2005
Hazelwood Christian Church in tiny |
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We left from Clayton on Friday, Sept. 23, at about In this photo you see Matt Miller at far right, reclining in the
bus’s back seat. He was able to
stretch out back there, despite the transmission hump that split the seat,
because as you can see seatmate George slept on the deck that covered the
engine compartment. You can’t see it, but he was sleeping on an inflatable
Spider Man pool raft. He said it was very comfortable, at least until Spidey sprung a leak. The plywood in the rear seat would later be wedged between the bus
seats to provide a flat sleeping surface for the vertically challenged among
us, so they could stretch their legs out. In front of George and Matt are Rachel and Lissa,
both 20 and students at the |
We arrived at the mission at about This dormitory has five rooms: four sleeping rooms, each with a
bathroom, and a kitchen/common area. The women sleep in the rooms on one end,
and the men in the rooms on the other. We came together for meals in the
common area. Earlier Hazelwood mission trips contributed heavily to building
this dormitory. So in the wee hours of Sunday morning, we unloaded the trailer, put
things vaguely in their right places, made our beds, and went to sleep. |
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This photo shows the Vida Nueva Iglesia de Christi ( One thing the trip’s leaders stressed was the importance of being
flexible and patient. So after we all got up in time to make Taking part in a Spanish-language worship service isn’t as strange as
you might think. After all, the familiar elements of worship are all there –
singing, prayers, taking communion, giving, and preaching. Frequently, their
songs used tunes from well-known English hymns and spiritual songs, and we
faked singing the Spanish words as best we could. Of course, when you don’t
know the language the sermon goes right over your head. The preacher talked
for well over an hour, which I’m told is common in |
After services, we invited the congregation to an all-American lunch
of hot dogs and chips. They really scarfed those
dogs down, and a few of them gratefully took the leftovers home. We ate at
the mission under a large gazebo built for such gatherings. It was awkward at
times not being able to communicate with the people. Everyone wore wide
smiles on their faces to show fellowship and appreciation, and everyone was
gracious and patient as we worked out the inevitable misunderstandings
(“Oops, I see now that you didn’t want ketchup”). But simple polite small
talk was pretty much out. At one point I stood next to a woman carrying a
tiny baby dressed in yellow. Without thinking, I asked, “Is it a boy or a
girl?” and the woman just looked at me puzzled. I didn’t even know how to say
I was sorry! It was very awkward. If I’m going to keep making trips like
this, maybe I ought to learn Spanish. It was such a hot day – 108 degrees. But there was so little humidity
that the heat seemed bearable. We weren’t sweating buckets, like we expect
during an |
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After lunch, a couple of us carried the trash to the dumpster. The
mission is home to four goats, and the dumpster is on the side of the fence
where the goats live. I vaguely remembered the goats from last year, but was
still very surprised when, as I shut the gate behind me, I heard a chorus of
excited bleating that seemed to say, “People!! People!!” I turned and here
came this thundering (small) herd of goats running straight toward us. Their
body language just screamed, “Oh boy! Oh boy!” My partner had been butted by
one of the goats last year, so she let out an “Eek!” and dropped the
cardboard boxes she carried between them and her. The goats made straight for
the boxes and started munching (left, top). Meanwhile, this little guy (left,
bottom) was curious and stuck his nose out for my camera. I wanted to reach
out and stroke his nose, but I figured this wasn’t as safe as the petting zoo
in my hometown and kept my hands to myself. Notice that there’s little grass or other growth on the ground.
There’s a lot of dirt everywhere in this part of the country. |
The mission fed us dinner – chicken with rice and vegetables. We had
our first nightly devotion time and sang songs together. A woman on our trip,
whose name I could pronounce for you but could not guess how to spell, was
trained in classical guitar and so led the singing (at right in the photo).
