February ’22 Family News

Ministry

Anja

Band

I was scheduled twice as tenor again this month. The first time was with the usual worship leader, the second time with the worship ministry leader and he gave me a rather difficult song to sing the lead voice (King of Kings by Hillsong). I am happy to report that it went well and that the ministry leader was pleased with my performance. He told me that he wants me to grow and that this was the reason why he started to schedule me as tenor. I am grateful to have a leader who is not just accepting the status quo, but who is challenging me to grow. I personally feel like my voice has gotten better. I can hit higher notes better and I am slowly starting to not only sing the songs as plain as they are, but add some solo singer ornaments here, which was the last challenge the ministry leader had given me.

Another highlight were my musician earphones. They are at the lower price spectrum, but I am not a pro, so I thought that would be enough and boy, I got blown away. All of a sudden, the sound was so loud and crisp! Before, I had to put every channel quite high with the overall volume high and now, I can keep it all WAY down. And yes, it is super crisp! To be honest, I am not sure if the left earphone is even working as I am always using the right one, but I do love that one 😉

Marriage Fellowship Band

Unfortunately, I did not get to song or play this month because every time, something kept me from it – one time our substitute car broke down, the second time Chris was sick and then the leaders were absent…. Oh well, let’s see what happens next month.

From Livestream to…

As mentioned in the last newsletter, things had gotten difficult with having to prepare the sound early and taking care of the kids at the same time, especially since we could not give Ziva to childcare and because of that, the team leader had suspended me. Well, I reached out to Pastor Mike to tell him about my situation. He then suggested I go and talk with Pastor Jesus, who is the executive pastor and is also allocating people. At the same time, Pastor Mike told me to think about joining the Kids Ministry since they are in need of teachers. I was not excited about it, to be honest since I already have two kids at home. However, the more thought I gave it the more I had to admit that this might be my best option. The kids are in the service during the worship time and only come to class later. That would allow me to be ready on time.

I had said talk with Pastor Jesus, and he suggested the prayer ministry. I then mentioned that I would have to be ready for that before the service too because they are reaching out to people offering prayer, which is why I cannot be a part of the livestream team anymore. Pastor Jesus then said he would reach out to the leader and talk with him. However, I mentioned kids ministry and that that would actually work for me. My only request: not being in any of the classes my girls are in. Pastor Jesus said he would talk to the ministry leader and then get back to me. Soon later he let me know that I could start there. I had a chat with the kids ministry leader and he asked me if I could imagine translating from English to Spanish. I was a bit surprised and said that I am not sure, but that I would be willing to try. He told me that I could sit in a class, but I ended up not being able to do that because our family got sick and I had to stay home to watch the kids. I guess I will have to start next month…

Fit 2 Serve

After being the only coach for a couple of months (with one of the Mexican ladies helping out during my pregnancy and during my recovery) and finding it rather sad, I am happy to announce that we are now two female coaches! I mentioned having more coaches during one of our prayer times during Fit 2 Serve and a day later, one of the participants approached me and asked what that would all entail. After explaining everything and answering all of her questions, she said, okay, count me in! Oh man, I am so excited just not to be alone anymore! It is hard to stay motivated and to do everything all by yourself. I was able to announce her in the second last roadshow of the month and work with her for the first time. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the last roadshow of the month due to me being sick and her absence, but I am excited for the roadshows to come!

I have been talking to one of the interns about him joining and he said he would have to ask permission since it’s one of their cleaning days. I let him know that if they were only allowed to come to the workout, that that would be fine with me. So let’s see how that’s gonna play out.

Back on Staff

I was super excited to get back to our pre-pregnancy routine. However, the requirements had been altered since I went on maternity leave. That means that apart from attending the staff meeting on Monday, serving in one weekend service and sitting in one weekend service you now also have to serve an additional weekend service (I was given permission to wait until the kids are bigger) and clean on either Wednesday or Saturday.

