After 2 hours of hiking, it is semi-dark and we are just barley beginning to see the lights of Mixtla, our destination for the evening. It is January 2010 and I and six others have been staying with the people of the mountains in there homes for over two weeks. Our base home is the house of a single mother and her four sons. The oldest son, age 16, is married, and him and his 15-year-old wife and their 2-year-old son live with his mom too. The time we have spent there, we have stayed up into the long hours of the night chatting, laughing, and making tortillas. The family has electricity, but all the cooking is done over a wood fire, and running water is unheard of. Because of this and the cold, most of us have only bathed once in the week and a half that we have been there. Three days ago we hiked up to another village, Tlaxticuapa to plant gardens, apply medicine to children with a skin disease, and just be with our brothers and sisters in Christ there.
Now it is three days later and we are returning back to Mixtla for another few days there until our two weeks there will be up. We return late, but are greeted warmly by the entire family, and a hot meal of tortillas and black beans are waiting. We eat quickly, say goodnight, and us girls pass into the room were the four us shared a bed, changed without saying much, then climbed into bed, ready for a night’s rest. I pull the blankets up tight and smell something wonderful. Cleanness. In the little time we had been gone, the 15-year-old mother took the time to hand wash blankets in the cold so that we, dirty unbathed, sweat smelling girls, could have clean bedding the few more days we were going to be there.
I washed blankets this past week, and in doing so, I thought of her. I began to have a new appreciation for her and what she humbly did that week a year and a half ago that spoke volumes to my heart. The time that we were there we saw new people come to Christ, children receive medicine they so desperately needed, vegetable gardens to give fresh produce to a people who hardly ever have it, and hearts encouraged. We were told to take pictures, write reports, and make presentations about what we had done those two weeks. But this past week as I thought and prayed for my friend, I found myself asking God to change my heart to be like hers. To make me faithful with what I have been given, to welcome people into my home, and to love others and Him the way she does. And I ask myself, when God watched that week the going-ons of small village in the mountains of Mexico, who delighted His heart?
{A note on the pictures from this post: Some are from the 3-years Rafa worked in the mountains, as he spent a lot of time in the villages mentioned above as well. Some are from the few months I went there every week, and some are from when I went back for a visit this past May when the group from Augusta was there. All of them were taken in the areas mentioned in above post, with the exception of the last one, which is from today here at home.}
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