How...

Well, summer's almost over and it's not too long before I go home.
But how do I do that?

How do I go from this back to Georgia...to sitting in class...to milking cows

Now that my eyes have been opened to the need here and the opportunity to serve, I can't just be content with my plans for life anymore. They suddenly seem insignificant and pointless.

In a week and a half I'm gonna have to go home and deal with that, but tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and build a house here.



This is by far the easier option.

How could I see this...



...and not want to replace it with this?

How does one word mean so much?

Since I've been hanging out in Mexico every week, something I've noticed about the Mexicans that I really love is the way they address each other. Hermano...or Hermana, is a pretty normal way for them to start a sentence. Well, what's that mean? Brother...Sister. I don't have a sister, but I do have brothers. And I kinda love them. A lot. So...for someone to address another person as if they were family, I think that's kind of a big deal. I've heard so many people call somebody hermano, or hermana, since I've been down here, but until recently nobody but my brothers and sister-in-law had ever called me sister. And although I knew the translation of that word, it really means more to me now than it has before.

Last week we stayed at a church in Mexico and went to their Wednesday night service. Afterwards, a man who I had talked with earlier caught my eye and waved at me. I waved back, smiled, and kept walking. Then I heard him call out "seester!" As I was one of twenty Americans among two hundred people, I assumed he was talking to me. I immediately felt like this man was giving me respect I didn't come close to deserving. I still don't even know his name, but I walked back and had a conversation with him. That conversation was all about me. What's my name? Where am I from? How old am I? What do I do? What do I study? I answered all his questions but didn't ask very many of my own. But somehow we still talked for at least ten minutes. About me. The conversation was literally never about anything that didn't pertain to me, except when he told me to feel free to come back and visit them and that their doors would always be open for us (which was still kind of about me). I've come to realize that these people really do care about us and they treat us very much like family. From the love and respect I've seen and felt this summer, I think these are people who genuinely care about me and want me to feel welcomed, and that every time they call me or anybody else hermana or hermano, they mean it.

Yet these are the people who are apparently not worth the risk of coming to Juarez for. Why is it that they give everything they have to cook meals for us, yet so many of us have refused to give them just four days of our lives...four days that would be converted into a solid house to take the place of their cardboard ones?

I'm pretty sure that, in calling us brothers and sisters, they give us a title that we appreciate, but don't deserve.

Redemption

  

So, this week we worked with a group called Team Casas. Team Casas is a group of people who come independently to build a house and make their own group of random people...kinda like what we're doing this summer, except with more people. Anyway, this last week was different in a lot of ways. Mostly because the three of us actually had to slow down, take a step back, and let these people work with us. We had never really had to teach anybody how to do stuff before because we always just did it by ourselves. Also, we actually had other people to hang out with and talk to, which was great. One person in particular I talked to a lot was Theresa. This was her first trip, so she asked us to teach her how to do things before she actually tried doing them. While I was teaching Theresa the finer points of stucco, I had a pretty huge realization: Building these houses is a lot like living life. You're going to mess up sometimes, but there's always a chance for redemption.
            Theresa seemed to really worry that she wasn't doing everything quite right and frequently asked if her work looked ok. As I told her that she could screw up nothing on this house too bad to be fixed, I realized how much that concept applies to life, and how it relates to the grace that God so freely and unconditionally gives each of us. I even messed up the stucco several times myself just to show Theresa how easy it is to fix. As I started thinking about it more and more, I saw how much just the stucco applies to us as people, whether we're trying to be good or Christians or whatever.

            First of all, one of the keys to good stucco is good chickenwire. The tighter and flatter your chickenwire is, the easier the stucco will go on. The thing is, even if the chickenwire is terrible and it's really hard to get the stucco on it, the stucco still has to go on the house. We have to endure the bad chickenwire sometimes. The same is true about the stucco mixture itself. If the mix is too soupy, it's hard to get it to stick. If it's too dry, it just crumbles off the wall immediately. But sometimes in life, we get dealt a bad mix of stucco and we just have to work with what we've got, tell our stucco mixer, and hope for better next time. Other than that, the stucco mixer is the only one who can improve the quality of stucco we're working with, so there’s no use fretting about what we can’t change.

