Friday Reflections – Mexico

This week’s guest blogger, Julianna Franklin, shares her experience as a member of the 2011 Mexico Mission Team.  And she has included some gorgeous photos from the trip as well!  Julianna is the daughter of Mike and Marty Franklin.  She currently serves as one of the Youth Elders for NWPC.  Thanks for such an inspiring and thought-provoking reflection, Julianna!  Well done!

Note:  A permanent link to Julianna’s reflection has been added to the 2011 Mexico Mission Trip webpage!

Mexico

by Julianna Franklin

In my 17 short years, I have never met with a situation that I did not think I could handle. This is not because I am especially brave or assured of my own abilities but because I know that I have North Wilkesboro Presbyterian Church behind me. This one building holds my family: women who have shown me the love of a mother, men with the support of a father, friends who show every aspect of a sibling, and then the head of our family who brings us all together, God. In this unit, I have all my faith.

Last year, a blessed decision was made that our very own mission team would go to Mexico. God delivered my chance, and I knew this was going to be an experience that would change lives. I never knew that it was my very own life that would be changed so completely.

After months of planning, preparation and prayer, we were finally on our way. Travel is never an easy experience. Add a foreign language and 25 people with various sized bladders, stomachs, and tolerance levels, and I will spare details. Two plane rides after we said goodbye to North Carolina, we stepped out of the airport to the most beautiful sunset slipping between the peaks of two mountains, the likes of which are only painted with the boldest colors and leave the surrounding landscape looking as if the clouds of color had not graced it with their abundance of fiery beauty. We traveled by vans for two more hours and watched as a gentle darkness suppressed the final streaks of defiant sun. After an eternity of speed bumps that were designed more like roof-checks, sending us dozing passengers into the air searching for the roof to stop our dreamy ascent, we arrived at a small hotel, were fed our first tortillas and beans, and found havens in our simple rooms and rest after what had seemed like two unending days of laborious travel.

`The next morning we visited the Clinic to which many, especially Penny Musson, have dedicated so much time and effort to. Mrs. Musson and others who had worked on it gave us a tour and we could all see the love and determination that went into creating this Clinic that will provide hope and medical care to a people often turned away only because of who their grandparents were. For the next leg of our journey, Hannah Trawick, Risa Baker, Cole Wright, Miles Hubbard, and I agreed to ride in an open truck bed to alleviate some of the stuffiness of the vans. Contrary to concerns for our comfort, we found our seats to be the best in our caravan. We got to see the landscape without the hindrance of glass or the dust that covered the last cars of our train. The mountains and valleys that altered the flat line of the horizon gave the land a heartbeat that caused ours to stutter in awe. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the view left us speechless.

We eventually left paved roads and journeyed onto dirt paths which led into a spectrum of vibrant greens, earthy browns, and an azure blue sky. Occasionally we travelled through small villages or passed small stores and saw curious faces observing the odd disturbance to the quiet presence of the road. We might not have been speaking in tongues, but it was here that I first felt the wonder of communication without the same language. Every single person we waved to returned the wave and smiled, sometimes even calling out a greeting. This wasn’t a simple “hey” to strangers, this was a welcome extended eagerly to friends. We felt this in our hearts and this leg of our journey, though longer and bumpier (if possible), was eased by the sincere welcome of the land and its people.

After travelling through many quaint villages and a couple of banyo verde (green bathroom or cornfield) stops, we finally reached our destination: San Carralampia. We ate, got situated into the housing situations they had set up for us (the girls in the church building and the guys in a nearby wooden building), changed into dressier clothes, and frantically attempted to learn Spanish in order to introduce ourselves in their language. The villagers gathered to meet us, struggled to interpret our Wilkes County Spanish (I’m sure if Hola can ever be translated ‘Hey Yalllll!’, it was that night), and joined us in a worship service. After our groups merged with very shy greeting, our youth set out to make friends. We pulled out our arsenal of childhood games and set to playing Pato Pato Pavo (Duck, Duck, Turkey, we didn’t know the word for goose) and Ms. Mary Mack, which the children loved even though they didn’t quite get what elephantes had to do with Senorita Mack. Our playing was halted when a child looked up and shouted. Hung in the sky were two multicolored bows signifying the gift that God had arranged for us in the next week.

The next week was so full and thrilling that the days blurred together and only actions gave significance to the days. Construction, Vacation Bible School, and Free Time provided the basic structure for each day and will thus be the structure for its recollection.

Construction

Our long journey to San Carralampia was also a journey away from technology, industrialism, and machinery that would have belittled the task before us. Our mountain of a task was to build a fellowship hall to enable the church to bring its people together. Without modern tools or methods, the job was daunting, but we dug in anyway.

