Mexico the Sequel

Back in April I posted about a trip to Mexico I took with the youth group from my church. Our students formed a real bond with Julio and Laura and their kids and our kids wanted to do even more for them. I figured over time the memory would fade and our students would move on to other ideas. I was wrong.

They raised $465 from the youth group and wanted to go back down to Mexico to buy the family a bed and anything else they needed. So on Saturday we headed south again and, once again, it was a wonderful experience. It turned out to be Julio's birthday so it was a great surprise for them to see us (we had no way to get hold of them ahead of time so just had to hope they would be home). We were able to buy them a bunk bed for the kids, a dresser for the whole family and bags of food. Laura and Julio cooked us a delicious meal and we got to sit in the house that we built - and that they turned into a home. It felt like a big family - American and Mexican.

I had a busy week last week and another one ahead of me so frankly I really didn't want to spend the whole day on the road, but I was so glad I did. It's such a great experience seeing a group of teenagers doing something so completely selfless. It did my heart good.

And, I got to be geeky also! When we go down to build houses, the logistics are handled by the people at Amor Ministries. This time we were on our own and had to find their house which is on a dirt road somewhere between Tecate and Tijuana. Fortunately I had marked the location of the house in my GPSr and used Google Earth to figure out which roads to take to get there. Then I found a great little program called GEtrax which allowed me to track our position in real time in Google Earth on my laptop (it used cached images since I had no Internet connection). It was great technology used for a great cause.