We made it home and I'm thankful

We're home....YEAH, we're home!!!

What a trip! We spent a majority of the time in the truck, but the time we spent actually working in the Mexican villages was incredible. This was my 4th trip into Mexico and I don't know if we have ever worked harder. I'll give you a day by day entry of what we did.

Saturday---
We left Athens at 7:30. We drove all day, crossed the border about 6:30 and arrived in Muzquiz, Mexico about 8:30. We stayed there in a church for the night. With the help of two Tylenol PM I was able to sleep all night. That is until the 100 roosters started crowing the next morning about 4am! I never knew there could be so many roosters in such a close proximity. It was crazy!

This is a picture of our hostess for the night. She's the one with the gray hair. She was so happy to have us all there. She was up with the roosters cooking breakfast.

Sunday--
We left Muzquiz and headed out into the desert. Our first stop was San Miquel. We fixed lunch for the villagers, played with the kids and then packed up and headed to our next destination. We drove another 3 hours on unpaved, desert roads and pulled into La Rosita about 5:00. We set up our cooking station, unpacked luggage and got busy cooking dinner for the villagers. My duties this trip were all in the "kitchen". That night we fried fajita meat, and french fries. We probably fed about 200 people and had a church service with them. We had an inside place to sleep and this...

We were livin' it up. No roosters tonight!

Monday--
Busy, busy, busy!
But first, it was a hair washing day. Hurray!

The youth painted 12 houses in a matter of about 8 hours. They all worked so hard and the villagers were so thankful for their freshly painted houses. There was the one incident of the youth almost falling through a roof, but besides that, not much drama. The drama was going on back at the cook tent. Because of my fry cook status, (that should be humorous to those of you who know I never eat or cook anything fried!) I was assigned the task of helping to cut up the meat that would be fried for dinner. I thinking great, I'll have beef to slice, but OH NO! It was deer, dove, sandhill crane, and turkey. Just picture me sitting out in the heat, cutting up raw meat in the middle of the Mexico desert. How in the world was I supposed to get the blood off my hands and make sure everything was clean? I don't think I got it all out from underneath my fingernails until about 30 minutes ago when I was in the shower. Talk about out of my comfort zone. I got through it and we cooked about 85 pounds of meat that night along with probably 35 pounds of french fries. Our head cook will deep fry anything, bananas, hamburgers, bratwurst, etc. Needless to say, I don't want to see anything fried for a very long time.
Here are some of the other things that went on that day.

Medical/vision clinics


Food being served-Mollie worked so hard!


All in all-a GREAT day!

Tuesday--
We packed up equipment and headed back to San Miquel for fuel and then on to Los Eutamis. We visited this village last year and just stopped long enough to serve a meal, Dr. T did some medical work, and the kids had a short bible lesson. We packed up again and took a "short cut" through the desert back to the main road. The short cut ended up taking us 3 hours on roads that were not travelled often. It got dark and many times we had to stop because the dust was so thick we couldn't see if we were on the road or not. How many people can say they've been through the desert at night on unpaved roads? We felt a little like smugglers!! We drove over 100 miles through the desert on this day. We made it back to Muzquiz around 9:00 pm for a short nights sleep.

Wednesday---
We left at 7:20 and headed for the border. It was fairly uneventful until 4 of us in the caravan missed our turn, and one of the trucks cut a Mexican off trying to do a U-turn. The Mexican chased him down and stopped him. It was a little scary at first, but after apologies were made, all was well. We crossed back into Texas about 11:00 am with little trouble and pulled into Athens at 9:00 pm.

Needless to say, we are all happy to be home. Also, no adjectives can describe the bath I just took. There have been no baths since Saturday. I did wash my hair twice, but only to have it covered in dust while it was drying. These trip always make me so thankful for what we have here at home. We are all so lucky! I'm so glad I went.

After having a massive amount of time in the truck to think about it, I compiled a short list of the things I am most thankful for.

10. No roosters at my house to wake me up at 4 am.

9. Running water.

8. Toilets that flush.

7. Ice cold diet coke-After a lengthy conversation with Dr. T about my little addiction, he assured me that I'm not going to die of renal cancer.

6. The Body Shop's Body Butter-All the dust, dry weather, and hand santizer left me skin a bit dry. I basically bathed again in Body Butter.

5. Paved roads

4. Peter Pan Chunky peanut butter, wheat bread, South Beach protein bars and sugar free Life Savers-This was my diet for the past five days. I wasn't eating the fried food or anything cooked out in the desert, for that matter.

