Weeks Three & Four: Just Your Average Day in the Desert

Time flies.  A month has passed since I first arrived, eyes widened, to Vicente Guerrero  - and since then, I've started to learn "Spanglish," I've made a handful of wonderful friends, and I've even begun to fall into a daily routine here (which I thought I'd share with you):

06:20 – Accompany the bus driver to pick up all the kids for the day (if it’s my turn).  We have two wheelchair-accessible buses, since more than half of the kids use wheelchairs or walkers.

06:45 – Pick up breakfast from the main kitchen (usually rice porridge) and eat back home over a good book.

08:00 – Devotions with all staff & visitors (unless it’s Tuesday or Thursday when I report straight to work).  Various departments of the mission take turns each day of the week to host the worship at the start of the service, followed by a speaker (usually a staff member, either a current or returning one).

09:00 – Bring the kids over to the learning centre to feed them breakfast, brush their teeth, and bathe them (not all of the kids have running water, so this may be their only opportunity to be bathed).  If there’s time, we also give them puzzles for cognitive development.

10:00 – “Circle time”:  we bring all 20 kids together for singing, reciting Bible verses, prayers, and a Bible story.  (Aside from “circle time,” the kids are divided into three different groups, mainly according to ability, in order for us as staff to best teach them and respond to their unique needs).

11:00 – Snack time: sometimes we have oranges for the kids to snack on, fresh off the vine!

11:30 – We assist the kids in working on fine motor skills, agility, learning numbers, and sign language (some of the kids can’t verbally communicate); make crafts; go on bike rides around the mission site, etc.

12:45 – Bring the kids over to the cafeteria for lunch at 13:00.  We often have corn tortillas, rice, beans, & salsa.

13:15 – Clean up the cafeteria, take the kids outdoors for sports, to play with dolls, and go biking (and get plenty of exercise chasing after the shenanigan-causers of the bunch).  In Baja California, it’s about 10-20°C during the winter (we experience cooler temperatures than mainland Mexico), so outdoor play is just about always feasible.

14:00 – Free time:  usually we still try to work on the kids’ coordination and fine motor skills, like playing with Lego or play-dough.

15:00 – Start cleaning up and loading the kids up on the buses … it’s a fairly long process to load and secure all the wheelchairs, so we leave ample time for this procedure!

15:30 – Accompany the bus driver to deliver all the kids home (if it’s my turn), which takes about an hour and a half.  If not, we clean up the learning centre, debrief, and plan out activities for the next day.

16:45 – Time to pick up supper, which my roommates occasionally eat together back at our place.  We often have soup, or beans & rice, and sometimes some other kind of pasta.

18:00-20:00 – If it’s Wednesday or Sunday, we have church.  If not, it's time to chill!

Rest of the evening – Being here is wonderfully conducive to relaxing—mostly because work is exhausting!—so most of my evenings are spent vegetating with friends from the mission or catching up on non-academic reading (I’ve been swapping books with other staff members on a regular basis).  Even with the good-natured teasing by my friends here, I acquire a few decades in age every Thursday when I play Scrabble and drink tea with three middle-aged/senior women.  I also try to accompany the outreach team on trips to the migrant camps each week, as well as visit the kids living at the on-site nursery during my weekday evenings.

Weekends are also all about recovery.  My friends and I make frequent trips into town—either for groceries, to go for ten-peso ice cream, or to take some of the kids from the orphanage to the park.  To me, nothing could surpass starting off a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and a stellar book in my sunny backyard, or an afternoon spent listening to music and journaling in the prayer garden.  I’m always partial to walking or biking around the orchard on beautiful, blue-sky days, or going for coffee in the evenings to my favourite Vicente Guerrero coffee shop called Mi Kazza.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time here, it’s that being so wrapped up in emotionally-exhausting, physically-demanding, and heart-breaking work demands self-care and relaxation.  So ... carpe diem! 

Week Two: Facing Fear

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Feel the fear, then let it go.  Jump in and do it – whatever it is.  If our instincts and path have led us there, it is where we’re meant to be.”  (Melody Beattie)

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”  (Marie Curie)

The afternoon before I flew to Mexico, my best friend called from Ghana, where she was working on a volunteer project with her husband.  She had asked how I was feeling about the journey looming before me, and my response was: “fearful.”  Fearful of my complex route down to Mexico; fearful of the pervasive violence and corruption and disconcerting travel advisories for Mexico; fearful of all the unknowns.  I can’t remember her exact words, but the crux of her message came to be my mantra of this pilgrimage: to live a life in fear is to a live a life without faith. 

