Concrete

One of the reasons I love to go on mission trips is that I just love to spend time with the other people who go on the trips. It must be something about “kindred souls.” I find the people willing to take a week out of their routine and leave the comforts of home behind are the kind of people I want to spend my time with. They’re invariably a low-maintenance and relaxing bunch to be around. They are the kind of folks who don’t mind sleeping on the floor surrounded by about 10 other people. Who don’t mind waking up at 5 am to drive for an hour just so they can wear their bodies out in a hundred degrees of vicious sun. These are people who don’t get upset if it rains on you at the beach because, hey, you were planning on getting wet anyway, weren’t you?

The group I went to Mexico with last week was an unusually good group of people to hang around with. They were a hearty lot. I think it helped that Damon got his bluff in early with this group when he told the story of the year he shaved the eyebrows off a boy who kept sleeping late.

Only about half of us were from my church. The rest were personal friends of the trip leaders, Damon and Annette Renaud.

Annette’s father, Diantin Guerra, started Faith Ministries after working for another Presbyterian group Puentes de Cristo.

Diantin is a former presbytery moderator and an elder. He had a sporting goods store in Brownsville when Annette was growing up until the peso was devalued and he had to shut the doors. Then Puentes de Cristo needed a bi-lingual administrator and ask him to come work for them. Like Faith Ministry, they build houses for the poor. But they eventually went from building houses to building bigger buildings like hospitals and churches. It became harder to get volunteers because it’s just more fun to build a house for someone you’ve met and worked with. So, in 1994 he started Minesterio de Fe, Faith Ministries, and took with him the contacts he had made with churches throughout the PCUSA.

The complex we worked on is the third town Diantin has worked in. He would go into a poor town and look for the town dump. That’s where the poorest of the poor lived, the people who survived off the food and materials they found in the garbage. Ministerio de Fe would build a small cement-block house next to the one made of cardboard and tin. This work is perfect for volunteers: you can build an entire house in one week and the skills needed are minimal. When the house was finished, they would have a dedication ceremony of sorts back at the church and the family could move into the house and either tear down the old one or use it for storage.

The great thing that usually happens after Faith Ministry starts working in a town is that the town officials will take notice and start paving the roads in the area and putting in utilities. Then the group starts building a complex of church sanctuary, dormitories for volunteers, clinic and community center. We worked on the third complex outside of Reynosa, Mexico.

Not all the roads in the town are paved—far from it. The potholes there have potholes. They are deep. I expected to find a lost animal inside one. When it rained and filled them you never knew what to expect when you drove through one. Several times the axle of the van hit hard enough to scare us that major damage had been done. Write this number down: 283153. If you ever rent a fifteen passenger van from Capps Rental in Garland, make sure you don’t get this one.

Damon and Annette have been going every summer since Annette’s father started in 1994. They brought friends who haven’t missed a year since. The young adults I met this year must have been in junior high when they started out and now they’re seasoned veterans who know exactly what to do once they get the shovel in their hands.



Concrete work is hard. Can I make it more clear than that? It’s heavy and wet and caustic. When it’s mixed, it has a milkshake consistency that oozes down into your shoes and rubs between your socks and your skin. More than one person left the first day with nasty sores on their ankles. Some had blisters on their hands. And that was just the first day. The second day everybody went in with appropriate bandages that almost immediately got soaked with another wave of wet concrete. So, one of the benefits of the trip to South Padre Island on the last day is for the healing properties the salt waters offer.




Every day but one we would break for lunch around 11. The sandwiches had all been made the night before and kept cool until lunch. Everybody got two sandwiches with the understanding that if you didn’t want your second one you gave it away to the Mexican volunteers who were working there. At Noon we would go across town to the First Presbyterian church (built by Faith Ministries) for a short worship service. There was lots of singing and visiting with old friends (mostly people whose house you may have worked on years before .)

Different people on our team would introduce me to a child they were sponsoring in school. There’s no public school and poor people don’t have the $400 tuition so many volunteers end up sponsoring a kid. I met a set of twins, Paula and Paulina, that have different sponsors right now but someone said there has been a set of twins volunteer this year who want to sponsor them for the next school year.

Our group this year was smaller than usual. So, instead of building a house for a family like this group usually does, they told us we were going to level and pour the foundation for the church sanctuary. Sounded kind of cool to me: laying the foundation for a church. After a day in the sun and not making much progress (Hey, it’s a big sanctuary.) the church people decided we should instead pour the finishing layer of concrete on the floor of one of the dormitories. The dorm building is two story and divided into two sections on each floor. I guess the two sections are to separate the sexes but when I went into the section where “hombres” was written on the door I saw that the bathroom was marked “mujers.” Maybe they got a little confused. But what it amounted to was mixing and pouring about one or two inches of concrete on a floor that I measured to be about 20X25 feet.

We started out mixing the concrete right there in the room. They rigged up a pulley system so we could haul up buckets and buckets of sand. Then someone would carry a one hundred pound sack of cement up the stairs. And when I say “someone” I’m meaning either sex. One of the things I learned on this trip is that girls are every bit as strong as boys. Some of the best concrete mixers were the chicks. It didn’t seem to follow a particular body style, either. The most petite and fragile looking girl out of the bunch could out-shovel some of the tallest and sturdiest men. It does matter, however, how old you are. I took one confident scoop of concrete and went to lift it and the muscle just wasn’t there. It send me an “on vacation” message. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. And I wanted to do the work so bad. It made a beautiful ballet when the crew was scooping, turning and tapping the shovel on the mix to test its consistency, all working in rhythm together.