Now, on the subject of the actual application of stucco… you're gonna jack it up sometimes. It's inevitable. You're gonna leave a hole somewhere there shouldn't be a hole. But here's where the grace of stucco comes into play. You can just get some fresh stucco, flick it on there, and trowel right over it. No stucco job is too bad to bad to fix. However, you still have to see that there’s a problem and that it needs to be fixed. And you've got to be willing to fix it.

Another important factor to consider is that stucco dries. We add lime to it to make it dry even faster. That being said, you shouldn't wait till the stuff is completely dry to try to fix a spot that you should have dealt with before. In other words, when you see a problem with your stucco, the best time to fix it is right then. It will only get worse and harder to fix as time goes by.

The last lesson I learned from the stucco is that on the outside, after it’s finished, you can’t even see the bad spots anymore. As I was finishing the stucco, I liked how one side of the house was so evenly done and all the stucco looked nice. I got to another part of the house, and thought to myself, “Self, this stucco looks pretty rough”. But after it was textured and finished, it all looked the same. You couldn’t tell it was all choppy in one spot and smooth in another. So basically, even though some stucco has been through tougher times than others, it still all looks like stucco and is hard to judge without seeing it before it's finished.

So that’s what stucco taught me this week. And if you missed all that symbolism, good luck living life…you’ll need it.

Here's what I gave my stucco for this week

What in the world am I doing here?

     So I guess most of you reading this probably know what I'm doing in Mexico and why I'm here. However, if you don't, this is for you. First of all, I'm working with Casas Por Cristo, an organization that provides short term mission trips to teams via taking them across the border to Juarez, Mexico to build a house in a couple days for the impoverished people there. I had been on two trips with Casas in the past and really loved most everything I experienced. So while I was in Mexico on my Spring Break trip this summer, my team leader Brittany Girle ( if you don't know her you're really missing out) talked to me about being an intern with Casas this summer. We had this conversation last year too, except that last year I told myself I couldn't do it before I even seriously considered it. This year, however, I was a little more confident in my abilities and Brittany made me believe that I could do it.
     So I got super pumped about being here all summer and applied to be an intern. Well, I was accepted and hired as a Casas Por Cristo summer intern. Then a week later I got a call saying that they actually couldn't have any interns this summer. The registration numbers for teams coming down to build houses was so low that they really couldn't afford to pay people to do the jobs that they already had staff members for. I was pretty devastated. I also still felt like I was supposed to be in Mexico this summer, but I made arrangements to be in Athens and work at the dairy all summer. Well, in an exciting turn of events, one of the other fired interns had a pretty great idea: we could raise the money to build ten houses and we would be our own team of four people and still be down here building houses all summer. Instead of being team leaders, leading other groups' teams, we would just be a team by ourselves. After a couple seconds of thinking this was impossible, I decided to do it. So we started raising the money and got everything worked out and we came down and started building houses. And that's where I'm at now. Also, I live at the Casas Por Cristo Executive Director's house. With four dogs. And a pig. It's cool, he's potty trained.

So I guess you're wondering why...

     So, before I came to Mexico everybody told me I should blog about it. Well I didn't want to. And I kinda still don't want to. Who really wants to share their thoughts and feelings for everybody to see? But I am anyway. I guess I'm getting started on this kinda late in the game...I've been here 5 weeks and the summer's halfway over. But I really feel like to do justice to this summer and what it's about and the wonderful people of Juarez, Mexico I need to do more than just take pictures.
     You may also be wondering about the title of this blog. Well, this thought has been kind of a recurring theme of my summer so far. So many times I've felt so strongly about something I've experienced that I want to take a picture of it so everybody can see what I'm talking about and so I can remember it forever. But then I stop and think to myself, "If I took a picture, it wouldn't mean anything. People would just see a janky little house, or they'd just see some kids hanging out in a tree house, or they'd just see some people standing in a circle. They wouldn't be able to look at that picture and know the story I'm trying to tell with it." Sometimes when I have those thoughts, I take the picture anyway. Sometimes I just don't. But whether I have lots of pictures or not, this blog is about writing the stories of life that the pictures leave out.