3. Those 21 sweet faces who meet me every morning and who will always be "the smartest class at Bel Air."

2. Old friends and new friends who just make me laugh and make me a better person.

1. My family-I'm so glad we spent this adventure together.


I'll have more pictures to post later. Thanks for thinking and praying for us while we were gone.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sandy C

Off to Mexico

So this Saturday we head off to Mexico for another fun filled mission trip. You can go here and here to read about my previous trips. I'm excited but a little apprehensive.. I'm not someone who flies by the seat of their pants. I like to know what's going to happen and when. These trips are never like that. We are going to some new villages and we don't really know whether or not there will be an inside place to sleep. If the weather is like it was last year, what with the wind blowing 50mph and the temperature being about 40, sleeping outside is not an option. To solve that problem, sort of, TENT!!! Yes, we are taking a family tent. We can only hope it doesn't end up back in the US before we do because of wind. To be honest, I'm also not looking forward to being in the truck with Wil and Mollie fighting in the backseat for 4 days. My prayer is that Wil ends up in someone else's truck or better yet, I'll end up in someone else's truck. That way, Wade can handle the kids. Sounds like a plan.

Recent discussion between Wil and Mollie....
God love them, they are so totally opposite,it's hard to believe they are related.
They were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. Mollie's best friend, Hadley, was also there. They were talking about the upcoming mission trip. Wil just mentioned that when he gets out of high school that he wants to spend a couple years doing mission work. (so so proud!) Mollie chimes in with the fact that he then would be poor. Wil says that he would rather do mission work and be poor than live in a million dollar house. Mollie said that she would choose living in the million dollar house over anything. Hadley of course sided with Mollie and poor Wil was outnumbered, but he argued his case very well. He didn't ever win her over, which is not surprising, but she got his point, maybe!
I love those two kids!

See on the other side of Mexico!

Sandy C

Home again

This morning around 12:30 we rolled in from Mexico. We left Aldama, Mexico at 7:45 am our time. The hardest part of these mission trips is the driving. As Wil said, we spent 75% of our time in the trucks. I'm going to give you a daily synopsis of what all we did while we were gone.

Friday, May 25
We left Athens around 7:30 am and drove into Alpine, Texas. We got there about 7:00pm. We stayed at a Baptist Camp and we had mattress and showers!! At dark, we drove several miles down the road and viewed the mysterious Marfa lights. Some people find it very intriguing. I personally think it's some wise guy with flood lights in the distance. A massive thunderstorm was moving into the area and the lightning was something to see out in West Texas.

Saturday, May 26
We got up early and left for the second day of travel. We drove to Presidio and crossed into Mexico. We had some trouble with paperwork and we ended up waiting for about 3 1/2 hours before that was resolved. Afterwards, we drove several more hours into Aldama. There we stayed at a placed called Gloria al Padre. It's a medical clinic and dormitory. The dormitory was built specifically for groups like ours going into Mexico on mission trips. We also met up with a group of 8 people from our church who flew into Mexico. We had dinner and our last hot shower until Thursday!

Sunday, May 27 and Monday May 28
Up early again and more driving! We drove into Guatamec to buy commodities for the Tarahumaran people we would encounter. We bought rice, oil, mesca(used like flour), salt, and fruits and vegetables. We then drove into Creel for lunch. This restaurant brings out fire grilled chicken, tortillas, hot sauce and onions. I'm very leary of eating food in Mexico. I chose to stick with the tortillas and a small piece of chicken. We then went another 50 or 60 miles into the mountains, off the main road for about 5 miles and into our first village, Yepo. The village center consisted of a small building that was the church. You can see from the picture that it was indeed small.




I only have a picture after we had arrived and attached tarps to the side for our cooking equipment. We were in the village for a day and a half. While we were there we fed the Indians, cut hair, held a vision and medical clinic and had a Vacation Bible School. The kids from the village school were brought to the church for all the afternoon and evening.





Wil had a lot of fun playing ball and Frisbee with some of the kids. We also took several kites. One boy played with a kite for hours and hours. It's amazing how something so insignificant can make such a difference.


I'm going to stop now and address our bathroom issue. In this village there was no real place to "privately" go to the bathroom. Therefore our bathroom for a day and a half consisted of a tarp stretched between trees with a hole dug in the ground with a fold out toilet seat above the hole. As we would find out later, this would be the best "facility" we would have in the days to come.

At this village, I also had my first experience with sleeping outside. Picture this....my cot, sleeping bag, two blankets and 35 degree weather and I'm still alive.