We started pouring the finished concrete, bucket by bucket, in the far corner and worked our way toward the door. By the time they got the floor done they had only the spot by the door. Everybody was out of the room by this time and it became a one person job, especially since the balcony in front of the door was only about 2 feet wide.

A song had been going through my mind all day, “The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ Our Lord.” I asked if anybody had their pocket cross and wanted to put it into the concrete; it would make for a small touch of rebar but would leave a little piece of us in the floor. Beaven produced his right there on the spot. A couple of days later we did the other half of the second story and Katy Pearson offered hers. I promised her I would make sure she got another one. The cross sunk into the concrete and no one will ever know it’s there except us. But, like I told Katy, there’s a piece of herself now left in Mexico.

The Nerd Family Does Disney

The year Six Flags Over Texas opened for its first season I was about 14 years old. That summer my Daddy took my best friend and me to spend the day at the park. Years later, when I grew up, it occurred to me how boring it must have been for a middle-aged widower to spend the day driving his daughter and her friend to an amusement park then hanging around until they were ready to go home. When I asked him about it he told me, “You have no idea how much fun it can be to just watch your child have fun.”

That’s what we enjoyed in our visit to Disney World last week—watching our kids have fun. It was hot and humid and crowded and we walked about six miles each day. But we had a blast watching our grandkids, and sometimes even our kids, have fun. It was a week of just plain old fun. No more and no less.

Well, we did get a lot more out of it than just plain old fun. It was bonding at its best. We experienced the good and the bad equally and, best of all, together. From the first melt-down Essie experienced at being told "no" to the triumph she and Sarah both had when they got all six “Discovery” stamps at the Animal Kingdom, we were all part of the experience. Don’t ask me about the damned stamps. They were more trouble than you can imagine.

Our first bonding challenge was when I realized our entire family was traveling on one plane and all of our wills were made to benefit each other. If that plane went down everything would go to the state. A quick visit with a lawyer, practically on our way to the airport, dealt with that detail and we traveled with peace of mind. This peace of mind was further enhanced by an entire bag of Disney DVDs and a portable player for the flight.

We had been keeping this trip secret ever since we first conceived it over a year ago. So you can imagine how excited we were to wake the girls on Saturday morning. Everyone gathered at Emily and Steve’s house. They woke fairly easily especially since they seldom have five adults standing in their room at 4 am. I asked Sarah if she remembered the night a couple of weeks ago when she and I lay looking up at the sky and watched a plane fly overhead. I had asked her that night if she could go on a plane anywhere she wanted where would she want to go. I reminded her of that wish…..did she remember where she wished to go?
Still a little sleepy and bewildered, she answered, “Ohio?”
A long silence hung over the bedroom. “Wrong answer,” said Steve.
“Guess again, “ her mother suggested. She looked up at us and Beaven asked her if she would like to go to Disney World. She and her sister were out of the bed faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket. And the adventure began. That same evening we watched fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle.



By the time we got to Orlando Essie had read the Children’s Guidebook until it was dog-eared and limp.



We had about 37 Disney guide books but nobody had read them ahead of time so there was a lot of cramming on the plane. Aunt Elizabeth was still reading a guide book when we headed out for our first visit as soon as we got settled into the hotel.

“It says here that the first Saturday in June is traditionally “Gay Day” at the Magic Kingdom,” she read. And all the gay customers that day wear red shirts to announce their orientation or wear their pride or get better seats on the tram or whatever. So we were prepared for the many matching red shirts we saw. But it was still a little shocking. Emily declared it a very educational experience when she saw a lot of male couples who looked more like professional wrestlers than hairdressers. Then as night arrived and we watched the fireworks over the park I spotted a few couples who held hands and generally relaxed at their ability to be who they are in public.



The rest of the trip was simply a blur of lines, heat and tired feet. Yeah, we had a lot of fun on a few rides and watching some shows and certainly eating ourselves into the gutter. But the main experience of the whole week was learning to live together. We were constantly checking around us for the girls to make sure they didn’t get separated from us. With seven people we could span a good fifty feet while we walked. We didn’t put a lot of thought into it; it simply happened. Each one would watch for the person in front and behind them. It made traveling through the crowds a lot easier. Every adult had a cell phone and we kept in constant communication even when we were apart. We used three different hotel rooms and someone came up with the idea of texting the others as we woke up in lieu of a loud telephone ring. We deepened our respect for each other’s comfort. After we realized how much we enjoyed our first “sleep in” morning we decided we didn’t really have to get there when the park opened.

We went to a character lunch where you had to reserve seats months in advance. We were rewarded for this effort when we got to see a full array of Princesses. Every princess Disney ever used in a movie came by our table to meet the girls. They were mesmerized. I never put much thought into how to tell the difference between Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty but an eight year girl can ID them a mile off. Plus Jasmine, Belle and Ariel. I know my princesses now. And I’ll bet if you asked any little girl exactly what a princess is, the answer would have nothing to do with monarchy or systems of government.

We found out that a box of popcorn could feed four people in about five minutes. It was my kind of eating, more like grazing. A little taste here and there. By the fourth day we gave up on “meals” and just snacked constantly. We let our appearance go and found ourselves hanging things around our necks for each other. Somehow Beaven ended up with somebody’s sunglasses to keep track of.



There’s not much more to report. We went. We had every bit as much fun as we expected.



Now Beaven and I are packing for a mission trip to Mexico. We’ll be gone next Wednesday and maybe that trip will provide interesting stories. In the meantime, I’m thinking of changing my name to Trixie again.

And for those of you who weren't reading when I tried to change my name to Trixie the first time, you can read about it in my posting dated March 28, 2006. It should be in the blog archives.