Migrant Camp Outreach

Thursday

"This is going to be an awesome next few hours," I stated, as we stood waiting outside the vans before going to outreach. It was Thursday night: migrant camp evangelism time. These are the camps--more or less their own little villages--housing migrant workers who have been trucked up from their home states (usually Oaxaca) having been promised "jobs" and "homes" here on the Baja produce ranches. The work hours are long, and the living conditions are generally rough. But I'm told that people are far more welcoming of evangelical ideas here than they are back in places like Oaxaca, where hostility towards the church is still all too common.

Playing string figures and handing out coloured paper and markers:
 I was touched when a girl gave one of the pieces back to me
--folded into a heart-shaped card with my name written on it.

Although outreach nights like these used to centre around evangelism, with a New Testament film and a speaker in the program, the response was so great that Foundation for His Ministry has now switched to a more discipleship-based structure. Migrant outreach now involves holding camp-wide Bible studies to disciple families to take the gospel back to those unreached places when they move on again.

But it's not just all talk: we also spend a good portion of the evening serving a big dinner to everybody, playing games with the many excited kids and handing out gifts.

This morning's work assignment: washing the dust off of exactly 396 plates (yes, we counted beforehand) brought out of storage in preparation for a Valentine's Day couple's dinner at the mission.

 

A Regular Day at the Mission...

Wednesday

When a "regular day" includes working in a place like
 the Prayer Garden pictured here, life is probably pretty good.
 

"...and one of you girls will have to go to the main kitchen," said the jobs coordinator after Sala Wednesday morning. Thus I came to be standing over large cutting boards alongside two other team members, scalping strawberries and dicing roma tomatoes. I found it to be pleasant enough work, especially because of the smell of bread dough being made nearby. When we all sat down to lunch, I decided that it would be una buena idea to try chomping on a slice of Jalapeño pepper. It wasn't bad, but if I had thought to wait until the end of lunch to eat it, then maybe I actually would have been able to taste my meal.

 
In the afternoon we took advantage of a job offer to clean the gift shop. This was especially great because it gave us the chance to combine mission work with souvenier shopping. The rest of the afternoon passed in the prayer garden as we pruned and deadheaded plants in this oasis set apart as a place to seek God. I always knew those hours working at a summer job in a greenhouse would be good for SOMETHING on the mission field...

A sign above the wall in the Bible School classroom

 To cap off an already full day, the whole team headed over to the Bible School for a dinner that the students put on as a fundraiser for their missions trip to Oaxaca. The school runs an intensive two-year training program designed to equip young (and older) Christians to be missionaries in their own (usually unreached) regions. Because of sponsorship for the students, tuition is free.

One muy delicioso chicken dinner later--the best part of which had to have been the all-you-can-eat nachos--everyone crossed the parking lot over to the church for the Wednesday night service. Do you know how much fun it is to sing worship songs like "10,000 Reasons" and "Blessed Be Your Name" en Español?

A Day of Three Outreaches

Tuesday, Day Three


The sky had just lightened to a pale blue behind the palm trees when a white bus pulled up in front of our dorms. The time was 6:30 AM, and Lana and I had signed up to accompany the daycare bus on its rounds this morning to pick up kids from the surrounding communities. Thus I found myself riding up and down through a series of dusty village streets in the early morning, watching out the window as little niños y niñas ran out to the bus from behind their backyard fences. More and more of them filed in each time we stopped, until the bus was fairly filled with youngsters.

A strong influence of Catholicism
is evident in culture.

