MEXICO DAY

Last Friday we took our students to Mexico on a "wing it" trip.

A few weeks before, we were set to work with a local church in Tecate when the thing fell apart due to a pregnancy complication with the pastor's family. So I was left with either cancel the trip, or come up with my own. So I prayed about it and decided that rather than cancel, I'd drop it to a one day trip to go visit Hector and his family (a boy we sponsor as a youth ministry) in a small town just south of Tecate.

[Side note: our goal is 1 kid sponsored on every continent that I can figure out how to- I'm guessing antartica is out. So far, we have one in North America and one in Africa.]

So, that's what we did, we went to visit Hector and bring his family some gifts. We really had no real agenda. We decided to just go, follow the spirit, and wing it. The only thing we did know is that they knew we were coming and would be home. So we decided to try an 8am to 10pm- one day shot. Fastest Mexico missions trip I've ever been on. Far cry from the 15 hour Nor Cal drive to Mexicali I did in a bus for years. Here's how the day went.

• 9am: leave church.
• 11am: arrive at Hector's house. Give them 50lbs of rice, 50lbs of flour, 50lbs of sugar, 25lbs of pinto beans, 4 containers of salt, 40 chicken breasts, 40lbs of beef, a box of toilet paper, a box of paper towels, a new set of heavy duty washable plastic plates/cups/bowls, some new kitchen towels, a couple of brooms, some cleaning supplies, a huge box of laundry detergent, a shovel and a few gifts for Hector: a baseball/bat and soccer ball and football for hector (and a few other things I think I'm forgetting.
• 11:30am-1pm: Play with Hector and his family and a whole bunch of kids from the surrounding neighborhood and help with some projects they had around the house- like clearing a six foot section around their fence to keep the snakes from having something to hide in near the house.
• 1pm-2:30pm: A fat BBQ lunch for the family/community.
• 2:30-4:30pm: Clean up trash in a local community park and then debrief our experience/get to know one another. There are 34 of us, about 25 of which had never been with us to this part of Tecate and lots of whom did not know one another before the trip.
• 4:30-6:30pm: Eat a lot of local tacos and quesadillas and plenty of manzana soda.
  
• 6:30-7:30pm: Visit a Tecate missions youth outreach center.
• 7:30-8:30pm: Enjoy some local ice cream
• 8:30pm- leave Mexico and arrive back home, hopefully changed and better for it.

Here's some pictures. Honestly. I love Mexico. I think it's so fun.