I deeply respect the people I work with and serve here.  Their lives are devoid of fear and bursting with faith, even in circumstances that seem to offer no hope at all.  Employment opportunities are severely limited here, rendering many people jobless and without any guarantee of securing basic amenities.  The kids I care for and teach during the week have no assurance as to whether or not they’ll be returning to a safe home or be given a hot supper at the end of the day.  The agency itself, FFHM, teeters on a tight budget, leaving the staff in charge of the various departments to operate just from day-to-day.  All the lives around me could be consumed by fear—that a job won’t come through, that it’ll be another night of hunger, that certain services will become incapacitated … But instead of choosing fearfulness, they choose to have faith that the unknown will become known; that needs will be met; that their prayers will be answered.

Inspired by the incredible attitudes of people who have virtually nothing, I see that most of my own fears are trivial or unnecessary.  In looking back on all I've feared in my life, everything has worked out.  And for those patches of my life that still need to be worked out—they will.  It just takes faith.  I ask myself this, and you as well: What really do we have to fear?

Week One: Gym Socks, Cement Blocks, & Culture Shock

There is a wooden plaque that hangs above one of the doorways at Cristo Por Su Mundo (Foundation For His Ministry), which reads: You will never be the same.  I pass under that plaque several times each day, but it wasn’t until the end of this past week—my first week—that I began realizing its accuracy.  Allow me to share a few stories, then, that begin to encapsulate my experiences and the ways they have changed me this past week.

Having done my share of travel, I was not anticipating to experience such a degree of culture shock—politically, geographically, and culturally—here in Mexico.  It was unnerving to be met by gruff men in military uniforms with guns at the border crossing and various checkpoints along the precarious and winding dirt roads.  I also found myself bewildered by the degree of destitution reflected in the dilapidated buildings I passed by along the way.  But I was also mesmerized by the craggy mountains that seemed to never end, the fields of cacti, the boundless ocean that coalesced into the sky.  It’s been a refreshing challenge having to learn a new language, use a new currency, and embrace the chaotic roadways (driver’s licenses are apparently treated more so as optional).

But perhaps the adjustment I’ll be struggling with the most is being surrounded by poverty.  After spending an afternoon visiting the drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre that FFHM helps to fund, our group was driving home and about to make the turnoff back home when we noticed a man, covered in mud, walking along the side of the road without shoes or adequate clothing to keep him warm.  (Note: Baja California experiences a climate that is significantly colder than the rest of Mexico—even as a ‘tough’ Canadian supposedly seasoned for the cold, I still wear four or five layers to bed at night!)  It was one of those moments we are constantly faced with: the choice to turn our backs and walk away, or to attempt to ameliorate a bit of suffering in a person’s life.  I’m not sure where this man will be sleeping tonight or what he’ll be eating tomorrow, but I do know he’s at least wearing a jacket and a pair of shoes that were kicking around in our van.  And my pair of gym socks that I had been wearing that day.

Toward the end of the week, I accompanied a group of volunteers out to a migrant camp north of Vicente Guerrero.  FFHM sends out a team several times a week to serve the people in these camps, who travel around Mexico to find work that, in most cases, barely generates enough income to support their families.  When we visit these camps, our focus is primarily the children.  These kids are often neglected during the day—not necessarily by choice of the parents—and are devoid of affection.  As soon as I stepped out of the van, children in ragged clothing were already swarming around me to receive a hug.  One little girl in a red sweater, named Lupita, was looking up at me with the most beautiful brown eyes, and had her arms desperately stretching up towards me so I would pick her up.  She clung to me all evening, and refused to let me put her down except when she reluctantly allowed me to give the other children a chance to be held.

It’s amazing to think that, even when you feel you have nothing to give—no presents, no provisions, not even the ability to communicate through language—you always have the gift of love.  It came to me as I was sitting on a cement block with Lupita resting on my lap, as we watched a movie in Spanish that was projected onto the side of our white van.  I remember looking over at a shivering boy nearby me, who had his threadbare t-shirt pulled over his knees to keep warm.  With Lupita still on my lap, I covered him with my jacket and wrapped my free arm around him to keep him warm. I had nothing to give him, but love.  This is what has impacted me the most this week; the way I have most changed.  I came here to work hard and make a difference in big ways, only to realize that the most I can do here is also the least—to love the people I serve.  And having learned that, I never will be the same.