Te quiero mucho.

I love you. A lot.

These three words pack a lot of meaning here in Mexico, and they brought me to childlike tears at the end of my time in San Quintin.

My first ever trip with Baja Missions was to San Quintin, during spring break of my sophomore year of college—about two and a half years ago. Since then, I’ve been to San Quintin seven times to spend a week or so with the people I’ve come to know, love and miss when I’m not there.

I truly feel like I’ve become part of the family of God in San Quintin, because I’ve been blessed to watch children grow, watch families multiply and watch new Christians be born into baptism. I’ve met a lot of amazing people that I’ll never forget at other churches in the Baja this summer, but San Quintin will always be my place.

On Saturday morning, we circled up in the parking lot of the Villa Marina to have a devotional before we did the last of the shopping and hit the road. During this devo, we found out some terrible news about one of the kids from the San Quintin church. Mario, who used to be the preacher in San Quintin, has a large family that still attends church in San Quintin. He has a grandson named Isaac who is deaf and mute, and really dear to the hearts of the Mayfair group. On Friday night, Isaac was riding his bike on the backroads in San Quintin, and he was hit by a car. Somewhere on the road to the hospital in Ensenada, 13-year-old Isaac died.

This hit the Mayfair group really hard, but the immediately started praying for the family and started adjusting their week’s plans.

I arrived in San Quintin on Saturday afternoon and helped Mrs. Phyllis in the kitchen until the other half of the group arrived that night.

Then I spent Sunday-Tuesday working in the clinic, helping with the kids class at night and having the privilege of listening to Jason Bybee preach while Matt translated. Sunday, we expected the body to arrive around 6:30 p.m., so instead of having classes and preaching like we’d have the rest of the week, we had a short service from 5pm-6pm and then when the body and the family arrived around 7pm, we gave them hugs and left while they had their visitation with the hundreds of Mexicans who came to show their support.

The next day, we were supposed to have our clinic from 9am-3pm like usual, but the body was still in the church, as they were going to the burial around 10 a.m. I spent the morning helping with the kids activities, and when the two hundred plus people left for the burial site, we set up the clinic. I knew how amazing the leaders of this church and this church family as a whole was before the experience—how the encourage and teach and lead and serve to the best of their ability and to the glory of God.  But watching them comfort the family during this terribly hard time was just another way I’ve been able to see God working here in the Baja.

Many of the leaders of the Mayfair group and group members who are really close to Isaac’s family attended the visitation and the graveside service, in which each of the Baja preachers participated. Something else really impressive about the church in the Baja is their unity. In the states, we seem to spend more time competing with other churches and other denominations rather than working with them. Just another way I’ve learned that America really doesn’t do everything correctly.

Since a good portion of the group that consists of the “Mayfair” group attends church back home at the Guntersville Church of Christ, we split off Wednesday and came to San Vicente, bringing the doctors, optometrist and dentist with us. Guntersville recently started sponsoring the church in San Vicente, and in the years to come they plan on coming here for a whole week to do the clinic.

I am one of the translators who was sent with the early group to San Vicente. Though I love the church here, it was really hard to leave my place after only spending 3 days with some of my favorite kids in the world. The last night goodbyes are always hard for me, so I was able to escape the sadness of that moment—at least I thought.

Some of the kids I’m closest to, who all happen to be brothers and sisters, knew that I’d be leaving Tuesday night. They always ask me when I’m coming back, and until this summer I’ve been able to say that I’d be back in just a few months, if God wants me to come back. But Tuesday night, these precious kids chased me out to the vans as we were loading up to leave. They tackled me, hugged and kissed me and told me “te quiero mucho,” which means “I love you.” This, and knowing that I had no idea when I’d be back (being out of college and not knowing what I’ll be doing in 6 months) sent me into a tailspin of tears.

One of my favorite people in the world.

It hit me right then and there how precious my time in the Baja really was, especially the time I spent in San Quintin. I realized how much I’d taken for granted the fact that I got to visit twice a year, sometimes more. I also realized that form here on out, it’s going to take a lot more sacrifice and commitment to get my butt back to San Quintin once or twice a year, but that’s a sacrifice and commitment I’m more than willing to make.

