Mexico 2010 Part 2

I went to bed on Sunday night excited and ready to get to work on the house. Monday morning we had chapel and breakfast @ the camp. Then we split into our teams to head out to our building site. I was excited that both of the Real Life teams would be building right across the street from each other, but I was also nervous. We had a lot of people on our team that had zero construction experience including myself and I really couldn't picture inside my head how we would complete an entire house (albeit a small one) in four days.

We made it to the job site. The concrete had been poured...an empty slate...We all got out of the van. The drive to the site had been sobering to say the least. I've heard people say that we in America don't know what true poverty really is and now I can see why people say that. Stray dogs roamed the streets, children too....little kids who may or may not have had an older child looking after them. Fences were pieced together with cardboard, leftover bits of boards, old wooden pallets, and wire. Outhouses sat behind houses that were slapped together with a hope and a prayer. And in we came....A line of trucks, and white cargo vans. Despite our intimidating presence everyone waved to us. Several houses in the neighborhood had been built by EOC crews in years past so I'm sure these people knew why the gringos had arrived.

As soon as we were out of the van the work began. I was shocked at the way our small group came together in that moment and formed a true team. We had split up into a framing crew, painting crew, and cutting crew the night before. So me and the other paint crew members immediately began painting the exterior house panels. Larry and Trae King turned on the generator started cutting all the boards...The kids from the neighborhood came over to check out what was going on. Many kids grabbed paintbrushes and started helping. We met Lydia and Kenya that morning (the mother and daughter we were building the house for). Kenya was a quiet girl with a sweet smile. I noticed Lydia quietly observing us and after a few minutes she grabbed a paintbrush herself and started to help. That morning we met not only Kenya and Lydia, but some of the other neighborhood kids: Antonio, his brother 'Berto, their older sister, and her ten week old baby, Carlitos, and several other kids who wondered back and forth between the two job sites.

'Berto in particular, touched my heart. He told me he was 12 and he seemed to understand everything we said to him even though he didn't speak English. Me and Katelyn ended up using him as a translator to the other kids that morning. He worked and he worked hard. He painted, lifted, carried, and translated the entire day! We found out from him that he lived in the house behind the one we were building and that his house had been built by EOC a couple of years before. So he understood the significance of what we were there doing.

The next couple of days were a blur of working, sleeping, eating, playing, worshipping and falling in love with the families we were building the houses for. I had some humbling moments for certain and I conquered many of my fears. The biggest of which is (well, was) my fear of heights....Jim, our crew foreman came over and told me and Katelyn he needed a couple people on the roof to secure the plywood. I panicked, but I didn't come on this trip to say no so I told Jim I would get up there. Larry held the ladder as Katelyn climbed up and got on the roof before me...And now, my moment of truth. I asked Larry if he thought I could do it and he swore to me I would be fine and that he would hold the ladder for me. I took the first step of the ladder very cautiously and took a gigantic breath and just climbed...I got to the top and looked up @ Jim who was on the roof. I had successfully climbed that dang ladder, but now I had to hoist myself onto the roof and I was scared....like, almost hyperventilating scared. I don't even remember what in the world Jim said to me in that moment, but I do remember feeling completely comforted by his kind words of encouragement and I took a deep breath and I did it!! I made it on top of the roof! I wasn't quite ready to stand up and say, "I'm king of the world," but I was up there even if I was clinging to those pieces of plywood for dear life.

Katelyn and I worked that afternoon on the roof. There was a moment when I took a break from my hammering and I just took it all in. The neighborhood, my team mates, the mountains in the background, and I started to weep for the beauty of it all...I was sitting on a roof of a house that didn't even exist two days before. And I was in God's presence up there. I felt Him like I have never felt Him before. I couldn't believe that a year and a half ago I was dealing with cancer..the lowest of the lows.... and now 18 months later I was at the peak of my life both literally and figuratively. What an amazing feeling to be in God's grace and to feel it, know it and appreciate it....I am a blessed girl...

Mexico 2010 Part 1

most of the Real Life gang

the border....

Angel....

Lynette Blincoe, Steven Weikel playing with Angel

Ensenada Outreach Center....

So a lot of my family and friends are expecting me to blog about my trip to Mexico, but I'm having a difficult time finding a good starting place.



The entire trip was magical, amazing, inspiring, heartbreaking, exhausting, uplifting, joyous, sad, miraculous, quiet, small, loud, enormous, beautiful, haunting, achingly humbling, bitter, and sweet...basically indescribable.



