the vengeful cow blog

Weekend in Mexico

Posted by marshall Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:00:00 GMT

The weekend before last (March 19-21) we went down to Mexico with a group from our church. I joined a group of guys building a house for a family, while Lara helped paint a schoolhouse. We drove down to Ensenada on Friday evening, worked on Saturday, and came back Sunday afternoon following a brief visit to La Bufadora.

We left from work Friday afternoon to meet up with our friends from the 20somethings group at the church. I think we had a total of 10 people going from our group, plus a bunch of others (older and younger) from the church. Apparently groups go down once a month or so. Our group was split into 3 cars; we were the third. Thankfully, the driver of the first car had been down many times before, and was experienced in keeping everyone together. Each car had a walkie-talkie so that we would be informed of upcoming turns or be able to contact the others if we were separated. The walkie-talkies were also useful for broadcasting our car's smashing rendition of Cielito Lindo; note that "smashing" in this context means that any Mexicans listening to this group of gringos butcher their song would no doubt want to smash our windows.

We stopped at In-N-Out on the way down to get some good burgers, and we crossed into Mexico sometime around 9:00pm. We took the "scenic route" along the ocean to Ensenada; there must have been beautiful scenery, but in the darkness all we saw was a black void to one side. Sometime after 10:00pm, we arrived at Campo de Sueños.

Campo de Sueños -- which literally means "Field of Dreams" -- was apparently set up for junior high and high school students to come down and work. It wasn't particularly family-friendly: Lara and I had to stay in separate rooms of bunk beds, and public displays of affection were pretty much forbidden. There were bathrooms, but toilet paper couldn't be flushed in the toilet, and of course the water wasn't safe for drinking or brushing teeth. Lara slept well the first night, but I was not so fortunate. There were a few guys in my room who got a chorus of snoring going, and I didn't get to sleep until about an hour before we were awakened for breakfast.

Our breakfast on Saturday consisted of French toast and oatmeal, and it was then that we were told that there wasn't enough hot water for anyone to take more than one shower over the weekend. Those who had already taken showers that morning had just had their only one. I hadn't yet taken one, but a look of horror came over Lara's face that informed me that she already had. It would have been nice to have known this ahead of time.

After breakfast, we split up into our workgroups. The girls in the 20somethings group were assigned to paint the inside of a schoolhouse. The walls hadn't been sanded yet, so they had to do that first. When they started painting, some little girls -- who apparently attended the school -- became curious and asked if they could help. Lara got to use her Spanish to talk with them and teach them how to paint.

The guys were assigned to build a house. The houses that are built on these projects are "loft houses": they are basically a floor, four walls (windows on two sides, a door on one), and a roof. Inside there are two floors -- two rooms on the bottom floor, an open loft on the top -- with a ladder going up to the second floor. The amazing thing is that these can go up in a matter of hours; the floor, walls, and roof are all pre-built, so it's just a matter of putting down cement blocks, attaching the floor, and nailing the walls and roof into place. Easy...or so we thought.

It turned out that the location for the house was a lovely scenic place called Lomas del Escorpion: Scorpion Hills. And the hill was indeed inhabited by many small scorpions that lived beneath all the volcanic rock and cactus that covered the hill. The family for whom we were building the house owned a small patch of property here, and the tiny shack they had built was the only real structure on the hill. The owner was unemployed; at 43 years old, he was considered "too old" to work wherever he applied. He and his wife had two daughters: one seven, and the other just a few months old. The seven-year-old couldn't sleep with her parents in the shack because of the scorpions; she had to be driven down to town each night to stay somewhere else.

The owner had dug a dirt path that allowed him to drive his truck up to the shack, but it was steep and rocky...too steep and rocky, it turned out, for the truck we had carrying the pieces of the house. It got stuck just before reaching the property. We spent over an hour trying to get the truck to move. We moved rocks to build a wider path, we had people hang off the sides of the truck to try to get traction...nothing worked. Eventually it was decided that we would just unload the truck where it was and hand-carry the house up the rest of the hill.

The majority of my time there was thus spent with a group of guys lifting walls and floors up a steep, rocky, dusty, cactus-patched, scorpion-inhabited hill. To make matters worse, the property was sloped, so a support system had to be built for the house that would keep it level. All of this added up to what the group leaders said was the most difficult house building they'd had.

But it was worth it.

The family was overjoyed to have us there. The father was lifting and building along with the rest of us, and the great big smile on the mother's face was radiant. The group had been provided with some sandwiches for lunch, but the mother made us fresh hot flour tortillas with frijoles...oh, so good. She asked (through the translator) for a sandwich, and it was neat to see her sharing a ham-and-cheese sandwich with her husband; we were both having exotic lunches.

Thanks to a second group that came to our site later in the day, we managed to finish building the house despite the setbacks, and when we all gathered inside the house at the end of the day to dedicate it, the mother and father both had tears in their eyes. We prayed that this house on a hill would be a shining light, a symbol of the love and grace of the living God. And that night, the family all slept together again.

We returned to Campo de Sueños very tired, very dirty, but very happy. We heard about how the girls finished painting and attended the dedication of a different house that had been built, how the woman there had refused to believe that any of it was really happening until the keys were in her hand and everyone was leaving. We all went to a local taco stand to get some great food, and then we walked to the beach for fireworks.

I slept well that night. The next morning, we had a small Sunday service, where another church group that had come down provided the music. Before heading back home, our group traveled to La Bufadora, a kind of natural wonder by the ocean. Water pressure builds up at a rock formation and then sprays out. We didn't actually see this, though, since there is a market there that we spent our time walking through. They had some excellent fish tacos and very tasty churros, and Lara enjoyed speaking with the various store owners. Lara found a sunflower tablecloth and a sunflower dress that she really liked, and the bargaining process for these brought back memories of Ecuador.

Getting out of Mexico was much more time-consuming than getting in. The lines of cars at the border are very long and move very slowly, so much so that one's car is beleaguered by vendors walking in the middle of the highway. Kids sit between the lanes of cars or lean over bridges. Young guys run up to cars and start washing the windows -- refusing to stop when asked -- and sellers of bobble-heads reach inside open windows and affix a doll to the dashboard; both then demand payment for their unrequested "service". Once past the border, though, it was an easy drive back to Redlands. We got back to the church just in time to meet up with the rest of the 20somethings group, which was heading to Marie Callender's for dessert. Lara and I tagged along and got some lemon meringue pie.

All in all, it was an exhausting but very rewarding weekend, and we'd definitely do it again. The church is apparently working on getting some property set up where people can come down, stay in a loft house, and then go build one; this would let Lara and me stay together for the weekend, which would make it even better.