Carlsbad at last

Friends: We have now been Carlsbad, NM residents for almost 24 hours. We'll send pictures when we find out how that can be done. We live in a suburb of Carlsbad in the back yard of a Carlsbad Mennonite Church member, in a 24' travel trailer owned by the family. Yesterday, we met some of the people active in the SOOP program here and had supper at the home of church members, the Yoders. Great people.
Tomorrow, we'll travel around to look at all the sites where our volunteer help is wanted. There are at least a dozen choices and we'll let you know how that turns out. Amzie Yoder proposed to us that the two Friesen couples and we take a trip into Mexico to the Cuahotemac Mennonite Colony so we're beginning to plan that for the weekend of the 21st of Jan. Apparently it's a 10 hour drive and we'd probably stay there for 2-3 days, getting to know the place. We are also planning to visit the Mennonite settlement in Texas (the name escapes me just now)sometime on a similar basis.
There's a lot to explore here. We've already found out that we're an hour from the UFO capital of the entire world at Roswell, NM, and that we're just 20 miles from a pilot project where the US government is storing military nuclear waste in a salt layer deep underground. That was a pleasant surprise. We're told it's 100% safe, but then, getting rid of Saddam was once 100% necessary. We also hope that someone will come to visit us while we're here, thereby providing us with an excuse to explore the caverns again.
Will we do any work while we're here? Of course! I'm leaning toward working with Habitat for Humanity and Agnes has a couple of things in mind. We'll let you know how that pans out. We're advised not to sign up for more than half days, and not for every day of the week. I intend to fill much of the rest of the time with writing on a number 0f projects that rest half-finished on CDs in my brief case.
Carlsbad Mennonite Church is a small congregation of about 30, and the elder, Ernie Good, told us that its future was a bit shaky in the same way and for the same reasons that rural Saskatchewan churches are apprehensive about their futures. The leadership is aging and youth is missing. We will be having dinner and games with church people in a few days, and on Monday we'll help the congregation sort and shell pecans as a fund raiser, learn how to make pecan pie and hopefully eat a great deal of it. Carlsbad is the pecan capital of the entire world, I guess.
Have a great day. I'm running out of time for completing this entry here in the public library in Carlsbad, where we have internet access for an hour at a time whenever it's open. No emails or comments on this weblog will go unnoticed or unanswered, so let us hear from you.