Saturday, June 29, 2013

Mexico Trip, June 29 – Day 5


Hola…

Today we finished the home that we were working on. Altogether this entire group will be finishing up 6 homes. Project Mexico has had other teams down here already, and will be having more groups coming down before the end of the summer. All in all they will be building 25 homes. That will be 25 families that will be receiving new homes with no strings attached. What a blessing it has been for the team to be a part of this. It has also been wonderful to see how God has been working on building the community within our Ohio team and the other teams from all across the country and Canada that we have been able to join up with. I cannot encourage people enough to participate in one of these trips…it is an awesome and rewarding way to spend your vacation.

Stucco, Step One…


The first step of putting on the stucco is to sift the sand to get the rocks and gravel out. Altogether we sifted about 48 five gallon buckets.

Stucco, Step Two…


Six buckets of sand, 1 – 80 pound bag of cement, 2 shovels of lime, about 3 buckets of water, and a lot of backbreaking stirring produces a batch of stucco. Since I was helping do this today, and mixing 8 batches of this stuff I did not get any pictures. The one above is what we did to mix the batches of concrete, which is the same technique…four people mixing and stirring until we had an oatmeal-type mixture.

Stucco, Step Three…


The rest of the team grabbed the mortarboards and trowels and spent the day applying the stucco to the walls. This will be the first coat on the house. After it has dried for a few days the Project Mexico staff will return to the site and put on a final smooth coat that the family will be able to paint at a later date.

The final step of the project…


One of the beautiful parts of this work is that we are doing all of this work for our Lord. We have been starting each day off with morning prayers and devotions and ending each day with evening prayers, each followed with private meditation and prayer time. This is such a critical part of doing this kind of work. We were not building this home for our satisfaction but for the Lord and a fellow family in need. This focus on a spiritual process continued into the turning of the home over to the family. The priest that resides over St. Innocents goes to each home and conducts a blessing service for the home. We all then share with the family our appreciation for being able to serve them and then give them the keys to their new home. There is much joy and many tears because we will most likely not see this family again in this life.

Our team…


Before cleaning up the worksite and heading out we took some pictures to remember our new found friends and family. This picture includes the family, the staff that we had on our team, our entire team, and Fr. Nicklas.

To reward the team for a wonderful job we stopped at our favorite taco stand again, drove around a little bit, and then stopped at a wonderful small bakery for treats. On our way to the worksite, we did a Chinese fire drill…all of us, and on our way home we were rocking out on some Mexican rap music…quite a sight to see (and hear) for the crew that we had here.

Tomorrow is our day of rest before we pack up and head home. We will start the day off with a liturgy (Eastern Orthodox worship service). Then we have planned a half-day of sports (soccer, volleyball, basketball, and whatever else) with the boys and a trip to the beach. We pack up early on Monday morning and head back to the airport to return home. Thank you for the opportunity to share our adventure with you.

I understand that some of your email servers are dropping the pictures from these emails. If that is the case you can see the same email with the pictures in my blog at http://journeys-of-a-redeemed-child.blogspot.mx/

If you would like to get more information on Project Mexico and St. Innocent Orphanage you can check them out at http://projectmexico.org/Home.aspx. I have also been posting updates on Facebook (david.b.short) if you would like to follow those updates.

Thanks for your prayers and thoughts.

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