All mission trips start before you get on the plane. I still think we have room to improve on the team-building side of things. But it's hard to really motivate that when the team is very small. Heading into this year, we only had one person commit to going aside from myself and Mike. I was hoping to get a couple more, but it just didn't happen. And so much of the prep work this year was time spent as individuals playing with this idea or that idea. Last year, I spent a lot of time practicing making friendship bracelets and other crafts. This year, it was me thinking about possibilities for science projects and science demos.
That's one thing I really wish we could figure out how to improve. There's a lot about a mission trip that's in the going and the doing, but there's a discipleship element that we really haven't worked out yet. Just as with any discipleship process, there's something that has to happen to get people from the point of nodding their heads in agreement to actually doing something. While I'm glad we had one person willing to go, I'd rather have about 5. But this part of it is especially hard. People have to sacrifice something, and that's hard. They have to sacrifice time, income, comfort, and even their ego. That's hard. So this is something that's going to be an ongoing work.
But back to the pre-trip. Although there were three of us slated to go, at the last minute (just a few days before we were scheduled to leave) Mike had to pull out for family reasons. His dad's routine procedure turned into bypass surgery, and he needed stay back to help take care of things. It was disappointing to hear, but completely understandable. It gave me a lot to think about for those few days. Although everything else about the trip was going to be at least somewhat familiar, it's more comforting to have someone else along who has also done it before. And I wasn't going to have that.
But that wasn't going to stop me from going, so the two of us went to the airport on Friday night, July 10, to go to Mexico.
The guy next to me is Bryan. Bryan is an interesting person. One thing about him is that his heart is always in the right place. He's not the most organized person, which leads to not always being punctual, but he understands serving others and being willing to do whatever it is that needs to be done. He was also the de facto translator because he speaks more Spanish than I do.
So we got on the plane and flew into Mexico City. This first day is always rough because we take the red eye out, but you don't really get to sleep. My notes say it was a 3 hour and 30 minute flight, and I probably only got about 30 minutes of sleep. They serve you a little breakfast snack on the flight: a ham and cheese croissant sandwich, a bag of carrots, and a fun size candy bar. I never know what to do with the carrots. For whatever reason, I cannot eat a whole 2 ounce (or however big it was) bag of baby carrots. It's not that I don't like carrots in general, but for some reason halfway through the bag I'm just done with them.
I saw this advertisement in the airport:
The second leg from Mexico City to Oaxaca went without incident. I got about another 30 minutes of sleep. We landed at about 8:15 local time. Dave picked us up from the airport, and we took the taxi out to Casa Arnel. We ate breakfast there (I got the huevos Oaxaquena -- scrambled eggs in a light broth), and then headed out into the city.
Since this was Bryan's first trip, we spent the time going around the city to take in some of the culture. We went to El Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzman, which is one of the big churches in the city. When we went in, one of the guys there gave us an extended history of the place. It was a thorough history, but it wasn't told particularly well. It was in English, so I understood it, which probably didn't help. He basically lost the narrative in a sea of dates and names. I had to keep standing up and pacing around a little bit so that I wouldn't fall asleep on the hard wooden benches. It only lasted 30 minutes, but it felt like it went at least an hour.
From there, we looked at a few art exhibits and checked out a few of the other interesting places in town. The city is interesting because it's an interesting mix of old and new. They've worked very hard to preserve the exteriors of buildings so that it has the feeling of being old and traditional, but the interiors were sometimes quite modern. I didn't get any pictures of the art, but here are a couple representative of one of the styles taken from the internet:
We also stopped off at an exhibition area where we found a couple different musical groups practicing.
By this time, it was about 1 in the afternoon, so we stopped off for lunch at a tlayuda place. This is one of the places we went to on our very first trip to Oaxaca two years ago. As Bryan was praying for our meal, a parade came down the street as was blasting music so loud that I couldn't even hear him anymore. It was kind of funny because Dave and I both looked up at each other and then looked over towards Bryan, who was clearly trying to pray louder and louder, but his voice just wasn't carrying over the noise. But that's okay.
Tylaudas are one of the things that makes me happy when I go to Oaxaca. It's not complicated food. A large, crunchy tortilla, slathered in lard and black beans, topped with meat and some cheese. It's kind of like a Mexican pizza, but not really. It's kind of tostada-ish, but the tortilla isn't that crunchy. It basically does what a good comfort food does. It's tasty and satisfying.
Dave noticed that we generally talked somewhat loudly, which I didn't really notice until he pointed it out a few times. Not being a boorish American is apparently something that takes at least a little bit of work. It's just one of those self-awareness things, I guess.
After lunch, we continued exploring the city for a little while, before going back to Casa Arnel to sleep for just a little under two hours. We were supposed to meet Dave back at the Zocolo (the city center) at 6:00, but as we were leaving the hotel, we were hit with a sudden summer downpour. I was watching the weather come in for about 30 minutes and hoping it would lighten up, but it looked like it was going to keep on going for the foreseeable future. This wasn't something I was really prepared for, but the time came for us to leave so we walked out in the rain. About 5 minutes of walking later, the rain stopped.