The first issue was providing an even foundation.  A contractor would call in a bull dozer and have a flat surface within a few hours. We had nothing but shovels and 5 gallon buckets to move the earth in. If you were to say ‘bucket’ in front of any member or our mission team, you would be shocked by a shouted “Bote!” and many echoed “Bote!”s from other team members. This is the one Spanish word that all of us have engraved into our minds. Moving dirt with buckets became the emphasis of our labor as specialists worked on brick-making and laying. Bricks were made individually, one-by-one mixed, beat into a single mold, and laid out to dry. As the dried bricks were laid, rebar had to be constructed to support the walls and structure.

One day, in concern for my red-faced labor with the buckets, I was sent to help Mongul with tying rebar. Now, I have never even heard of ‘rebar’ before and here I am with Mongul, whose silent exterior leads me to have no idea about the extent of his English vocabulary (a few men hid what they knew in a sly approach to improve our Spanish). He shows me, hands me a wire and hammer-thing and does five while I struggle with mine. He comes over to check on my one, redoes it, shows me again, and watches this time as I attempt it again. “Si?”, I asked.   “Yes”, he says with a slight grin. That’s all the English I got out of him, but he patiently helped me and corrected me as I slowly worked alongside him, though he outpaced me ten to every one I completed.

Once the support columns were going in, concrete was mixed and poured into the 6-foot holes some men had dug into our ‘perfectly’ flattened floor base. The concrete was mixed on the ground by a group of men who continued to churn it as others carried it away in buckets. These buckets weighed almost double the ones we were carrying, yet the men continued to carry them while we took our breaks.

The men who worked alongside us were patient, diligent, and crafty when making up for lack of technology. They began work before we had even eaten breakfast and worked long after we left to play with the children. They also changed their long-held beliefs about women and humbly allowed us to work alongside them. Along with these sacrifices, the workers quit all other responsibilities for a week for the improvement of the church. With them, we rearranged a hill and built a building; through them, I saw how faith can move any mountain.
 

We built this building from the ground up, with not a single electric tool or machine.

 

Vacation Bible School

In order to tackle the enormous task of leading a hundred non-English speaking children in a Bible School, we chose the basic structure of our VBS’s: groups to lead arts and crafts, story telling, recreation, and music stations, and shepherds to take groups from one station to another. (Now one important thing to understand about these villagers is that they didn’t all speak Spanish; they spoke their native tongue of Tze’tal and only some of the men learned Spanish.) Miles and I were shepherds and our combined Spanish vocabulary might have added up to Hello and Goodbye with very little in between. I consulted with Paula (Paula and Nina proved invaluable on this trip as friends and translators) and learned a phrase that meant ‘Come with me’. When we had our groups separated, I tried my phrase, watched as some of the older boys puzzled over it and then translated it for the girls. Really, all we had to do was hold some child’s hand and begin walking, and the others would hurry after us, vying for our free hands. At one point, I was holding a hand with each of my fingers to avoid a feud.

One day, my group was at the recreation station where Parks, Dave’l, and Owen were quickly running out of translatable games. The translator for that station then offered to create a game for the kids; I listened intently, trying to challenge my Spanish. I heard rojo, blousa, and nina, words I knew meant red, shirt, and girl. I looked down, then back up as I groaned and began backing away from the 30 eager children who had found their new favorite game: “Chase the girl in the red shirt.” I passed the torch as soon as I made it back to the group of laughing Americans and was glad to see the slight panic in their eyes as the mob of panting children headed their way.

For story telling, the stage was a concrete basketball court, the actors were Cole Wright, Gerald, and whoever we could coax from the audience to participate, and the story tellers were Cole, translated by Paula, translated by a native to Tze’tal for the children. The children were thrilled with the story of Noah and loved playing the animals who loaded into the boat. Gerald played the part of Noah so well that later, whenever he was walking around in the village, excited shouts of “Noah! Noah!” could be heard along with a stampede of children to giggle with him and act as the animals boarding his boat.

They also acted out the story of David and Goliath, where Gerald graciously agreed to play the part of Goliath and dramatically die four times that day. David was played by a volunteer from the crowd; once a little girl bravely took the part. One volunteer grew very excited when he learned his role in the story; Gerald soon found out why when it was time to kill the giant and the boy pulled out his very own slingshot. We managed to explain the situation to the boy and Gerald gave his most convincing performance to ensure the satisfaction of the boy.

 

Free Time

Most of our free time was spent exploring and playing with the children. From swimming with the skinny-dipping hoodlums to taking about a million pictures with them showing us their world, we were always well-entertained.

One afternoon, a couple of us and the children went on a hike down to the river for a swim. We chose a place under this bridge, a true rope bridge like the one in Shrek, and prepared to jump. Then the little girls with us looked worried and distressed. They got my attention and began trying to tell me something. They used several different words in an attempt to make me understand. Then one girl used a motion that I’m sure is universal: she placed her hands together, wiggled them through the air, and made a ‘sssssss’ sound. Snakes!  I didn’t need to speak a different language for that. Some of the braver members of our group enjoyed the cool water of the river, but I let the kids lead me back up to the village to their usual swimming hole.

