Huatla

Christian recently lead his last team as an OMS Mexico Missionary. He has worked for about 9 months setting up the next mission project for the H2O Church in Oklahoma. The purpose of the trip was to determine the needs of the Huatla community in the mountains of Hidalgo, Mexico. Huatla is pronounced "Whatla." Six people went along on the trip to investigate the possibility of assisting the UNIFAM Church there with the construction of the local church and training local farmers in increasing their crop and animal production. The local language is Nauhtl (Na-what-el) and although many do speak Spanish, there were times that Christian could not communicate with the locals due to the language barrier - even right here in Mexico there are some who can't speak Spanish!
The area is very poor. Most houses have only dirt floors. Few have running water. Most do have electricity, but its really spotty. The local church was planted by a local UNIFAM church here in Mexico City. There have been two missionaries assigned to this area over the past 18 months. BUT, these missionaries are Mexicans from the Mexico City area. We believe this is a great sign of maturity in the Mexican leadership because they are starting to send out their own as missionaries. We PRAISE God for this!

The local church has started to plant house churches. Here is a church service we visited.

Here Steve (from H2O Oklahoma Church) and Martin (a missionary from Mexico City)
discuss the plans for the church roof.

Church service with a plastic roof. There were about 70 in attendance.

We don't think the standards are the same between US churches and
Huatla churches regarding the admittance of stray dogs - All are welcomed!

For Christian coming from a farm background, a very satisfying part of the trip was seeing how open the locals were to accepting the agricultural expertise from the states. Here Steve shows how to design a drip irrigation system to Memo, a local farmer and a leader of the community. The team from Oklahoma hopes to train him so that he can train his community.


This video is a clip of the worship service at another house church.
They are singing in their native Nauhtl language. Can you guess the tune?