Mexico Day 59 - Month 2

So I know I haven't exactly been consistent with my blogging this month but to my defense there have been a crap ton of groups here and I have been working pretty hard. Fortunately, I have been attempting to take quite a few pictures so here they are....

A couple weeks ago we were totally crossin' the border into Texas to do some storage work and Walmart/Target/Traditional American Store run(s) on the other side. Ironically, the first thing I did when we crossed over and were picking up stuff from a friend who lives in Texas, was drink a huge hand-full of tap water.....simply because I could. It was crazy being back in the states because you actually notice a HUGE difference when you pass from the border of Mexico to the border of Texas when you are only a few miles away from a whole other country. It's as if you are on a whole new planeta and it was a very surreal experience even after only living here for two months.

David (the capitán of La Casa Hogar Bethany), Steve, and I all went to La Casa Hogar Bethany a while ago to install some bunk-beds and bring them new mattresses to sleep on. I think the picture of the "Before" speaks for itself.....Three-inches of egg crates is hardly considerable as a bed. However, one of the things that is unique to Bethany that not all children's homes can say is that they truly are a family. The care-takers there are probably some of the nicest people I have seriously met in my whole life and the kids are just straight up tough sons of guns.

Yesterday we went on a bike-riding field-trip to a local park with Bethany and I was paired with one of the youngest kids in the entire home (excluding infants) and as he traveled at about 2.3 mph on his bicicleta (with training wheels) he fell over greater than or equal to, five times throughout the entire day causing his knee to start bleeding and not one time did he cry. Every time he fell I asked, "¿Estás bien?" and every time he's was like "Yo, what are we waiting around for?" (in Spanish of course). They truly are a family and the director Daniel and other male caretakers are really the father that some of these kids never had and some of them even call Daniel, "Papi."

Last week we had a group of five engineers from a heating/cooling business based in Mason, OH (rep the 5-1-3 fur sure bird) which was pretty sweet. We got a lot of work done with a little amount of people and a little amount of work time which amounted to probably one of the most productive weeks I have experienced since I got here. Unfortunately, the ex-Army Ranger in the group got a little jackhammer-happy a couple times and cracked a main water pipe.....

Did I say crack? I meant completely mutilated the whole thing making the section completely unusable bringing our broken pipe count for that week up to a new record high (for my work teams) of two in three days.

So I simply HAD to put at least one picture of Jahir from La Casa Hogar Douglas up because Jahir is a special individual.....Up until I believe last year, everyone who knew Jahir just kind of thought he was a little "slow" and he didn't really understand when people would talk to him making people think he was just a straight up dumb kid.

Well, last year Jahir's ears were tested at some doctor's office somewhere and it turns out he's deaf....Like REALLY deaf.....I want to say he's about eight years old and has been deaf without knowing it for EIGHT YEARS. Think about that for a second..... He speaks with a slur, you have to speak very loudly/enunciate your words very clearly to him, and he's asked me about six or seven times when I got to Mexico and when I'm leaving and six or seven times I have told him y todavía no entiende but that's okay. From probably around the first time I went to Douglas Jahir has always gravitated towards me. He gives me a hug every time he sees me and one time when he was at the B2B property tagging along with one of the staff I saw him and his face lit up like you wouldn't believe. I feel so bad every time we go on field-trips with Douglas because Jahir always wants to be my partner and every time I have to explain to him numerous times (like usual) that I am working and that I can't play all day like I know he/me would like to. Just a quick side note: one day, out of nowhere, he started calling me "Paco" because I don't think he can say my name so I can now add that forename to my lyrical quiver of Mexican nicknames I have acquired over the past two months which I think is cool pretty sweet. On the upside, he is the only person in all of Mexico that calls me that so I now know that whenever I here a muffled little voice three feet above the ground calling out, "Paco", I know my homie needs me.