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Chris

Lights

Light Controller

After being busy reorganizing our existing light system, the Lord put it on my heart to get going with the light controller for our church plants – to get the system fully ready to do lights in our sanctuary, to be specific. To make this transition as smooth as possible, I had to face different problems. For one, I still haven’t solved the problem I faced last summer at our concert; in certain cases and on bigger setups the dmx interface would not work anymore. Now after finding out that there was simply nothing I could do with the configuration, I decided to “circumcise” that interface (cutting off… a wire). I did not think that the solution would be that easy and therefore, was quite relieved when it worked. Another problem I had to solve required more work: to write a script which would import all the necessary data from the existing system into the new system, to be able to use the self-made system as a fallback. So far, this is still a work in progress, but at least there is some progress…

New People

One Saturday, one of the Fit 2 Serve participants approached me with the wish to be trained on the lights. I gladly told him about the ins and outs and asked him to come in for training. However, that did not turn out to be as easy as it seemed. After some back and forth, and him praying about it, he told me that his place would be with the ministry he’s serving right now. That was a bit of a downer, but I find it’s more important to ask the Lord for His will first. After that, I talked to some other people who need to be trained on our light system, but it seems to be difficult to get the people show up on time.

Kids Ministry

For some time now, I have set up the lights team so that I don’t have much to do on Sundays. When I was talking to our executive pastor about the “freed” up time, he suggested that I should start serving either in the kids ministry or with the ushers. Since I did not think that I would be able to teach kids, I started to already imagine serving with the ushers, but the Lord had other plans.

The Lord’s ways are not always comfortable and so He convicted me to go and sign up for the kids ministry. After talking to the pastor in charge of that ministry, he mentioned that I could start teaching the kids in March. That sounded a bit challenging for me and so I decided to start immediately with sitting in other teachers’ lessons. The first time was with a Spanish only class that didn’t have a translator. That’s a challenge by itself, since my Spanish is still a bit limited. The Sunday after that, I was sitting in with another teacher, who also is a Church Planting Class teacher and could learn a lot about how to engage the kids. As in the Church Planting Class, my biggest challenge is the structure of how to study… March is coming soon!

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Family

Neighborhood

Interestingly enough, two of our neighbors moved out around the same time and another house had just been rented out to new people. However, the neighbors that moved were the ones right next to us and they had shown a great interest in our girls since they have four daughters on their own, the youngest being about 14, i.e. they would buy them gifts and ask how they were doing. However, they just moved to a different street, but are still in the same neighborhood since the owner wanted to sell the house or something like that. We have not seen anyone moving in next to us yet.

The second neighbor that is moving out is a chef with her daughter. We had a good relationship a while back, but it started getting weird after we had her over for dinner and prayed with her. She said that she said that she had felt peace after the prayer, but ever since, things had gotten downhill and our relationship never recovered. We just by accident saw that she is moving out, otherwise we would not have known at all. Apparently, she found a house somewhere that she liked so she bought it. There seems to be someone living there already, but we have not seen much of them.

When Anja was still pregnant, a couple moved in across from us after a muslim African American family moved out with their four kids. We only knew they were leaving because the kids told Anja. Anyway, Anja had planned on welcoming the new neighbors with a zopf (a traditional Swiss bread), and had also promised to make one for the neighbors that had invited us on Christmas Day. However, she had been too tired during the pregnancy and the first couple of months after the birth. Now she had finally enough energy to do it and both neighbors absolutely LOVED the bread, which is very nice, of course.

We asked our landlord, if we could maybe cut down that ginormous plant with its beautiful pink flowers because it has a lot of thorns, grows like crazy and is just always in the way when we want to park our car. To our surprise, he agreed immediately and all we had to do was to reach out to the gardeners who maintain all garden areas in our neighborhood to do the work. Good thing that Anja knows them quite well from her daily walk with Ziva prior to having Yuna. They did it, but also cut the main water pipe to our house. However, they were able to fix it and now we can enjoy the little palm trees that were almost dying because of the other plant and don’t have to worry about the girls getting stung by those nasty thorns.

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More Car Trouble

Last month, we shared that our car started steaming due to problems with the head gasket and that we were able to borrow the church’s car. Well, that did not last too long either… Our car broke down on Saturday and on that same day, Chris was able to get the church’s car. On Tuesday, we were on our way to one of the stores to buy some necessities before attending Marriage Fellowship. We were just pulling into a parking space when we heard a loud noise and the car sank down in the front on the driver’s side. When we got out of the car, we noticed that the car was sitting directly on the tire. Somehow it came off the ball joint! Chris tried to reach the guy from church in charge of the cars, but he was in Tijuana at that time and could not help us and we didn’t know how we would be able to get a tow truck. So we sat in the car and let our English speaking group from Marriage Fellowship know what was going on. Then Anja suggested that we should pray and ask God for wisdom and for a car or a solution for us to be able to get around, which we did.