After the last meal, we showed "The Jesus Movie". It's the only known movie translated into the Tarhumaran language. It was cold and windy, but the people sat there in awe. God was really evident that night. I'm not sure if the people understood the Gospel, but the seeds were planted and work will continue in that village.

Tuesday May 29
We moved on to the next village. It was actually right off the main road and most of the people spoke Spanish. We did basically the same kinds of ministries at this village. I learned to build glasses and did this and cut hair most of the day. Some of the men in our group also built a wall and help pour a concrete floor in the building next to the church. This will be used for education rooms in the the future.



We were able to sleep inside for our time at this village. Bathrooms.....they had a his and hers outdoor facility. However, they can't seem to get the idea of hitting the hole, if you know what I mean. It's hard to go to the restroom while holding your breath and keeping your feet out of all kinds of nastiness.


We showed "The Jesus Movie" in Spanish and had the same result. There were lots of people very still and quiet hearing about Jesus!

Wednesday, May 30
We left our gear at the village from the day before and drove about 30 minutes off the road into our final village. We stationed ourselves at a school. What was interesting was that the building we used was a secondary school. The students received their education mainly via satellite and internet. It was amazing to see that kind of technology in the middle of nothingness. We set up our vision and medical clinic and saw patients on and off all day. Our kitchen was set up outside and we served two meals. We cut hair out back, held VBS and again showed "The Jesus Movie." It was the same results as before, total quiet and attentiveness.







One of my favorite things that happened in this village had to do with Wil. I looked out and I saw all these kids surrounding him. I walked out there and he had a bag of those balloons you blow up and add the rubber band to the end and you pop it back and forth. He had about 10 of them and there were about 20 kids. He was blowing them up as fast as he could and trying to get them to understand that they had to share. I found another girl to go out and help him. It was great to see him giving those kids so much happiness.



Bathrooms...another train wreck. Oh, how we wished for our hole in the ground and the blue tarp.

Thursday and Friday May 31 and June 1
We drove back to Aldama on Thursday and got our first shower since the previous Saturday. It was the best shower I have ever had. I had no water pressure, but I had clean water!!! We rested and left early Friday morning for the trip home. We had no trouble getting back across the border and were back in Texas by noon. It was home from there. We stayed ahead of all the storms moving down I-20 and got to Athens around 12:30.

I enjoy these trips so much. Of course I miss all the modern conveniences, especially a flushing toilet and my hot shower, but I can do it for a week knowing I have the hope of home. The Indians don't have that hope of a better life. They have a look of hopelessness. The woman in particular show little emotion. The only chance they have of knowing Jesus is when we are there to share Him. That comes in the form of food, haircuts, medical and vision care, VBS, a movie in their language that tells them who Jesus is and Wil blowing up balloons. It's as simple as a smile from one of us. It's an amazing opportunity to share Jesus and the blessings we get in return far outweigh the hardships we encounter along the way. Thanks for your prayers while we were gone. God was with us and went before us!

Sandy C

To Mexico and back

Mexico and back in 5 days...WOW!!! We traveled over 1400 miles in a very short time. Going on these mission trips is hard on our trucks, hard on our bodies and a lot of work. However, the blessings we receive in return makes all of the hardship seem minimal. This trip we travelled into the high desert of Coahuila. We went in to serve the native Mexicans instead of the Taramauran Indians, as we did on the May trip. It's such a beautiful place. The mountains surround the deserts in places. There are tall yucca trees, wild mesquite trees and many types of cacti. We even saw maroon cactus which our Aggie truck coined "aggie cactus". Among all the quietness and beauty there are thousands of Mexicans who live in unbelievable poverty. These villages are out in the middle of nowhere, literally.

On Saturday, we drove all the way into Mexico. We stopped at a small church in the town of Musquiz. It was about 100 miles from the border. That was an experience. Steve Akin is very familiar with the pastor and is wife. They knew we were coming so when we got there, she had made homemade tamales and tortillas for us. (This was the first of several meals of tamales!!!) This was also Mollie's first experience with the sewage system of Mexico. She vowed not to use the restroom the entire trip after her experience. I didn't dare tell her that at least she had a toilet in this town. That night we slept inside the church. My bed was two pews pushed seat to seat. It was a very comfortable place to sleep. I could've had a great night sleep, except for what seemed like 100 dogs barking all night. They also failed to tell us that there was a dance hall a block over and they started the party about 1:00. Needless to say, we all got very little sleep.

