Ruiz, a small town in the Mexican state of Nayarit, is an area plagued by unemployment, and those who do find work only earn between six and ten dollars a day for hard labor–they are locked in a constant struggle to feed their families. So when Experience Mission offered to help them achieve a community vision, their response came as something of a shock: Young members of a church said that what they wanted most was the chance to go serve others.
Ruiz is one of Experience Mission’s partner communities. Executive Director Chris Clum, who founded EM in 2003, has been working there for nearly 20 years. He has seen small children grow to become active members of the youth group at a local evangelical church, Iglesia Vida (Life Church). They are now teenagers and young adults, about 25 in all, and most of them have seen American mission teams show up every summer for almost their entire lives.
Clum said he sat down with the group in 2005 to discuss what opportunities they would like to have but could not as a result of their economic situation.
“They said, ‘We’d love to do what they get to do - go on a mission trip,’” Clum said.
The initial plan was to send them to Jamaica, he said, but the young men in the group are required to complete military service before they can obtain a passport. And so their destination was changed to Tecate, another EM partner community in Mexico. Churches and private donors in the United States, many of whom had previously worked in Ruiz, contributed enough money last year to transport the group by bus in July 2006.
The team would finish building a home another EM team had started earlier in the summer. They would also put on a Kid’s Club outreach program, participate in evening worship services and attend services at a local church. The hope was that their experience would be not unlike that of millions of Americans who participate in short-term mission trips every summer.
But the teenagers from Ruiz arrived with a perspective most short-term missionaries do not have: They live in what is considered even by Mexican standards to be abject poverty. Veronica Bernal, 18, said that makes the opportunity for them to help out other families in need especially beautiful.
“We have lived all that,” said Bernal, who has been attending Iglesia Vida since 2004, shortly after her mother died of cancer. “We have felt - at least I have - what it’s like to not have a definite place to live and to have to move from house to house.”
Donations covered the cost of food, transportation, housing and construction materials for the participants, many of whom are still students. Others, however, work full time and for them especially the trip represented a sacrifice; they went without a week’s wages to attend.
Maribel Ponoco, 20, works in Ruiz at a purified water plant and attends a public preparatory school. She said life there can be very trying.
“I try to be happy with what I can,” Ponoco, who dreams of being a pediatrician, said. “But sometimes I feel like Ruiz does not love me.”
However, she agreed with Bernal that it felt very good to have the chance to pay it forward.
“If we have very little, and other people go to help in Ruiz,” she said, “why not give a little of what they give us?”
The journey
After a 27-hour bus trip pockmarked by no less than nine luggage searches at military-controlled checkpoints, they arrived in Tecate to learn that a logistical snafu left them without a ride from the bus station to the church they would stay at.
The group carried their luggage several miles in the midday sun without a single complaint.
During the ensuing week, the group worked tirelessly to finish a home, adding roofing, laying a cement floor, building a patio and an awning and painting it. Others focused on the Kid’s Club outreach ministry, and when attendance faltered among kids who normally attend in order to interact with Americans, they amplified their recruiting effort.
Mark Shoemaker, an EM intern who helped coordinate housing, transportation and construction projects for the group, said he was deeply moved by the trip.
“It’s so humbling to see them. I mean, they don’t have much, and then they’re giving everything they have,” Shoemaker said. “It makes you step back and just think about what true giving is, and generosity. The character of those people is absolutely inspiring.”
Nicole Nelson, a teacher in Burbank, Calif., has been volunteering in Ruiz since she was 14. In part because of her lasting commitment to the community, her home church, Woodbury Baptist in Woodbury, Minn., donated $8,000 toward the trip.
Nelson said the group feels like a second family to her and she was thrilled to accompany them on the trip.
“They have servant hearts,” Nelson said. “You go down there to serve, but you leave feeling like you’ve been served, and you learn so much more.”
Abel Castellanos, the pastor at Iglesia Vida, led the group. He accepts no salary for the three or four services he leads each week. He finds work where he can in the construction industry - mainly as a welder - to keep food on the table.
“We live by faith. We’re not accustomed to having a salary. Only large congregations assign a salary to the pastors,” Castellanos said.
Castellanos said the trip represented an important opportunity for personal transformation and that the trip would be more educative for them than would be years of classroom instruction.
“The principal focus of this is that they can be humble; know that they don’t only have to be served, but rather that they must learn to serve. This is a primordial, principal goal in life that they should get to know,” Castellanos said. “What I teach them, they can forget, but what a person lives, they can never forget and it will remain planted inside of their hearts.”
