Doing life in/from Coslada

On Monday we said goodbye to the Cox family and navigated the Metro (subway) to Coslada, a near eastern suburb. We will be staying here for almost three weeks total at the home of Peg and Jerry Schweitzer. Peg and Jerry are WorldVenture missionaries who teach at Evangelical Christian Academy (an English-language school primarily for MKs). We spent two evenings with them, but now they've returned to the U.S. for a wedding and other family time, so we have the place to ourselves. Thanks for your hospitality and the gift of your home, Peg & Jerry! Besides this space, Peg has also passed along another piece of herself to us - she taught Meggan how to make a pie shell from scratch. Yesterday Meggan turned that shell into a peach glacé pie (yummy!).

The peach pie brings us to another interesting note - grocery shopping. Tuesday we introduced ourselves to the three stores in the neighborhood, then returned to the first (AhorraMás, which means “SaveMore”) to do our shopping. Meggan successfully navigated the meat counter for two LARGE chicken breasts, while I miserably attempted to ask for help finding something they didn’t carry. But, hey - we’re here to learn, and you can’t learn if you don’t try! We went back to the store yesterday for milk and fresh fruit, but we had to go to all three stores to find what we wanted, because there’s a truckers’ strike going on in Spain right now. The Portuguese strike has recently been resolved; pray for a quick resolution here as well.

Yesterday was also our day to discover the Cercanías (regional train network - a little faster and more expensive than the Metro, with a broader reach). We walked about 20 minutes to the station, then rode about 25 minutes to Atocha, the main train station in Madrid (the station that was bombed by terrorists in 2004). From there we walked around a lot of central Madrid - through Retiro Park, into El Corte Inglés (“The English Court,” kind of like Macy’s), past the Royal Palace and Royal Theatre, and through the Plaza Mayor. We had lunch in a small place off a side street - our second meal out, and our first on our own.

So, how are we doing? We’re okay; it’s an adjustment to be on our own. Some of that is nice, of course, and some of it is naturally intimidating but necessary. The piece that’s a bit surprising is that we were less prepared to feel the absence of having hosts focusing on our goals and needs. Our first three families gave a lot of energy toward helping us along our journey of discerning what God has for us in the future, which was very beautiful and served us deeply. Without their presence, we feel more out of place than we did earlier. If you ask Meggan and me, we’re so thankful things were arranged in the order they were; we needed the extra support at the beginning! So, praise God for that, and pray for God’s presence in our ongoing adjustment to life on our own.

Hopefully our activity in the next few days will help with that adjustment. This afternoon we are meeting with a Spanish pastor named Andrés, tomorrow we are having lunch with a team of missionaries from the agency WEC, and Saturday night we are going to a secular event against human trafficking hosted by Aslan (the performing arts ministry we will be working with in July).