God calls again, we move from Belize to Ecuador (South America)

Ok now this sounds even more crazy..but the more we step out in faith for God we are realizing the more he expects of us for Him..I mean we were all up for the ¨stay in Belize¨ thing I mean maybe not forever but come on we had come out here all the way from England..but God confirmed to us it was just for a year..next mission -ECUADOR- S.America..ok God whatever you say wherever you lead we will go (we know we can only be truely happy when we are where God wants). Rhoda had the country of Ecuador on her heart way back in England before we even arrived in Belize, we were not sure why, but now we believe God wants us to move on to there. So, after again trauling the internet we came accross a website which listed hundreds of international Christian schools in many different countires throughout the world. We emailed about 20 schools in Ecuador which the site listed and then prayed for only the one school that we were meant to teach at to respond..miraculously only one school did - the one we will be teaching at! As part of securing the teaching-English jobs for us in Ecuador, Rhoda had to phone the manager of the Ecuador college from Belize. As Rhoda had never spoken to anyone in Spanish ever in her life before (except for learning a few phrases from a phrase book!) this was rather scarey to say the least, but God gave her the clarity of mind and the strength to go through with the phone call. God does give us the strength as christians to do whatever he calls us to do, but just like Joshua, Moses, and other characters from the bible, so we too have to step out in faith and courage with boldness.WITNESSING IN MEXICO: When we lived in Belize we would often walk down the road a mile to the river. Here we would pay a few cents in order to take the canoe accross to the small community in Mexico on the other side! Here we met a Mexican family while having lunch at their one and only shack restaurant in the village. It turned out that the man who was the owner of the place was very interested in us on hearing that we were from England, they had never seen English people before and asked if it would be possible for Rhoda to teach his children some English (we managed to get another man in the restaurant to translate this to us because at this point we didnt know any Spanish and the restaurant owner didnt know any English!). The people in this Mexican village of about 200 people were very very poor, infact they only had one shared toilet which did not even flush, for the whole community. Therefore when the man offered to pay us something we struck up a deal that instead in exchange for our time he could simpy provide us with a meal from his restaurant...we never knew each week what the food would be but we always found it to be delicious as we are not hard to please and eat (just about) anything and everything. When the time came for us to leave Belize we had to say farewell to this Mexican family also. As they owned the only restaurant we knew that if we could be of witness to them then they could potentially help lead the rest of the community to faith in Jesus. They only had a small Catholic church there. We had bought for ourselves a Spanish/English Bible when we found out that we would be going to Ecuador in order to help us learn some Spanish. This was excellent as it was the full New Testament as well as Psalms and Proverbs, each page being in Spanish and English. On our last day we felt led by the Lord to show this Bible to the restaurant owner, and he was absolutely delighted and joyfull to see it and immediately held it up to everyone around saying 'la biblia en ingles!'. We decided therefore to give this family the Bible and pray they will come to know the Lord through it. We needed this Bible so much that the next day we went out and ordered another copy for ourselves of it again. I very much enjoyed teaching the children in Mexico and it gave me a flavour of what would be to come for us in Ecuador, I infact used a 'Teach yourself Spanish' book with the kids to help them learn English as it had all the phrases in both languages..so I also benefited from them by learning some Spanish. We had fun pointing to many different colours and objects in the restaurant and saying their names. Mostly we could understand each other, and I even understood one day(after looking in my dictionary) when the man asked if we would eat snails to say 'no gracias' (no thankyou!).

Sad to leave Belize but excited to be going to Ecuador we boarded our flight from Cancun Mexico, which took us to Panama and from here we arrived in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador. Well we had quite a few different things to adjust to now..for example waking up the first morning to find we had bad headaches and nausea (we realised it was altitude sickness having come directly from the sea level) to trying to understand and learn the Spanish language and culture..here we go God, what do you have for us here? ..

By the way, the following is a link to one of our favourite online ministry pages, its really nice with beautiful pictures and scripture passages: -

http://www.fathersloveletter.com/fllpreviewlarge.html