NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

During the holiday, many people take part in Blog holiday house tours showing off their decorated houses ready for Christmas.  Well, in Las Moras, the people don’t celebrate Christmas.  There is no decorating, no gifts, no Santa stories, and most importantly, no knowledge of Jesus Christ and the significance of his birth.

Although there will be no festivities this year, I thought I would give you a house tour nonetheless.

Welcome to a Nahuatl house...

This is Nichol’s house.  She and her husband, Tony, are the oldest couple in our area.  They are very friendly and always welcome us into their dining room/extra kitchen when we visit.  They use this room for storage, to eat, and sometimes to cook.

The kitchen workspace

This is the kitchen “counter”.  There’s a few leftover tortillas from lunch, dishpans with lunch dishes, some firewood for when they want to light the stove again, and the broom leaning against the wall for when it’s time to tidy up.  You can see their dining table in the background with the tablecloth.

the kitchen cupboards...

This is the only place the I have seen these ingenious shelves.  They have carved them out of their adobe wall.  Very cool looking and very handy!

the extra stove...

They have and outside stove, scroll down for picture, and this inside stove.  These metal stoves are common, but not as well liked as the homemade adobe mud ones.  There’s extra firewood all ready to heat water for coffee (instant) and some drinking water on the left that they haul from the stream a little ways away from the house.

the corn mill...

No Nahuatl kitchen would be complete without a corn grinder.  This is how everyone makes their tortillas.  They soak the hard corn kernels, then send the now soft kernels through this grinder.  It comes out a coarse dough.  They then grind it further before forming their tortillas.

cheese storage

In the rainy season when there is plenty of grass for the cows, the people milk the cows with calves a little each morning.  The ones who have several cows can get enough to make cheese.  Here Nichol is storing her homemade cheese on a stick shelf hung from the rafters and covered with a cloth.  I have seen this way of storing cheese in several houses.  Not sure if this nifty shelf is to protect it from mice?  or to keep it dry?  I’ll have to find out!

the coat rack...

Well, they don’t use it as a coat rack, but it’s the catch-all hook right by the door creatively fashioned from a forked branch.  Very resourceful!

another view of the dining room/inside kitchen space

We’ve never been in the other room of the house – the sleeping room.  So, our tour is limited to the kitchen/dining area.

the outside kitchen...

This is Nichol’s homemade oven.  It’s in a separate little building just off the main house.  It’s pretty tight in there, but well-lit!

This house is very traditional and a good representation of house our neighbors live.  This now concludes our Las Moras house tour.  Hope you enjoyed it!

Merry Christmas!

When we arrived at our house after having been gone for almost 6 months, we found that some critters had worked the whole time in preparing us a special surprise.

We found this skeleton in our sink. I'm glad it wasn't alive!

The first critter that we found was this normally scary thing.  This one, however, was not scary as it had long ago died.  I think it got stuck in our kitchen sink and died of starvation.  No food and no way to escape.  This is the one and only one we’ve ever seen in or around our house.  Hopefully this is the last.

We found tons of evidence of other creatures. We wept and gnashed our teeth as we cleaned the house (every single nook and cranny) for 2 days and found countless things the mice gotten into and destroyed. So, we found all the traps we owned and Tom set them.

Thankfully, mice really like pumpkin seeds!

We caught 2 of those havoc-wreaking creatures and I found another one dead in my room.  One of the guys on our team was a hero and cleaned it up!

Although it is a cute thing, it has a devilish mind - full of mischief.

So, now we know better how to pack things up when we leave the village.  Hopefully next time, we will have a surprise-free arrival!