This summer groups from many Madison churches are traveling to participate in ministry projects. This report is from Angie Meyers, a 2005 journalism graduate of the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology now working as an administrative assistant at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. She and her husband Dave were a part of a group of 40 men and women from Blackhawk Church that traveled to Juarez, Mexico, to construct a Sunday School building for a church and a home for a family.
We set out on our trek Saturday, June 10 at 5:00am, for a 30 hour bus ride to El Paso, Texas. We spent Sunday night in a hotel in El Paso to get refreshed and replenished before crossing the border to Juarez. On Sunday night our group sang worship songs in the hotel and had group prayer before going over the details of our trip. We woke the next morning and split up into 4 vans (and one additional cargo van) that were rented by Casas Por Christo the ministry organization that organizes home building in the border towns of Mexico. They build around 360 houses per year!
The rest of our trip we slept on the floor of a church called "Victory Oasis". We would wake up at 6:00am each morning, eat breakfast and be out the door by 7:00am to head to the site and work until 12:30pm to 1:00pm. We then headed back to the church for an afternoon siesta (which was really nice since that’s the peak temps during that time of day) and lunch and were back to the site usually between 3:00pm-4:00pm, we usually didn’t make it back home again until between 9:30pm-10:30pm. Then we had dinner, got in the showers if you were willing to wait long enough and hit the hay between 11:30pm-12:30am. Average temps for the trip were between 104-106 degrees so it certainly was toasty (thank goodness for 45 SPF sunblock).
Highlights from the trip definitely included our host church family, the Sanchez family. Pastor Sanchez was the pastor of the church that Blackhawk’s building team built last year and this year we added on a Sunday school building. Each day he and some other members of his family were out at our building site bringing sodas (in a glass bottle!), cutting up fresh watermelon (yummmm) and/or helping.
When we were finished on the 4th day, Pastor Sanchez did a Dedication of the building through prayer, scripture reading and personal testimony…they had us all in tears. They were so gracious, humble and amazing examples of what it means to be rich in spirit.
Our building team (Dave and I were team #2) got along amazingly well despite the fact that we had many technical difficulties. Just to name a few: our generator went out more than once leaving us without an electric saw and we had to cut all of our wood by hand for a whole day!, a drywall screw gun broke so we had 2-3 people hand-screwing them into the wall for a whole night and our cement mixer broke for a few hours in the middle of pouring the concrete slab so we had a team of people mixing it by hand. Everyone just rolled up their sleeves and said "we’re just going to have to work a little harder" and kept high spirits about doing it.
The last big highlight of the trip (although there were many) was a church service that Victory Oasis had on Thursday night after we were done with the build. Pastor Sanchez had several team members come up and give a testimony about their experiences throughout the week and they based their sermon around our group. We sang worship songs together in both Spanish and English and it was an amazing experience to hear both cultures come together and worship God in two different languages and know that He hears us and loves us in the same way.
Overall, it was very humbling and I would definitely say that we were given more than what we gave to them. Mexico may be poor financially, but they know the value of family and what it means to have a strong spiritual life.