The rest of the Mayfair group is on its way to San Vicente right now. We’re doing the full clinic again today, and the part of the group not working in the clinic or doing crafts with the kids at the church will be traveling to the rancho here in town.

I may have explained the ranchos earlier, but I’ll go ahead and explain them again. The people here in the Baja are poor. But the people who live and work on the ranchos are the poorest. The field owner builds a long row or two of concrete rooms, and each family gets a room and some food in exchange for work. They basically don’t own anything, except for the little bit of clothing they wear. When the season is over for whatever crop they’re picking, the migrant workers move to another part of the country to pick another crop.

The group going to the rancho today is just going to spend time with the people there, play with the kids, and bring some games, crafts, sunglasses, snacks and medicine. Those are some of the poorest people I’ve ever met, but some of the happiest kids I’ve ever met live there, too.

We’ll be back in Ensenada tonight, and I’m so excited to have a day and a half to rest between groups. Our next group, which is also out last group, will leave Ensenada pretty early on Saturday morning. We’ll be spending the week in Vicente Guerrero, which is just about 15 minutes from Camalu and 15 minutes from San Quintin.

After the last group, the translators are planning on taking a mini-vacation for a few days over to the Sea of Cortez, which I’m told is the most beautiful place on earth. I can’t wait!

Focus.

This week in Baja was different. Though I spent back-to-back weeks in Camalu, this go-round was so unique compared to other weeks, in scary and amazing ways.

The group this week was a mix of three different churches: Rockvale from Murfreesboro, TN, Southside from Lexington, KY and Central from Sparta, TN. The translator line up was Sara Robb, Matt Moore and myself. You never would have known that this team consisted of people from different cities and states, because they worked so well together, and worked hard, also.

After the long week last week without much of a break between groups, we were pretty exhausted. And just our luck, this group stayed an extra day as well. This meant we got no break at all between groups, which means that I’m more exhausted that I’ve been in a long time. But it’s a wonderful kind of exhausted, the kind where I know I have to rely on God to keep giving me strength to do his work in the Baja.

The group in Camalu this week did a clinic, with a doctor, a pharmacist and an optometrist. I translated with Dr. Ty Webb, a general family doctor, and Sara translated for Dr. Terry Connor, the optometrist. Dr. Janet Webb (wife of Ty) was the pharmacist, and she grabbed me or the trip leader’s wife, who also spoke Spanish, when she needed some help explaining medications.

While the clinic was happening, there was a crew doing benevolence shopping, organizing, packaging and delivering and another crew doing carpentry, cement and roofing.

We knew that the group would be in Camalu until Friday morning and that Matt was leaving Wednesday night to pick up Baja Missions Director Rex Watson and his wife Phyllis in San Diego as they arrived early to prepare for their trip to San Quintin. What we did not know was the scary turn for the worse the trip would take on Wednesday and the impact it would have on the group, and in a small way on me in particular.

Wednesday morning I was woken up by Matt banging on my door at 5:20 a.m. When I stumbled to the handle and opened the door, expecting him to tell me one of my parents died because why else would you violently bang on someone’s door so early, I heard what happened.

Liz, 19 years old and one of the girls on the trip, had been complaining of leg pain for a day or two, and she woke up because her leg was hurting a lot more than usual. She asked the doctor to look at it, because she was loosing feeling in her entire leg and her toes were turning blue and black. His first thought and worst nightmare was that it was a blood clot, so Dr. Webb, Jay (the trip leader), Matt and Liz piled in a van and rushed to San Diego to get Liz to a hospital. If she did in fact have a blood clot and it moved to any vital organ, well you know what could happen.

Matt told me what might be happening to Liz, that he was headed to San Diego and that Sara was throwing up, so I’d be the only translator all day. He then told me to have a good day, shine bright and that this is what I’d been trained for. (We received no training). So that frantic Wednesday, we checked on Sara a few times, got phone call and text updates from the group with Liz whenever we could, and I ran around like a translator with her head cut off helping everyone I could.

I worked in the clinic, but then I’d need to run to the eye doctor, and then to the concrete crew or to talk to the registration table or the preacher about supplies. Luckily Elizabeth, the nurse who was seeing patients in place of Dr. Webb, knew Spanish so I only had to help when the patient’s problem was weird or hard to explain. Julio, the preacher from Erendira, came to VBS that night and saved the day by translating the adult class, while Elizabeth did the kids class and I did the teen class.