The singing felt so good that several of us sang some more later in the
evening, well past the time we should have been in bed. Somebody was kind to
take the picture at left so I’d have one with me in it. Sue Wilkes is at
left. We’re in the common room in the dormitory. |
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Monday morning after biscuits and gravy we got to work. Several crews were formed for various jobs. One crew was sent out into the “suburbs” (that is, out into the desert) to build a parsonage for a church that had been built there, and to do some finishing work on the church building. Another crew remodeled a tiny bathroom at the mission’s preschool to add a shower. My crew was assigned carpentry duty to build the preschool a bookshelf, a cubby box, and five teacher’s desks. I was a little nervous at first about this assignment, having grown up in the shadow of a cabinetmaker and his high standards, but soon I realized we were just making stuff out of plywood and that I could handle that no problem. Here are some photos from our carpentry work. |
Building the cubby. We used a dado blade to cut grooves in the
horizontal shelves. Then we put glue in the grooves and slid the shelves in
(with a little help from Mr. Hammer). |
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At left is Big John and at left is Brent, both from Hazelwood,
hammering in more shelves. |
This is the assembled cubby. |
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This is what the teacher’s desks look like from the front, before
painting. The teachers like to be at the kids’ level, so these desks are only
23 inches tall. |
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This one is still wet with a coat of paint. Here you can see how it
went together. The top is plywood with some pine board glued and nailed to it
for a finished edge. The legs are two pieces of pine board glued together and
milled for uniformity. The shelves are made from plywood as a separate
assembly, screwed into the desk as the last step before painting. |
Just after we applied the last coat of paint to the desks, the
preschool director came to see them. Through an interpreter, she told us how
pleased she was that we had finished them, and asked us if we could make ten
more! She asked us if we were carpenters. I said, “We are now,” and she
chuckled. That’s the week’s worth of work for my crew. I felt really satisfied
at the end of the week that we accomplished all of this. It helped a lot that
the man who assigned work to all the crews at the mission was a cabinetmaker
– he gave us plenty of design and technique pointers. He also pitched in on Thursday so we could
finish the job. The temperature rose to 108 again on Monday. I woke up with my stomach upset, and
despite my body warning me against it ate that hot breakfast anyway. By
mid-morning I had a nagging headache, and by lunch it had settled at the base
of my skull. Aspirin didn’t touch
it. I finally wet a rag, filled it
with ice, and put it on that spot, to great relief – but then I felt extreme
fatigue set in, with some dizziness. The heat had clearly gotten to me, despite having consumed a half
gallon of water in the morning. So I
went to bed and stayed there most of the afternoon. Out at the church/parsonage site, several
of the workers there succumbed to the heat as well, but all they had to rest
on was the wooden pews inside the church. It stayed this hot the rest of the
week. The heat was actually pleasant because you didn’t sweat very much. But
that not sweating very much was actually a sign that you needed to keep
drinking. The rule of thumb was, “If you don’t need to pee, you’re not
drinking enough water.” It took more than a gallon a day for most of us to
reach that threshold. |
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The bathroom crew had a difficult job. The bathroom was barely big
enough for the sink and toilet it contained. They were to install a smaller
sink, move the toilet, re-grade the floor for a new drain, and install the
shower pipes. Fortunately, there seems to be no such thing as “code” in This crew had a large industrial fan blowing on them to help keep
them cool, because the heat really built up in that confined space. The
108-degree heat continued Tuesday and Wednesday. I can’t tell whether we’d
gotten used to it, or whether we’d gotten smarter about staying cool, but
none of us suffered from heat exhaustion the rest of the week. Sleeping
became challenging at night, though. Our dorm rooms had little room air
conditioners in them, but they had not been well maintained and were
struggling to keep up with the heat. Monday and Tuesday nights I woke up a
couple times overheated and sweating. It was cooler outside in the night than
it was in the room, and the nightly lows were in the upper 80s. Time and a
cold drink cooled me down to return to sleep until the next time I woke up
overheated. Many of us suffered through the nights this way, so we weren’t very
well rested during the week. On Wednesday, somebody from Hazelwood took all
of the air conditioners apart and cleaned what he described as “muddy gook”
out of them, and with wonder and relief we all experienced frigid cold air
from them – and good sleep – that night. Then on Thursday the temperature rose only to 96 degrees, which felt
really comfortable. |
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This sleepy little girl kept us company all week in the garage.
Notice how her bottom teeth stick out – she has a serious underbite!
We all thought she was part Cocker spaniel, but couldn’t figure out what else
she might be. She liked paint and more than once stuck her nose in it or
walked through a paint tray. Mexicans seem to have more relaxed relationships with their dogs than
we do. They don’t appear to be affectionate toward them; at least, on both of
my The mission is home to another dog, a medium-sized black dog with
medium-length hair named Coyote, who jumped aboard the truck every day to go
out to the church work site. Our Mexican hosts didn’t seem to pay attention
to whether Coyote came along or not, and I suppose it was up to Coyote to
watch for the truck to leave at the end of the day or he’d be left behind.
Indeed, the little girl in the photo inadvertently spent her nights in the
garage because she fell asleep in there while we worked in the late afternoon
and did not wake up until after we’d left and somebody had locked the garage
for the night. Nobody seemed the least bit concerned that she probably hadn’t
been eating. |
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So every morning Coyote made the trip into the “country” to supervise
efforts on the church and the parsonage, shown under construction in this
photo. Here you see mortar being mixed so that block can be laid. Most
buildings are made from cinder block in This crew thought ahead: They blocked around where windows would go,
as you can see. The house we worked on last year wasn’t so fortunate. They
blocked the walls solid, and then knocked holes where the windows would go.
