Sunday, November 30, 2008

Mexico - Oct 21st

We did not sleep in today. We met in the foyer of the hotel bright and early at 6:45am and headed to the church for 7:00am. I'm glad we did though. We spent time worshiping and praying and had a little message by Arturo. Breakfast was fruit, muffins and cereal again. Today we were very much blessed because we had a man by the name of Carlos join our team. Carlos is able to speak both english and spanish so we were able to communicate with Pedro, Lucas, Alex and Juan. It made for a much easier day for sure. We began the day finishing up with knocking out the concrete we had left from yesterday. Then the fun began. Mixing concrete by hand is not easy. The first batch was 10 bags of concrete/ 50 pails of sand/ 50 pails of stone. You start by dumping the sand in a pile. Then you level out that pile and put the concrete in. You mix up that with shobels until the sand and concrete are well mixed. Flatten that down and pour on the pails of stone. Water is thrown into the mix and you mix and mix and mix until it is to the right consistency. Adding water as you go. Talk about tough work. Thankfully the second batch was only 1.5 concrete/ 7.5 sand/ 7.5 stone. It was still hard work but much less of it. That was about all the work we did. It took basically the whole day. The highlight of my day though was being able to have a real conversation with Juan thanks to the help of Carlos. We talked about how he came to this church and how God is transforming him. He lives in true service to God. He works on this project and pretty much stays at the location 24/7 24 hours a day to serve God. He said he was extremely thankful for us being there but couldn't understand why we would come from so much and so far away to help them when they have a hard time getting people from here to help them. We did our best to explain that we are extremely thankful to be able to come here and help and that it is an honor to work with them. We explained that we felt called by God to come and that we are brothers in Christ so its a blessing to both them and us being here. I'm not going to lie I had to choke back tears quite a bit. The passion these people have humbles me. Oh and it turns out Juan does auto body work too, so thats kinda sweet.

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