I don't know if you can tell what this is by the picture but this is quite possibly the coolest part of all of La Casa Hogar Douglas (minus the people). This is a slide that runs all the way from the church up on the hill all the way down to the Comedor which is amazingly EPIC. Now at first glance one may think, "Wait a minute, that's made of concrete and there's no railing and there is no padding and blah, blah, blah...." One would be missing the point. This is the essence of Mexico (at least Monterrey) all wrapped into one object. In the states you would need the proper permits and licensing to pour your own concrete and do construction and blah, blah, blah, but in Mexico that is not a problem.

In Mexico things are just ghetto enough to where you can kindasorta build whatever, wherever. In the states, little kids cry ever two seconds when they fall down and sometimes just cry because they want attention, but here the kids are tough as nails and only cry when something more profound than a scraped up knee is wrong (except when it comes to soccer when everyone's huevos se van adults and kids, and everybody turns into a crybaby for no apparent reason when you accidentally bump there foot or they fall down, but that's a different story for a different day). All politically correct malarkey aside, the slide is REALLY fun.

If you are un jefe del tobogán como yo than you will be really hardcore and go down without any cardboard or broom to keep your booty safe. Depending on the time of year and the extra material laying around, sometimes they will put water down it or enhance the experience with some other use of impressive ingenuity. It's funny to watch group members watch the kids go down because as they go down every American bone in there body is saying, "Intervene! Someone's going to get hurt and one of these cute little kids are going to cry and I will feel like soooooooooooo terrible!" But truth is: the majority of the people who get "hurt" on the slide (and by hurt I mean scraped knee or skinned hand) are the group members 'cause they ain't got nothin' on our Monterrey flavor, so go and call the Savior, 'cause these chavos are so hardcore and have so much Mexican legitimacy that they're gonna make-yeah........................................cry.

What.

-N8

Mexico Day 39 - Day-to-Day

So I know a lot of my faithful, daily, dedicated, supportive readers have been asking…What does a day in the life of Mission Trip Nate look like? Well, here it is…

Every night I set my alarm for 6:45am and 7:15am. This was a trick that I learned last year and it’s started to work quite well. Now I know that most people set two alarms because they have trouble getting up and need a little motivation but I am not one of those people. Yes, I do have trouble getting up in the morning sometimes but I do not set two alarms for that specific reason.

I have learned that by setting my alarm two times about 30 minutes away from each other I can actually start remembering the majority of my dreams I have. Dreaming is a remarkable ability that God has blessed us with that should be utilized to its fullest. I believe that dreaming is one of the only times where you have absolutely no control over what’s going on in your head. There is a saying that I have heard someone say at least one or possibly even TWO times in my entire life: “Intoxicated words are merely sober thoughts.” I’m sure whoever made up those awe-inspiring words of wisdom was quite the philosopher, but think about it…when intoxicated almost all inhibitions go out the window and there is very little that gets filtered between the brain and action. Now think about when you are dreaming.

When one is dreaming there is no such thing as inhibitions. It’s just an uncontrollable mental diarrhea every time you go to bed. That being said I would like to make my own philosophical galleta. “If ‘intoxicated words are merely sober thoughts’ than dreams are intoxicated words that are stored up in one’s mind and almost immediately forgotten for those who do not get intoxicated.”

“¿Comó te llamas?”

“Me llamo Señor Aristotle” Desafortunadamente, as humans, la mayoría de nuestros sueños are lost late at night in our deepest states of sleep, hours before we will ever wake up and any worthwhile dream is almost always forgotten by the time we awake. But I have found that if I sort of “half wakeup” to stop my initial alarm I almost always dream for the last 30min of my sleep. Granted, I do not always dream right before I get up, but if I do I almost always remember it and I think that’s pretty cool. Try it.

I normally roll out da crib around the 7:45am area to go have breakfast at the two coolest people that live in the second level of the LDM above the age of twenty with a baby girl named Evelyn’s house (notice how specific my ratings are). Jelly sandwiches or Zucaritas (the Mexican version of Frosted Flakes) are the way to go every morning. And yes, I do have weird things I do with my cereal as well.