We had dinner at the meat market. This year, the meat market was moved outside while there was some sort of construction going on. The three of us had 2 kilos of meat for dinner. Yeah, that's about 4.4 pounds of meat (chorizo and tasajo) for three people, served with salsa, pico de gallo, some green sauce, some roasted chiles (I think), and grilled green onions. After that, we got some dessert at a nieve place. Nieves are like a shaved ice dessert. I let Dave pick something interesting, and he got me a scoop of mango and a scoop of zapote negro. Zapote negro is a sweetened black bean that reminded me a lot of the Chinese sweetened red bean.
On the way back from dinner, we hung out a little bit in the Zocolo and watched the pre-Guelaguetza celebrations that were going on.
At around 9:00, we got back to Casa Arnel to wind down. My notes say that I probably fell asleep at about 10 PM and I woke up at 7:45. That's nearly 10 hours of sleep, and it was good. This takes us to Sunday morning.
At around 8 AM, I heard some singing from the church across the street from Casa Arnel (which is neither the Santo Domingo nor the church with the etched glass). I thought it was a wedding because I saw a woman in a white dress and a whole lot of people around her, but I was later told that it was a baptism. At some point, I heard a woman singing what I presume was "Seek Ye First" (because I recognized the melody). I was a little surprised because I thought that song was "relatively" recent. And it is. It penned in 1972 by Karen Lafferty. To hear an American protestant song written in the 1970s in a traditional Catholic church in Mexico was a surprise. I guess I never realized how widespread that song had become.
I also snapped these pictures of the mural that's on the wall facing Casa Arnel.
We had breakfast at another place that we went to on the very first trip called "Marco Polo." It's a nice outdoor dining area, like in a courtyard, but with lots of plants, giving everything a fresh feel. Here's another internet picture:
After breakfast, we went back to the hotel to do a little bit of work. We needed to start nailing down our supply lists and really deciding what types of activities were going to work and not work. There's a hint of our lack of getting together as a team here, as there's really no reason something like this couldn't have been worked out in advance. But we were able to talk through it and work it all out.
That afternoon, we went to the airport to wait for Chef Jose. Jose was coming here to teach the culinary group. He's a former chef instructor at Le Cordon Bleu. While we were at the airport, I got a couple pictures of the artwork that was in the lobby.
Eventually, we got picked up and taken to the ranch. Since it was Jose's first time, we toured the ranch. Here's the inside of the greenhouse. These are all tomato plants.
Brian, Jose, and I all slept in the new family dorm. This is something new this year on the ranch. In order to be a bit more family-friendly and serve a few more needs of the ranch, they're starting to build new dorms that are designed to allow couples and families with kids to stay together instead of being split across the male/female dorms.
And this led to the first real semi-problem we had to deal with. Bryan snores. It didn't bother me that first night, probably because I was so exhausted. And it didn't bother me too much that second night. But Jose struggled with it. Snoring doesn't make Bryan a bad person, but it was enough that he got booted out of the room for the rest of the week. But we did set him up with a sleeping area in the main room, and that worked out okay.
This is what I would imagine is a classic example of speaking openly and honestly to work through problems. If we didn't talk openly about the problem, there would have been growing discontent over the course of the week, possibly leading to a major incident at some point. But instead, we talked through it and dealt with it right away, and that prevented any escalation of resentment. Instead, we talked through it and found a solution. I admit that I felt a little bad for Bryan kicking him out (though it led to a funny incident later in the week), but since we talked about it, he understood it as nothing personal and just something that needed to be done to make things function well.
This brings us to Monday, which was our shopping day. This was the day that we had to go out and get all of the stuff. Actually, I went out and got stuff while Bryan stayed behind at the camp to do some painting and finish work on the dorm. He works as a maintenance guy for an apartment complex, so these were all things that fit very well within his skills and background. The first stop was Home Depot. Yes, there is a Home Depot down there. No, it's not quite like our Home Depot. They have some of the things you would find at a home depot, but not everything. It's kind of a Home Depot lite.
I have a short note about a conversation that we had. Dave was talking about how some of the rural towns functioned, and he talked about how in some of the towns it's someone's job to be the cell phone guy. If you wanted to send a text, you would go to the cell phone guy and pay him (payphone style) and use his cell phone. At a certain level, it makes sense. There's not enough money for everyone to have a cell phone, and so if someone can get their hands on one, it makes sense that they would share access to the community, while still trying to cover costs. And eventually, if the community makes enough use of it, it naturally turns into a business (perhaps both sending and receiving texts) as a communication hub. Interesting stuff.
The first group of students arrived at about 9 PM that night. We had a late dinner with them at nearly 10 PM. And that's where I'm going to end this post.
