Mission Mexico 2005

I figured I should post a couple of pics from the Mission Trip for all of you wonderful peoples. All pictures are courtesy of the amazing Dana. So here you go:


We stayed at a Red Roof Inn in Laredo on the way to Mexico. It was a great last night in the US. We ate hamburgers at Fuddruckers that night. It was a fitting "last supper" before we crossed the border. I was very pleased to find an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game at the restaurant. That is only the best arcade game ever!!



Driving in Mexico is pretty darn crazy. It's basically like driving in a big city like New Orleans...that is driving in New Orleans with mountains and on steroids. All traffic laws are suggestions. This is a great pic that Dana took of Brock while he was driving. I'm sure he was looking for me, since his van was always in the lead and my van took up the rear.



Roadstops in Mexico were pretty similar to the US. Your gas stations would have all of the normal candy bars, soft drinks, cappuchino machines and packaged pasteries. Everyone would pull out their pecos and practice their Spanish on the poor, unsuspecting cashier.



We arrived at the camp in the early Tuesday evening. We found the camp to be way more developed than we had expected. They had four one-room cabins built. We occupied two of them...one for the girls and one for the guys. They only had a limited number of bunkbeds, so we put them all in the guy's cabin. There just wasn't enough space in the room to put all of the guys on the floor. We all slept on those foam pads that you see in the pictures. They were pretty comfortable. One issue was the climate. It was really cold!!



As for the projects...two of the main ones were succo work on the exterior of the four cabins (it had been started by a previous group but not finished) and fixing the foundation of one of the cabins. As you can see from the first picture, our girls did most of the succo work. The second picture gives you a little idea of the foundation work. The long and short of it is that three of the four cabin walls were laying on cinder blocks instead of the edge of the concrete foundation. We had to raise those walls one at a time, remove the cinder blocks, build forms and pour concrete to extend the foundation to the edge of the walls. Does that make sense?




Another big project was to build retaining walls around the front corner of two of the cabins. As you can kinda see from these pictures, these cabins are built on an incline. When it rains, water was flowing right into the cabins. So, the walls we built are meant to direct the water away from the cabins. As you can tell, we did a lot of digging (the first two pictures), then forming and framing the walls (third picture) and you can see the final product (last picture).



My favorite outing of the trip was the hike at Bernal. Bernal is one of the largest rocks in the world. You can see it in the first picture. Basically it is a mountain that is one, big rock. It was an extremely difficult hike to the top. I don't know if we all would have made it if it weren't for all of the encouragement that was flowing through the group. The second picture is the view from the top.

Here is a picture of the group that made it to the top:




Another outing we took was to visit the city of Queretaro. Queretaro was about an hour drive from the camp. It is a city of about a million people (about the size of New Orleans). We went there to sightsee and shop. We were really impressed. It was beautiful, historic and clean.

So that was our trip...at least a couple of highlights. It was an amazing trip for each of us that went. God truly changed us through the experience.