It's hard to describe how fantastic of a week I just had in Mexico. Megan, her parents, my sister, two friends, and I traveled down to the city of Reynosa in northeast Mexico and built a home for a poor family. Nothing tops the feeling you get from substantially improving the lives of seven people.

We started the week with nothing more than a foundation and in five days we laid concrete blocks for the walls, poured concrete columns, poured a concrete floor, poured a concrete ring around the top of the walls, and laid the final two rows of block on top of the ring. We also poured foundations for two other houses, laid the first row of block at another house, and poured the concrete roof on yet another house.

That should sound like a lot of work, but if not keep in mind that by "poured concrete" I mean we mixed concrete on the ground with nothing but shovels and moved it in buckets and/or wheelbarrows to where it needed to go. The roof alone required around 15 tons of sand, gravel, and cement. Needless to say, I'm a bit sore today.

When we weren't working, we were likely to be eating. I had the best tacos (we'd probably call them burritos here), gorditas, and tamales I've ever eaten at a taco stand run by some friends there. I knew the food would be good, but I was blown away. Now I'm looking forward to going back just for the food.

The one area that wasn't fun was realizing how rusty my Spanish had gotten. At the beginning of the week, I'd open my mouth and sometimes nothing would come out right away. The gears in my head seemed to slip a bit before engaging the right words and verb conjugations. Now I know how much practice I need to start doing - a lot.

This was my ninth trip to Reynosa and something like my 28th week building houses with Faith Ministry/Ministerio de Fe. Each time, I feel like I gain better perspective on the rest of my life. It's hard not to be affected by seeing how different some people's lives are from our own. The thing that struck me this trip was how relatively small amounts of money and even simple acts of kindness go so far in Reynosa. Perhaps most importantly, as my father-in-law commented, is that giving is met with gratitude. I don't want to be praised for giving less than I can truly afford to give, but an unexpected meal, a thank you, and even a smile makes you want to give more, again and again. One of many reasons I keep going back.

Now that this trial run of putting a group together, traveling to Mexico, and working for a week went off without incident, I'm looking to do it again. Let me know if you, your church, or even your office (forget the ropes course, build a house for some serious team building!) are interested in joining in and having the experience of a lifetime.

Posted by JoshC at October 8, 2007 8:39 PM

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