 

Part of the daily routine for the women in the village was baking bread in a large clay oven. The oven was large and domed, heated by simmering coals and cleaned by brooms handmade with nearby branches. This bread was wonderful, the rival of which would only be Carolina Finley’s, and was a staple in their diet. One day they invited us to join them and help in the process. The bread had to have a very specific texture, gained by cupping your hand and rolling the dough against the table. To test the consistency, the dough was thrown onto the table and if it didn’t lose its shape, it was ready to bake. This process was somehow impossible for Rebekah, Rachel, and me to grasp. The women would giggle, show us how to do it again, and share crinkly-eyed grins when we failed yet again. When one of us actually got it right, the women placed our pieces very carefully onto the cooking pans, emphasizing our accomplishment like loving mothers. Then Cole Wright came in and asked if he could help. He was a natural; he awed the ladies with his braided bread and quickly made friends as they giggled at the man in the kitchen. When Cole’s batch came out of the oven, the women distributed it and bragged to the others about his skill.

One day we were supposed to have a church service in the evening so we all showered in the small showers, which consisted of a huge barrel of cool mountain water and a pan to dish the water onto our steaming, muggy bodies; dressed in the village-appropriate long dresses; and waited to be called to the church steps for the service. The construction had just taken a critical turn and the men still working decided that they had to finish that day. Looking for something to do, we all wandered down to the open field where a pick-up game of soccer had started. Each wondering about the skill of the other, the two groups joined and redistributed into teams. People quickly gathered to observe the odd sight of girls dribbling in long dresses and the Americans thinking they could compete. Now don’t worry, we held our own, and the game developed into a well-matched competition. Parks was passed the ball and, to the cheering of many, headed down the field towards the much-adored goalkeeper, Dave’l, of the other team. Dave’l was not about to let down his fans and rushed the ball. Somehow, Parks, continuing his attack, flipped completely over Dave’l and landed tangled on the ground to the hearty laughter of a hundred villagers.

The Gift

One evening we were informed that the women of the village wanted to wash our clothes in appreciation for our hard work. We protested that our gift was not meant to be repaid but were told that it would be an insult not to let them. As a compromise, some of us girls volunteered to help with the washing. We followed several women down to a stream with large flat rocks in the middle and set to work. We were shown how to do it and grabbed a stack of clothes to begin. My first items were socks, which I scrubbed repetitively and rinsed in the creek, only to be dismayed that they had remained discolored. Jane picked them up and set to work as I moved on to a much cleaner pair of shorts. When she was done, I tried once more to remove just a few of the small stains left and, together, we proudly held up our accomplishment. One lady glanced at them for a second, said “sucio” (dirty), politely took them back and quickly returned them to store-bought white. As we humbly tried to finish some of our clothes, we noticed another woman scrubbing a paint-stained shirt. We tried to tell her that the paint stains were permanent and the owner of the shirt didn’t mind its condition. A few minutes later, she held up a spotless shirt in her red, raw hands.

 

This was the first sign of the gift.

 

 

The final day of construction had arrived and you could tell that we were all seriously worn down. The grate that we used to sift concrete mix was moving at a slackening pace and “Bote!” was shouted with an undertone of desperation and muffled hatred for the word. Then our playmates appeared. They knew that our time together was drawing to a close and they wanted to spend every last second with us. So they began to help us in our work. Sebastion, a kid of no more than seven, didn’t have the leverage to scoop with a shovel; so instead, he would lay the shovel down, pull dirt onto it, lift it, and run as fast as he could toward the buckets, hoping to reach them with about half of the dirt he had started with.

This was the second sign of the gift.

Our final day in the village, we all came together to celebrate the week that we had spent working and growing together. A cow had been killed, a sacrifice of monumental meaning and honor, and an entire day had been spent preparing it. The tables were moved outside so that all could see our feast and we were served only the best of what they had to give. It was delicious, maybe not because it catered to our pampered taste buds, but because so much love and sacrifice had seasoned it. We attempted to eat everything on our plates as a sign of gratitude but there was such a bountiful spread, we were soon sitting back rubbing our stomachs and wishing we had worn our elastic-waisted pants. The villagers disappeared towards the end of our meal into the kitchen area and returned content with their meal of the broth in which our beef had cooked. Then the women who had cooked our meal approached and asked for a translator. Their next words shocked us all. They asked for forgiveness. They perceived that our mission to their village held more value than they could return in a humble meal, and asked us to forgive them for the meal didn’t show how grateful they were.

In that moment, the gift overcame us in an unbreakable, overwhelming rush of love; love is the gift that God gave us through the people of San Carralampia. This love changed all perceptions of the emotion and gave a new understanding to Christian love.

Love is patient ; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in the wrongdoings, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This love was so evident in their heartbreaking words that, as the heart tore, the adhesive that stuck it back together made it larger and more capable of love than it ever had been before. With the marriage of our church and these people, my family became complete. I will never forget my hermanos and hermanas in Mexico. My newly expanded family will always be a part of who I am; as I move on in this life, I will always try to share the love that they taught me.

The End

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Love Never Ends (1Corinthians 13:8)