Memories of Mexico

My husband's CanDo Mission Trip has brought back memories of my own mission trips with CanDo. I went on two. Both trips were based in Saltillo, but our worksites were different. One worksite was in Saltillo where the president of the Lutheran Church in Mexico was building a new church. I'm not putting many names because I know that I'd butcher them, but I think his name was spelled something like Balmaro. Anyways, Pastor Balmaro did not speak English, but two things that he said over and over again might always stick in my head. One was "God is love." The other was, "If you are going to ask God for something, ask for something big." The worksite there in Saltillo was the building of what seemed like a large church. It was hard to tell because only the outer walls were completed. We worked on leveling out the sanctuary floor with dirt that was brought in. I use the word "dirt" loosely. It had trash in it and a lot of tile, the kind you might have in your kitchen or bathroom, only beautiful. The tiles weren't whole; they were broken; they were trash. The floor was going to be stadium style, with a slope, so we worked at getting the slope just right. We also worked at painting over some graffiti. We straightened out rebar. Do you know how hard that is? Well, rebar is steel, so imagine trying to straighten out bent steel. It wasn't easy and took a long, long time. We mixed cement right on the ground and transported into forms with rebar in them to make the columns that would one day hold up the walls and the roof.
The other worksite that I got the opportunity to work at was a church that had been being built for at least 10 years. It was in a little village a drive outside of Saltillo. To get to the village we drove on very narrow roads. Cars would pass each other while someone was coming the other way. It was very scary because the terrain was treacherous off the road. This village was very poor, very different from the city. The homes were shacks that you would imagine in a poor village. The church would be large, but took so long to complete. They did have a small room where they were able to worship that was finished, but it was nothing compared to what needed to be done. We worked there on building walls and roofs. We did a little VBS there, but that was hard because we didn't know the language and didn't have many materials because it was unexpected. The congregation made us a meal one night. I swear that it was hotdogs with dirty water. We all ate it graciously because we knew that they didn't eat better and that they had worked all day to prepare enough food for us. We also knew that they might not get a meal the next day because they might have just shared with us all they had. It was very moving, touching.
The home that we stayed in for both trips was Pastor Balmaro's home. He lived above his church in Saltillo (not the one he was building, but a different one). The boys stayed in a relatively outdoor area, open doorways and windows. It wasn't safe for the girls downstairs, so we slept in the Balmaro's home. The home was 3 floors with just 2 or 3 rooms on each floor. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags. There was a shower for us to use, but we couldn't run the water during the shower. First the shower had no walls or railing at the bottom. It was just the flat floor with the drain below it. The pipes couldn't handle all the water, so we had a 5 gallon bucket on the floor to catch the water as it came out of the shower. We would quickly wet our whole self, turn off the water, soap everything up, then quickly rinse everything off. The shower had to be very short, so rinse quickly, and try to get the water to go into the bucket, not on the floor. The view from their roof patio (the roof of the sanctuary) was beautiful. We could see the mountains around the city.
At one of the sites I met a man who had been imprisoned for drug trafficking. His story was amazing, and I'll never forget it. As far as I know he is now a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Mexico, but that is a story for another time...