We went to Mexico

Last fall, Joseph came home from school with news about his friend: “Mark (as we will call him) is going to Mexico next summer to help build houses. Can  we go?”

I had been vaguely aware that our parish was floating the idea of a family mission trip to Mexico (a first for this parish), but hadn’t really considered it. My ties to the parish didn’t extend further than Mass, pick-up in the car line after school and occasional adult education talks at that point. Going on a mission trip with a bunch of people I didn’t know didn’t seem to be a likely path. But when Joseph reported that his friend was going, my thinking shifted a bit, it seemed more possible, so I called the coordinator.

Too late. They were full, she said. But she’d put me on the waiting list.

And that was that, I thought.

Until she called me up in February saying there were spots that had opened, people had dropped out, and there was a meeting the next Sunday. If I was still interested, I could come to the meeting, see what I thought, and make a decision.

So I went.  As it happened, of course, one of the families that had dropped out was Mark’s, so that gave me pause. But I thought and prayed about it some more, talked to the kids, and went ahead and said yes.

Weirdly, about the same time, my oldest called me from Atlanta and said, “Hey mom, I want to do some kind of mission trip this summer. To give back. Can you hook me up?”  As it turned out, he couldn’t come because of the impossibility of adjusting his work schedule, but that moment affirmed my sense that we should do this, anyway.

Side note:  Between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I did 6 weeks on a mission trip in Harlan, Kentucky. It was run by n order of religious sisters who did several of these in different parts of the country -  I think I originally wanted to do the Bronx mission, but it was full, so I ended up in Harlan, which was better because it was just a couple of hours from Knoxville, and gave me an experience of the poverty closer to my own area. We ran a Vacation Bible School, worked in the parish clothes closet/food pantry, did a lot of home visitation and did things like completely cleaning, from top to bottom, the home of a blind man. It was an important experience for me to have, taught me not to romanticize poverty or the poor, and deepened my faith in many ways.  I wanted my daughter to have an experience something like that before she went off to college.

But even then, I struggled and vacillated, for two basic reasons:

• Safety.  I’m not obsessive about this, but I did worry a bit. Every time I would start to feel totally okay about it and that safety issues were overblown, knowing that the problems (to say the least) of drug-related violence were mostly in the west and closer to the border than we would be, something would pop up in the news, the last being when, in early May, I think, the University of Texas pulled all of its study abroad students and even some staff from northeastern Mexico, including Monterrey. Hmmm. So I bugged people with emails and questions, and was finally satisfied with two points: one, we had a missionary located in the place we were going come and give us an orientation, and he reassured us on the safety issue, and then I reasoned that if the situation were bad, the bishop of the area would not let groups come.

And let me tell you, once I got there, I thought, a bit abashed ….er…what was that about? Seriously. But more on that later.

• Poverty Tourism.  Not being a Spanish speaker, not having any particularly useful skills like those with medical or construction experience, I could not imagine what I could bring to the table, me and my three children.  I was wary when I heard people say, “Oh, you end up getting more out of this than they (the poor) do” as if that was a good thing. That’s not the point of missionary work, is it? Even short-term?  To visit poor Mexicans so I can enjoy some culturally enriching spiritual growth? What? There are very poor people just across the railroad tracks in back of my house. We shop together at the Dollar Tree and Wal-Mart. Alabama is not known for its stellar literacy rates and impressive maternal and child health stats.  There are plenty of poor Mexican people living in the Diocese of Birmingham. Why go fifteen hundred miles, across a border, to do this? I pondered that question through the whole trip, and I still am, even though having been there and done what we did, I see the value to the people we visited and helped. It’s a complicated question though, isn’t it?

***

And so we went.

The plan was for us all to converge on San Antonio on Saturday the 19th, pile in two rental vans and drive south from there.  We were three families from our parish, plus a few individuals, a couple of individuals from other locations (North Carolina, Atlanta and Denver).  Some flew, others drove. We drove, stopping to visit the fabulous Dorian, Matthew and The Speedlets on the way and taking a spin – either literally, or by pointing at directional signs -  through various locales in the area important to Welborn Family History: Nixon, where my great-aunt and uncle lived for a long time and Jourdanton, where my father lived as a small boy for a shorter time, primarily.

We arrived at San Antonio around 5, heading for the parish of St. Francis of Assisi, which had graciously responded to our (the group’s) request for a place to stay before heading to the border.  I was the first one there – the others being in charge of the vans which needed to picked up at the airport, along with some of the group.  I waited for Mass to be over and introduced myself to the pastor, Fr. Larry Christian, who took us to the youth minister who in turn let us in to the building where we would be spreading out and camping for the night. They had even bought us pizzas – very nice.  The rest of the group arrived, along with the missionaries from Family Mission Company, the group at whose mission we would be serving (more about that later) – kindly coming along to help us through the border, which ended up being more important than we’d thought.  But things happen, you know?

So there we were – finally. We got a bit of an orientation. Some sorted through and organized medicines that were being taken down.  We ate, we prayed, we spread out our sleeping bags and went to sleep for a few hours, until the 5 am call to get up and ship out.

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