It wasn’t very pretty. Either way, you install windows by building up cement
around them. It seems to me that you’d be pretty much stuck with those
windows forever, even after they had worn out. |
This group is about to fill the baptistery inside the church
building, which is at right in the photo. The black cistern in the truck bed
is filled with water, and the people lining up here were about to form a
bucket brigade. Few people in Oh, and if you’re an old-vehicle buff like me, you’ll be interested
to know that the truck is a rust-free US-spec 1973 Ford F-350. |
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Inside the church, a large crew was applying stucco to the cinder
block walls. In the center of this photo is Sue Wilkes, recently of Many roofs in Piedras Negras
are flat. They get so little precipitation that there’s very little runoff to
manage. I was a little surprised by the bars on the windows and by a barbed-wire fence around the church property. I suppose that out in the country, there’s little protection against crime. |
Forgive the dark corners in this photo; it’s a problem with my cheap
camera. This is the terrain around the church –miles and miles of miles and
miles. The greenery is mostly a cactus-like plant that travels the ground.
There are a few houses around this church, dotted here and there, but it must
be pretty lonely to live out here. It’s not uncommon for people to live on a
patch of land here in a form of indentured servitude to the landowner. They
work for the landowner and after an indefinite (and long) amount of time, the
square of land on which they live becomes theirs. |
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We frequently came together as a group, mostly at mealtimes. Here some people have started trickling into the common room for lunch. Erika from Hazelwood was in charge of breakfast and lunch. We didn’t anticipate the week’s heat, so meals tended to be heavy and hot. Lunch this day was roast beef, for example. The food was good, but oh what I wouldn’t have done for a cold ham sandwich! |
The mission fed us wonderful dinners during the week, but we gave
them a break on Tuesday when we drove into town for dinner at Albina’s. Her home had been wiped out in a flood a couple
years ago, and the Hazelwood crew helped rebuild it last year. I was on that
trip, and applied plenty of stucco to the structure. So it was exciting to
return and see what Albina had made of the place.
She and some relatives who lived with her built a taco stand on the corner.
It had become pretty popular – while we were there, several cars stopped and
bought something. We had dinner there, which probably was a major cash
infusion for Albina. It was great food – small
(four-inch?) tortillas laid flat and covered with chicken and beef toppings.
I had two plates! After dinner, we sat in a big circle on a cement pad in Albina’s back yard to sing and have our evening devotion.
Albina and her family, plus several people from the
mission who traveled out there with us, certainly had to feel the same way we
did at church on Sunday given the language difference. Albina
told us, through an interpreter, that she felt blessed by God to have her new
home, thanked the Hazelwood crew for their work, and told us that when we are
in Piedras Negras, she
expects us to come and visit. |
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I wish it wasn’t already so dark when we arrived so I could have
gotten a better photo of Albina’s house. When I had
last seen it, stucco work had just been finished and the windows had been
cemented into place, but the roof wasn’t up yet. Here, Albina
has painted the house a nice pale yellow, which the picture utterly fails to
capture. At lower right in the photo is where the Hazelwood crew hooked Albina into the city water system last year. It was a
makeshift connection at the time (a “kludge,” as we’d say in the software
industry), and I was surprised that it became permanent. |
We finished our work Thursday morning. We spent Thursday afternoon at
the town’s open market. Because Piedras Negras is a border town, the market caters heavily to
tourists, and prefers dollars to pesos. They even give dollars in change.
Other businesses in Piedras Negras,
such as chain convenience stores, are happy to take your dollars, but they
give you pesos in change. They generally exchange one dollar for ten pesos,
regardless of current exchange rates. The market sells touristy things such as T-shirts, colorful straw
sombreros, candies, and blankets. They also sell giant bottles of vanilla for
$2. People say the vanilla is wonderful, but a bottle I bought last year was
unusable. It turns out that this market is something you need to do only
once. I did it last year, and this year it was just the same old stuff. I did buy a bag of candies that I thought
my sons would enjoy, but when I got them home I learned that they were spicy candies, so spicy they were
inedible. I did make it across the street to Oxxo, a
convenience store kind of like 7-Eleven or Village Pantry, to buy a couple
2-liter bottles of Manzana Lift for a friend who’d
asked. Manzana Lift is apple soda, and it’s
surprisingly good for being basically carbonated apple juice. The bubbles
really seem to add something to make it quite refreshing. I bought a small
bottle for Damion and Garrett to try – Damion loved it and Garrett, who doesn’t like carbonated
drinks, conceded he liked it “a little bit.” Too bad we can’t get it in the
States. I didn’t even see it in the truck stops in |
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Friday morning at 7 we packed the trailer with our bags and boarded
our bus. By We accomplished a lot on this trip for the mission, so the mission
could continue to reach out to others. I learned on this trip that there are
two kinds of mission trips: The kind where you try to win souls to Christ,
and the kind where you work so that others can win souls to Christ. We did
the latter on this trip. People at the mission said that they love having the
Hazelwood group because we work hard and accomplish a lot while we’re there.
Still, though we went to serve the mission and its people, we came away
feeling served and blessed. |
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Here’s the whole group. I’m in the back row, second from the right.
Matt Miller is in the third row, third from the right. Lynn Golden (Sue
Wilkes’s sister) is left of Matt. Sue Wilkes is in the second row, at left. |