Liz is in the hospital in San Diego, and probably will be for a week or more. They found a large clot in her thigh and another clot behind her knee, which is completely terrifying and such a blessing that she made it to the hospital in time.

Jay and Ty got back Thursday night in time for church and to wrap up the trip with the last group devo. They were both obviously really impacted by what happened with Liz, since they were with her in the 3-4 tense hours on the way to the hospital. Ty talked to us in devo about how he was nervous that at any moment, he could turn around and Liz would be gone. He thought about the explaining he’d have to do to her parents about why he couldn’t help her.

Then he told us that he had a change of thought. “We put so much value and worth into this life we have. Now don’t get me wrong, I love this life. But if God came to me right now and said he was ready for me, I’m sorry but I’d be gone. When we got to the hospital and everything calmed down a little bit, I almost wanted to apologize to Liz for helping to save her life, because I know that if something did happen and she did die in the van, she’d be dancing and smiling with Jesus right now,” he said.

Someone else mentioned how impacted they were by the attitudes the people down here have towards material possessions. Spending time with Christian brothers and sisters is so much more important to them than having a nice house or a new car or designer clothes. Living as Americans, we are the rich man that the Bible talks about, and we need to stop putting so much meaning and value into the material things we have. They are going to rust and rot and decay. We need to focus and value things that are eternal.

As you can see, from events that happened and God-given wisdom spoken through some amazing people, I’ve adjusted my focus a little bit. And after 5 weeks, that was very necessary.

I’m at the point in the summer where I’m completely exhausted all the time. Until now, I’ve been able to catch up on sleep between groups, but now I’m relying on God and some caffeine to keep me awake and alert, and neither one of them has let me down yet.

This week is really special, because it’s my group and my church. I’ve worked with San Quintin each spring break and summer for the past three years. I’ve been coming with Mayfair for the last two summers, so I’m really close to this group.

Mayfair sets the standard for mission trips in the Baja. Though numbers are down this year due to a hotel fiasco and they’ve brought around 50 people, they normally bring about 90 people. This year, there are 3 dentists, an optometrist, a pediatrician and maybe another doctor or two. Besides the clinic, the group entertains hundreds of kids during the day and hosts them for a VBS each night. They also do a ladies class, men’s class and teen class. Rex’s wife Phyllis runs the kitchen, and let me tell you, it’s good eats all week in San Quintin. Put that on top of getting to stay at the Old Mill, a beautiful hotel on the ocean, complete with a pier and palm trees, and you see why it’s my favorite place to be It’s safe to say that their group is a well-oiled machine.

The people I’ve grown the closest to and love the most are in San Quintin. While it’s been fun getting to know new kids and preachers’ families, I’m excited to go where I’ll see some familiar faces, and get to give out some pictures from spring break!

Hope everyone reading this is having a great week. Keep praying for the work down in Baja and thanks for your continued support!

Long weeks, short breaks and a little deja vu.

It's Saturday morning, July 2 at 10:05am Pacific time. I am exhausted.

This week we were in Camalu with Northeast, a church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had spent the first three weeks of my summer with groups from Alabama, so it was kind of a culture/language shock being with some northerners! Nothing wrong with it, just a lot different about it.

I have a special place in my heart for Cincinnatians anyway, since my Dad's side family lives there. But I also was excited about this group because it was full of Matt (my friend and boss)'s family. His mom, dad, aunt, uncle and cousin all came to work in Camalu, and work they did.

This group consisted of 19 people, about half of them being youth groupers and the other half adults. They really brought their A-game in the food category, specifically desserts. Mrs. Sue was the baker for the week, and running a baking business on the side in her normal life, she spoiled us like no other group has. She baked chocolate chip cookies, shortbread cookies and no-bake cookies all from scratch, yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing, white cupcakes with homemade buttercream icing, and a cake on the last night. It was incredible.

The ladies on the trip spent most of their week visiting members' homes and cleaning them, as a service to the hardworking women in the church. This group did a lot of carpentry work as well. At the end of the week, they had built (from nothing) a double bed and twin bed (and bough mattresses for both), two huge kitchen shelves/counters, a smaller shelf, two kids tables (for the nursery/classrooms) with 8 chairs, and they stained every piece of furniture to make it look even better.