After we ended our prayer, Anja suggested that Chris should call one of the guys from church who is a Mexican and a mechanic. He offered to call a tow truck for us so we could get the car to church. Then a couple who lives about 5min away from us offered to drive us home after Marriage Fellowship. And just as the second tow truck was getting our car on its trailer (the first tow truck could not pick us up since we were parked with the rear towards the road), a car pulled up next to us and the guy asked where we needed to go to and offered to give us a ride. When we told him that we were heading to Calvary Chapel, he told us that they were going there too, to the Marriage Fellowship. We declined since we wanted to stay with the car. However, when we finally got to church, the same guy offered us to borrow his car until ours was ready again! We had never seen these people before and here they were, offering us, perfect strangers, their really nice car for as long as we would need it! Only God can arrange something like this!

So we got home with the couple that lived close to us the same night, received the car from the other couple on Wednesday in time to go to church and were able to get our own car fixed just about a week later. We should still do a tune up and replace the v-belt, replace the side mirrors (one is broken and taped together, the other consists of a mirror foil that is bent and doesn’t really allow for anything to be seen), put a new plastic cover over the now naked front light, fix the heating and the vents in the back. There is still a lot to be done, but at least we can use the car again. It’s a good thing we are in Mexico. It would not be possible to drive around with a car in such a condition in Switzerland.

Love Fair

The Valentine’s Day event that Calvary Chapel organized was a love fair, i.e. we had a lot of fair games where you could win raffle tickets, a photo booth, food stands and we also had, of course, a raffle, got to see a magic/clown show and hear a short sermon on the topic of love. Everything was nicely decorated and well organized. A group of ladies was in charge of the food and people from the youth were helping with all of the games. If Anja remembers correctly, there were about 80 people attending the love fair. Unfortunately, we didn’t win anything in the raffle, but it was a nice to do something different for a change.

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Sick Time

This month, it was Chris’ turn with food poisoning… He had some chicken that might have been undercooked and he showed the same symptoms as Anja did last month – diarrhea, aching muscles and joints, tiredness, feeling sick, etc. So Anja was taking care of everything during that time. Just around the time when Chris was better, the kids both had a runny nose and a cough and bit later, Anja got sick, too. This time, it started with a sore throat and then showed effect on Anja’s voice and it was very straining to speak at all. She also had a runny nose and cough, which resulting in her not attending church or leading Fit 2 Serve.

Problems Mexican Paperwork Ziva

If you have read our previous newsletters, you might have noticed that Anja is trying to ensure that all the necessary papers are ready when we go to the INM (immigration office). However, this time, we had to hand in Ziva’s birth certificate as a part of her application for permanent residency and Anja didn’t notice that they had put her maiden name on the birth certificate. Why is that important? Because Anja doesn’t have any official document, like an old passport, to prove that Anja Schmid is the same person as Anja Zollinger. We would have to order a special document from the Swiss embassy… You might realize what we are trying to say.

Right, we were sent home being told to come back with a proof and show it to the guy at the information desk. We tried the same thing we did for Anja’s permanent residency, which was our marriage certificate and an old ID from Anja’s time as an employee of the police of St. Gallen. However, both were declined and we were advised to fill out a new application with Chris as the one signing because he has the same last name as Ziva on the birth certificate and Anja as authorized person so she can do all the talking at the INM. Thankfully, we were able to schedule an appointment before the end of March when her card is expiring. If that would happen, we would have to start her process all over again and we really don’t want to do that. Let’s pray it works out next time we go to the INM!

Ziva

Of course Ziva learned some new words again: abbutze (Swiss German for cleaning her off after eating), tschüss (Swiss German for an informal good bye), a kata (helicopter), paper plane, pony, aneena (hyena), hippo, morning, o man!, what?, azul (blue in Spanish), Nuna (Yuna), I peed, potty, chocolate, rabbit, a pants. When she is watching something, she is pointing out the things that she knows how to say and she is repeating new words that she hears. She also started “reading” books to herself when she is sitting on the potty.