On Sunday, the first village we visited was La Union. This is when Mollie got her first experience with an outdoor toilet.
She learned quickly, you use what you have. She didn't like it, but she adapted. Many on the men in the village worked in the candelia "factory". I use the word factory very loosely. Candelia is a plant that grows wild out in the desert. They harvest it, boil it, skim off a substance that comes to the surface, mix it with some kind of acid and it then becomes wax. They can sell the wax and make about $50 a day. They use the plants after they are cooked for fuel for the fires to cook new candelia, and their burros graze on it, also. There burros were very fat! The youth on the trip painted two houses in the village. One was painted pepto bismal pink!! We served dinner to the village and some of the youth and adults held a Vacation Bible School for the kids. Some of the woman of the village church, cooked for us. They brought....tamales, beans and tortillas. We then had a joint church service with the villagers. They have a small church up on a hill. Their pastor spoke (we had translators) and then our pastor spoke to them. What was so amazing about that experience was that even though our language and lifestyles are so very different, we can worship GOD together and all the difference subside. That night we slept inside the main building in the village. It was so dark, quiet and peaceful. Before we went to bed, several of our group spent time outside studying the stars. They looked very close. So much so, it seemed you could almost reach out and touch them. We slept great that night. NO DOGS or DANCE HALLS!

The next morning we moved on to another village. On the way we stopped and had a quick service on the side of a mountain. It was amazing! Kyle, our pastor, said that even though we see the people as poor and in need they all seemed very happy. God meets all their basic needs and they are happy!

We continued on through the desert and ended up in a small village of which I can't say or attempt to spell. This village was much more in need. We got there about 4:30, so we worked quickly to cook. The youth started painting more homes. They started 3 houses and finished two before it got dark. Dr. Mettetal operated on a man's toe about 15 feet from our outdoor, makeshift, kitchen. My job was to slice potatoes to fry. Cindy Henderson and I then cooked pounds and pounds of french fries. We probably stood over the hot grease for 2 hours!! For those of you who know about my experiences with frying...you know I was out of my element. The men fried chicken fried steak and fresh corn. We also had tamales, imagine that. We worked outside until about 10:00. About 8:00, the wind started blowing and it got extremely cold. We slept inside the small church. The wind howled across the desert all night. Not much sleep this night either!! I kept thinking about what Kyle had said that morning, the people are happy...the people are happy.

The next morning, we brought our kitchen inside the church and cooked again for just our group. We cooked pancakes, bacon and ham. Dr. Mettetal again operated on a man's eye very close to our cooking area. He then left to make some house calls or as they called it...they took out the MASH unit. The youth left to finish painting. Cindy, Chris Stapper, Wade and I burnt all the trash from the day before. When we finished that, it was time to start preparing lunch. I couldn't seem to locate Mollie. Moments later she returned with several of the youth. They had been visiting with a local woman and she had let them help her role out and cook homemade tortillas.You can't get that experience on a routine vacation!! As lunch was prepared, again I took on the french fry grease. Cindy and I cut and cooked potatoes for hours. My hands were very dry before we reached this village, now they are smooth and silky!

We left that village and headed back out across the desert on our way home. We made it across the border about 10:30 Tuesday night. We drove into Eagle Pass and got a hotel. We had the most amazing shower!! We left early this morning and headed home. We got back into Athens around 4:00.

I could list the blessings I received from this trip. I won't. Instead, below, I am going to add to my list of things I am thankful for from my previous post. We will head back to Mexico in May for a trip back to the Copper Canyon and the Taramauran Indians. I am glad to be home but anxious to return!

26. I am thankful for the beauty of Mexico.

27. I am thankful for the people we met and how appreciative they were of what we did for them.

28. I am thankful for shared worship time between our group and the villagers.

29. I am thankful that the people are so happy even though it seems to us that that's impossible.

30. I am thankful for getting to know Kyle and Cindy Henderson in a new light. (hours over hot grease can bond people)

31. I am thankful for safety to Mexico and back.

32. I am thankful for our youth minister, Chris Stapper, and the kids he brought along on the trip.

33. I am thankful for indoor plumbing.

33. I am thankful for a soft mattress.

35. I am thankful for toilet paper and being able to flush it down the toilet.

36. I am thankful for asphalt and paved roads.

37. I am thankful for a warm shower with soap and shampoo.

38. I am thankful that Wil and Mollie got to see how less fortunate people live and that the world does not revolve around them.

39. I am thankful for Dr. Mettetal, who is our family doctor,and how he uses his profession in such a selfless manner.

40. I am thankful to have shared this experience with Wade, Wil and Mollie and the other 35 or so people who went along.

Sandy C.