Juan Jose and Flor, and their kids Samuel, Dencel and Kassandra, currently live in a house on the church property, but they've recently begun construction on their new house across the street. The house they're in now suffered a lot of damage from the floods last February, and they're going to build this new house with more precautions in case flood waters come again. Matt's dad, Clint, and some of the teen boys worked with the Mexican teens and adults to lay the foundation for the new house. It didn't look much different from the beginning of the week to the end of the week, because most of the work was underground. But those men worked hard for 7 or 8 hours each day and did a lot of precision work.

The group started their VBS classes Sunday night, and was in Camalu through Friday morning, one day longer than most groups. I translated the kids class each night, and also Monday-Thursday mornings from 10-12.  Jason, Matt's uncle, did a kids class every night and every morning, for a total of 9 classes. I can't imagine how much work went into preparing that many classes, but the kids loved them! They learned about the fruits of the spirit, studying one each class.

Morning VBS consisted of studying the fruit of the spirit, doing some activities that reinforced the lesson, some kind of craft and then games! Jason and his wife Laura have been going to Impact, a youth rally at Lipscomb University each summer, for a long time. So they brought some of the famous games from Morning Impact all the way down to Mexico. We played sink or float, world's largest paper-rock-scissors game, and the Blender of Fear (formerly known as Impact-o-matic), where you blend a bunch of food together and have a chugging contest.

When you spend lots of time with people in foreign countries, you learn a lot about them. This week, I learned that Matt Moore has the weakest stomach of anyone I've ever met. He was helping to announce the game one day, and when he congratulated the winner (as you can see in the video above), he caught a whiff of the food-made-drink concoction and almost lost it right there in the church building. Luckily he made it outside before he blew chunks. The Blender of Fear was a success, in that the kids loved to compete and that we only had two children get physically sick at the mere smell of it. Well, two children and a field director.

When Baja Missions groups work in Camalu, they stay at the hotel called La Cueva del Pirata, or the Pirate's Cave. I was told by my more experienced translator friend Sara that this hotel wasn't luxurious, but it was cozy. It sits up on a hill, right beside the Pacific Ocean. The views are breathtaking, and I hiked down to the ocean one morning for this view.

Pacific, as seen in Camalu.

Cozy. I can do cozy! Especially after staying at La Palma for two weeks, scoring bed bugs each week. Well, apparently cozy means arriving to find dead rats or body parts of dead rats in your room and killing a nest of black widows before going to sleep. Luckily neither of those were in my room. But a few mornings in, I woke up, put my contacts in and went to go to the bathroom only to find a live frog in our toilet, having arrived their through the pipes. It wasn't green, more like a white/pink color. Pretty gross looking if you ask me. After it hopped up on the toilet seat and hopped around on the wall, Spiderman-style, Siobhan captured it and set it free (PLEASE check the video on Facebook. It's epic). We only encountered one more frog that week, but after talking to the maid, it seemed as though she caught one in our bathroom at least once a day. She suggested that we set a trap for them. Yes, with all the materials we brought to set frog traps.

Oh yeah. Just chilling on the handle.

It should also be noted that the Mexicans challenged the Americans to a soccer game on the beach Sunday afternoon, and the Americans won. The Mexicans got their feelings hurt and blamed the terrain, so they challenged the Americans to another game on a concrete slab that serves as a soccer field and basketball court in town. The Americans won again. So for the finals of the world cup soccer tournament between Cincinnati and Camalu, they played Thursday night at the church. And guess who won? Oh yea, the Americans. Emotions ran high, fans were loud and obnoxious (me probably being the loudest and most obnoxious), and the competition was fierce. But let it be known that American reigns. 

Overall the week was long and exhausting, translating twice as many kids classes and getting in on sanding, staining and concrete work when I could. But the group worked really hard and it was so fun working with them, working for the people they love so much.

So because our week was long, that means our break between groups is short. I'll be headed to meet the next group here in just a few hours. And the deja vu part... I'm headed back to Camalu for another week! Hopefully I won't have as many stories to tell you about the critters we found in our room or fished out of our toilet. I won't have internet again this week, so I'll talk to all of you in about a week!