Yes, potty training is a thing again. We started to put Ziva on the potty when she had to poo a while back because it was always such a drama to clean her up and because she was making noises that would give her away. So she started telling us when she had to go poo. A couple of months before Yuna was born we tried to get Ziva to pee on the potty too. She got pretty good at telling us when she had to go, but then she stopped all of a sudden. The only times Ziva would tell us when when she had to go poo or when she had to go pee before going to bed. We thought that we would give it another go now.

We went to the store and asked Ziva if she wanted panties and told her that she would have to go potty and not use diapers. She seemed excited, but it didn’t quite work out. Ziva got all panties wet within a day… We tried putting her on the potty every hour until we would have the panties washed, which resulted in wet diapers and some peeing on the potty. Then we switched to every half an hour with better results. Ziva was mostly peeing on the potty, but would not tell us that she had to go most of the time. The other difficulty is that we are out a lot, which makes potty training difficult. We are trying to keep the half an hour thing up when we are in the house, but Ziva really doesn’t seem to want to go potty. However, when she pees, she says YAY!, raises her arms, points to the container with the rice stars that is sitting on the window sill if a reward is needed, and says, STARS! because she loves them.

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Last month ended with Ziva’s nose being dry and her skin being nice and smooth. Let’s just say when we stopped the treatment after 3 weeks, as suggested by the doctor, it got worse real fast again, which was pointing towards an allergic reaction. One day, noticing big blotches of dark red on Ziva’s face as well as bumps on her ears and Ziva complaining about being itchy, Anja was crying out to the Lord, asking if there was anything we could do or leave out to help her. Anja just heard one thing, egg. We decided to give it a shot and banned egg from her diet and guess what, her skin got better in no time! When we had the doctor’s appointment, we did a test on the most common allergies and guess which ones Ziva has: dust and egg! It’s a light allergy (only one of three crosses), but still. Since I had told the doctor that we had avoided egg, he wanted to know how we got to that decision. I told him that I had prayed and that was what came to my mind. What we can do to help Ziva is keeping the house clean, avoiding giving her a lot of egg and keeping her skin hydrated to avoid itchiness. Of course, we keep praying for healing for Ziva because God is the one who can do it.

Although Ziva is very similar to Chris in character, she loves one thing her daddy does not like at all: horses! We went to Parque Morelia again and just like last time, she wanted to see the ponies, but this time, she raised her arms for us to put her on one of them. Her name is Katrina. Anja remembered that name so it might be that Ziva was interested in that pony the last time already. Anja asked the guy how much a ride was and since it was not a lot, we let Ziva ride on Katrina. During the ride, the guy who was leading the pony asked where we were from and when Anja said Switzerland, his behavior changed completely. He was like, oh, I thought you were a gringa (American) and was all of a sudden super friendly and chatty and wanted to know all kind of things about our country and culture. It seems like speaking Swiss German in Mexico could be beneficial. Anyway, Ziva was so happy to be on that pony and that made mommy super proud since mommy loves horses, too. It was a whole drama to get her off that pony. After we did a tour through the zoo, we decided to allow Ziva another ride because she loved it so much. We didn’t have less drama getting her off, but it was worth seeing her happy face while being on that pony.

Yuna

Yuna has gained height and weight again despite her still quite frequent spit-ups. Her face looks fuller, but she is still skinny-ish. However, we will soon have to set up the baby bed since the crib is slowly but surely getting small. The question is just, are we gonna put Yuna in the same room with Ziva or are we gonna put her bed in the office since there is no bed in our room? And if we are putting Yuna in the office, will we put the changing table in our bedroom? Or rather in the closet?

Yuna is also a lot more active now. She enjoys laying in her rocker and playing with the toys that are dangling in front of her, jumping in her jumper, rolling from her back to her belly and less often from her belly to her back, sitting in her seat, turning the toy and grabbing the cube and the pyramid attached to the seat. Yuna also loves to watch movies and learning videos with Ziva.

We think it’s funny that Yuna is having a hard time falling asleep during the day without anything covering her face. Maybe she is trying to make it darker? Yuna is always very happy when she finds something that is making crinkling noises, like the wet wipe package.

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Prayer requests

• health (Chris’ and Anja’s back, Yuna’s spit ups, Ziva’s allergies)
• appointment opening for Yuna’s Mexican passport
• finances and favor for Ziva’s permanent residency
• money for car repairs

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