called Mariano this morning to see if he was coming to church. Mariano is the man who was saved as a result of our flood relief efforts last year. He immediately said that he couldn’t, because it was flooded. I said that I knew that it was flooded from last night, but the highway was still open. “No, the canal broke again last night. The highway is closed both ways.” Huh? I looked on the Internet, and sure enough, the open (sewage) canal burst again around 3 a.m. this morning, trapping around 10 cars as water descended rapidly from the canal, which is abound 20 feet higher than the highway. You can see the water marks in the white SUV below.
So I went and took some pictures today, and also tried to give some advice to a friend from Puebla who has a flight at 6:35 a.m. tomorrow. Give yourself plenty of time!
The flood this time is a fraction of what it was last year, however, due to deep-level drainage that was put in after last year’s flooding. And, of course, the promise that this would never happen again. But alas…it did!