The facts are this:



1. I went to Ensenada, Mexico with a group of kids and adults from Real Life Christian Church.

2. We split up into two teams and in four days we built two houses.

3. I laughed a lot.

4. I cried a lot...ok a WHOLE lot.

5. I fell in love.

6. I had my heart broken....repeatedly.

7. I put a roof on my house.

8. I hit my thumb unbelievably hard with a hammer.

9. I literally left my blood on the rooftop of that home.

10. I had an intense moment with God on said roof.

11. I made many new friends, some lifelong.

12. I left a bigger piece of me then I would care to admit in Mexico.

13. Trae King is cool.

14. Katelyn Maurice and I would make mad mischief if I weren't a responsible wife and mother.



So one week ago ago I, along with others from Real Life Christian Church, boarded a plane heading for San Diego . Everyone was quietly excited and anxious as we boarded the plane. I was feeling a bit out of my element and frankly, old. I was traveling with a bunch of teens and I honestly began to wonder what my place on this trip would be. I was nervous and wondered if I would even have anything to say to these kids for an entire week. We made it to San Diego after a long day of traveling where Doug Forehand (our lead minister), and two other guys from our church Bucky Osborne, and Jim Green were there with large white vans. We piled all of our luggage and ourselves in and headed for our hotel. The next day we met up with others from Virginia churches and headed in a long caravan of white vans to cross the border into Mexico.

I had been told that crossing into Mexico was a fairly painless process and coming back out was a little more complicated. We approached the border and I got a bit nervous. There were armed men standing @ the border gate just hanging out in case anything troublesome were to occur. And when I say armed, I mean really large machine gun style weapons...Slightly intimidating (only slightly). Doug and Bucky were in one van, Jim Green and Nona Kim were in another. Our group from Real Life had been split into two vans and there were a couple more vans filled with the other people from different churches. We were ready to roll and start this trip.....

And for the first time in the eight years our church has been doing this trip (I know, right???) all of our vans were asked to pull over rather than driving straight through the border and into the country! I probably would not have been nervous except for the fact that my friend Sherry who has been on this trip almost every year made a comment about this being unusual. Up ahead I saw Doug talking to a border guard and I quietly snapped his picture. I was seriously afraid it might be the last time I ever saw him! A border guard approached our van and asked to look inside and our van driver, Larry King completely freaked me out by getting out of the van himself and opening the door for the guard. Inside I was screaming to myself, "Larry..Get BACK in the van." The whole process was extremely intimidating. Fortunately we were cleared to go forward and we all crossed the border in Mexico safely and relatively drama--free.

We continued on to Ensenada, Mexico which was approx. one and a half hours south of the border. We passed Tijuana on our left which was a bit creepy. It's surrounded by this wall and just looked run down and scary. The further down the coast we drove the more scenic it became. We were hugging the Pacific Ocean for most of the drive and it really was quite lovely. Every now and then you'd get a reminder that you weren't in America--the armed guards @ all the toll booths, the little girl, obviously homeless, sitting on the side of the road. We were, for the most part quiet, as we all took in the scenery. We made it into Ensenada, Mexico at about 5:30 that afternoon. I was tired and hungry, but excited to have reached our destination safely and ready to start work.

We unloaded all of our bags @ our base camp, Ensenada Outreach Center. Our rooms were actually really nice. Typical dorm style with bunk beds and shared bathrooms, but clean and very welcoming. There were 140 of us @ the camp for the week and the energy was exciting. We headed in for a quick meeting welcoming us to EOC and then had our first dinner together. The families we were building houses for had been brought to the camp for introductions. My team found out that evening that Lydia and her daughter Kenya, whom my team was building a house for were not there. I was disappointed that I wasn't going to meet Lydia that night, but learned she would be on the job site the next day. We did meet the other family that the other Real Life team was building a house for and their adorable boys, Angel and Enrique. I was very nervous about approaching the family @ dinner. My Spanish speaking skills consist basically of what I have learned on Dora The Explorer. I was nervous about how I would communicate with these people....How I would get across the message that I was excited and thrilled to be given this opportunity? I decided t play it safe and approach the kids, who by this time, had gotten up and started mingling around camp, playing, ping pong, and foozball. I approached Angel who was 8 and said "Hola." He responded "Hola" This was going good I thought to myself. I had brought pictures of my kids in my wallet...mostly in case I missed them and needed to see their faces, but in that moment, I decided to pull out the pictures of Stella, Ashlyn, and Quinn and show them to Angel. I pointed to Stella's picture and told Angel her name and he asked how old. I told him 8 (I knew my Spanish numbers up to 10), next Ashlyn's picture, and finally Quinn's. He took the pile of pictures from my hand and flipped through them over and over. He smiled and pointed and repeated their names after me. It was very sweet. I was able to communicate to Angel that these were pictures of my kids. It was a nice quiet moment and I felt for the first time that maybe I did belong there in Ensenada and that things were going to be fine...maybe even better than fine....