Aqui estoy

Tijuana, Mexico was amazing. We worked at three different places last week. First we went to Juanita's where we spent two days

• moving a huge pile of gravel from the street above to the house below--this traversed about a 15-20 foot descent down a hillside at roughly the angle of 30-45 degrees. Very hard work. We used large plastic buckets and manual labor to hoist them down to her house.

• digging out the foundation and laying the foundation cement block wall including rebar reinforcements
• mixing, passing and dumping buckets of concrete into the holes of the cement block foundation
• chucking the empty buckets back for more concrete
  

The third day was spent working at clearing rubble from a crushed up concrete pad that used to be a basketball court at an orphanage for young girls aged 2-14. They house and care for 55 girls. We were amazed at how well behaved the girls were and how much the staff loved these children. We got to eat lunch with them. I talked a little bit with them in Spanish and tried to translate for some of the other group members during lunch when I could. The Mexican government donated a front-end loader to clear the rubble away from the front part of the orphanage where we had moved it.

The fourth and fifth days were spent working at Modesta's where we literally built the walls of her new house from floor to ceiling. It is truly something to see the walls of a house just go up in two days built by people who don't necessarily know exactly what they're doing. Wow. 12 block rows later and two cement pours to stabilize the walls and there's the house. She will have two windows and three doors; one for the bathroom, one for the outside and one a double wide to connect to the next module of the house they plan to build in the future.

I very much appreciated the Esperanza model for building community not just with the other people and families who enroll in the program and work (much like a Habitat project with sweat equity) to build their houses but also building community with the people who are building the houses. We got to know both the families and the girls at the orphanage in our short stays there. I even got to bless Juanita's house before we left. It was all just so inspiring and overwhelming. There was so much to take in and think about.

Like, do the girls at the orphanage realize that their lives aren't "normal"? Do they remember what it's like to have a family? How will they turn out? Will they be damaged goods or will they be able to turn out as stable, productive and capable people? Will Modesta ever be able to afford a new bathroom and the second part to her house? Who else will Juanita be able to bless with her smile and delicious food? So much to ponder.

I hope to be able to go back again. I'd love to spend my entire summer after graduation from seminary down there working with Esperanza. There is something very holy about working with the people there and being needed by them. There is something about speaking Spanish that just gets in my blood and I can't stop speaking it. It's intoxicating and invigorating. Praise God for trips like this that show you the world and change your view and, in essence, save you from yourself.