Riddle me this world…Why are we forced, day in and day out, to put all our cereal in a single bowl every morning and drench it with milk that will eventually lead to the final bites of cereal being nothing more than a sorta-kinda-not-really tasty slag of some sort of foreign, cere-milk mixture? I say thee nay. Every morning when time is not an issue I pour my cereal in a normal bowl like 100% of the rest of the American population but that is as far as it goes. Following the bowl of dry cereal comes a carton of milk. I pour nothing; I simply bring the carton with me to my seat and take the two elements of the cereal experience individually. I take a spoonful of cereal using one of the Lightsaber spoons I won from the box then a drink of milk, spoonful of cereal, drink of milk. Call me Leonardo da Vinci but I believe yo soy el primer hombre  that I know of, to come up with the only way you can possibly get that, “first bite” bite every time for the entire breakfast experience. Running late? No problem. Just return the excess cereal back to the appropriate box and place the milk in the fridge and pick up where you left off whenever the next time of convenience arrives. Try it.

Every morning at 8am we have a “Stand-Up Meeting” to go over what will be going on that specific day and pray for the day that is about to ensue. After the meeting we take out the necessary materials to have a successful work day and prepare to leave for the worksite. We normally leave around 10:00-10:30am and arrive on the worksite around 11. Lunch is at 12 and depending on where we are and what day it is, sometimes the casas hogares may cook an authentic Mexican meal for the entire group or maybe we will eat ham and cheese sandwiches that have been prepared in advance.

Worksite time normally lasts until 4ish to 5:30ish. Sometimes we won’t really do any “work” for the day and instead we will take some of the kids from one of the homes to an amusement park or to rent bikes or just to do something fun to breakup the daily monotony of breakfast, school, homework, dinner, breakfast, school, homework, dinner.

We normally arrive back on the Back2Back campus around 5:30-6:00pm and have time to chill and shower before dinner. Dinner is at 6:30 every single night on the dot unless we go to dinner out at some restaurant. Normally when eating out with the groups we attend a restaurant chain local to Monterrey called “Pollo Loco” which is Spanish for “Crazy Chicken” in case you are completely oblivious to the cultures that have surrounded our country since the beginning of time when Pangaea separated into the different continents some 742.98 buzillion years ago. Look it up. It’s on the internet…

After/during dinner on campus I normally have a bit of time to chill around and say, “whatup” to some of my homies. Occasionally, some of the RIDICULOUSLY CUTE staff babies may be out and about in which case I completely skip dinner and spend the remainder of the night grabbing toes, speaking in “the baby voice”, and letting them grab my long, tropically delicious locks of hair because for some reason they like my hair better than everybody else’s. Coincidence? I think NOT! It’s seriously the little things here that make every day worthwhile. A super cute baby’s smile at the end of a hard day of work or a ham and cheese sandwich smothered in hot sauce. Take your pick ‘cause they’re both amazing.

This is either Alex or Evan....they're twins and I still don't know who's who even though they're not identical twins....

When I die I want to be seen as one of those people who stopped to smell the roses. Someone who stopped to smell the roses and picked a few out to give to someone else and in some way inspired someone else to pick roses for another. As Christ-Followers we should live life in such a way if people look back at our life all they should say is, “Yo, that _________ dude was legit. They actually DID something. For real.” Try it.

Now I know that this has, by far, been my longest post but now you know. Now you know that you can set an alarm early as an aid to maybe remember some of your dreams. Now you know that taking the elements of cereal like the elements of communion at church is the one and only way to get a first bite every bite. Now you know the random mezcla of information that goes through my brain every day and possibly a part of the reason why.

I honestly have absolutely no clue as to how my brain got to be so “weird” over these past couple years. Maybe it’s the contusion, maybe it’s the North Carolinian air, I don’t know. But I do know one thing: I know that when you take a step back from the endless banging of a gong our lives can sometimes become and just chill for a second, God can do amazing things in your life. When you leave the country, change your job, mix up this spiritual uniformity we get trapped in, God shows his true face and it changes you. For real. Try it.

-N8