My ridiculously limited Spanish vocabulary hindered conversing much with them, but at least we could play together! Using whatever supplies I found in my bag--namely a piece of paper and a couple of Band-Aids--we managed to make a puppet and play "clinic" until ending up talking on "telefonos" with our hands. (Imitating a ringtone and saying "hola" and "adios" fortunately for me doesn't require much knowledge of the language.) Once at the daycare, I stayed long enough to style a few hairdos for the niños, and then it was time for me to head off to morning Sala. Speaking of which, here's how a typical day for a volunteer here goes:

(Please click Read More to continue)

A Tour, a Duel, and a Most Bizarre Snack

Birds are singing, my tongue is burning, a spider is hiking across my keyboard, and I'm sitting in a tree. That's what's going on right now, in case you were wondering. It's break-time between lunch and work assignments on Tuesday--our second day here--and I decided that this inviting-looking tree in front of the beautiful arched buildings here would be a better place than the dorm room to blog about yesterday. What about the burning tongue, you ask? That would be the result of my attempting just now to consume an extremely sour but unbeatably fresh grapefruit from the orchard here. But back on topic:





Yesterday morning was mostly taken up by a tour of the grounds here. I found myself officially re-immersed in a world of the taste of macadamia nuts and empanadas, the sound of ringneck doves calling from their hideouts in bougainvillea, and the sight of palm trees just waiting to be climbed.

Guavas, as fresh as they come

In the afternoon five of were headed off to sort macadamia nuts when the Job Coordinator ran over and asked for two people to go to the prayer garden instead. That's where I ended up, weeding in the experimental orchard. It's deliciously pleasant to be able to live and work in the shade of a stand of banana trees again. Another perk to the job was being able to partake in the sweet, pink guavas fallen fresh from the trees.

The fruit, the likes of which I'd never encountered nor
heard of before,turns out to be called a cherimoya.
It has it's own Wikipedia page if you're that curious to learn more.
 

At one point, Norberto, the gardener, brought over a spikey green tropical fruit for us to try. Splitting it open, he showed us how to remove the large black seeds and eat the juicy white pulp. It wasn't bad!

On Monday nights, visitors always get to babysit at the orphanage to give the house parents a break. Of all the activities we did together with our house girls--designing sticker posters, making bracelets, decorating cookies--I'd have to say that the funnest for me was the crazy balloon-sword duelling we did towards the end. Battling it out with a couple of squeaking inflatable swords to the sound of laughter mixed with intense Spanish music...it's a pretty priceless moment.
 

Back on Southern Soil

I'm not sure what it is that makes oversized white rocks so compelling, but the sight of the Rocky Mountains as seen from the sky--their thousand peaks sharply defined in shadow and light--certainly tends to invoke in the viewer twinges of awe.

At least that's what I decided again as our plane passed over them enroute to Seattle, and then to San Diego. The sound of a hearty "Hola!" that greeted us as we stepped out of our taxi soon after landing let us know that we had reached our YWAM group. The following hours found our procession of white YWAM vans cruising southbound, along the Baja peninsula as the lowering sun played on the desert around us. Onwards stretched the highway, through cultivated valleys and white-washed Spanish cities, passed tumble weed-riddled fences and between mountains flanked with twisted cactus.

At last, after the colours around us had faded into darkness, we pulled in front of a familiar green taco shop. As soon as I stepped out and walked up to the open-air front of the building, one of the ladies standing there smiled at me and did the motions for making a string figure. Surprised, I nodded excitedly "yeah--that was me!" and she gave me a hug. I couldn't believe she still recognised me after a full year as the girl who had done the string figures one other night, many months ago.

After downing a few very good, very authentic tacos--and of course a bottle of Manzana Lift, I ran out to the van to return again with a multicoloured string. I'm counting what time we spent there as a highlight of our trip (even though the trip has only begun), as we played with the kids and browsed at the little market. Soon however, the time came to file back in the van and complete the drive to the orphanage. When my feet hit the sandy ground as I stepped out of the van, something else hit me: the smell of the night air, the sight of a sky full of stars, and the realisation this is going to be a great week!

Return to Vicente Guerrero

...There. The alarm is set for 3:00AM. Two fully packed (and somewhat weighty) suitcases are parked, zippered shut, on the floor beside us. The only sounds in the room are the rustle of pages from the missionary biography Lana's reading, and the clacking of my laptop's keys as I type. Technically we should be sleeping now--after all, we're getting up again to drive to the airport in only a matter of hours. Let me explain...

 

(To continue, please click Read More.)