One week before my brief return

I'll be training an intern to shoot photos and put together the nightly slideshow tomorrow(Monday), and then shooting video the rest of the week.

I've been feeling somewhat useless — actually a rather common feeling among intern-level staff members from what I've seen in my several years with Mission Discovery. We all want to feel as though we are required for something, that if we weren't there to take care of things, they would fall apart. This summer I've been filling a lot of holes. I've been helping with sound when I'm needed, or taking photos when I'm needed, or cutting linoleum, or making sandwiches, etc., etc. I haven't really had the specific job of shooting and editing video like I thought I was going to have, and as a result I've felt somewhat unneeded. It's a useless and fairly illogical feeling, but unfortunately that doesn't stop it being a feeling. Hopefully shooting video this week will cure me.

Here are a couple photos I took last week.

The Insulation Prayer

No photos for this post, just a few thoughts.

Tonight at the nightly service, the praise and worship leader led everyone in a song he had written about a week ago. Before he started the song, he told the story about how he had come to write the song. The story went something like this...

The worship leader had come down to Mexico a couple weeks earlier to check out the situation in Mexico for his church(the crackdown on the drug cartels has some parents of campers worried). On his flight back he was feeling concern for the kids he had met in Mexico while he was down there. He felt bad that he had air conditioning and food and luxuries, and felt like he should really be doing more for the poor in Mexico. But then, "God moved in him" and he realized God was taking care of the Mexican families, and he didn't need to feel guilty for the American blessings he had. He used the verse from the Bible telling us how we shouldn't worry because God takes care of even birds and plants to back this up. After the song, which implored God to help us remember that he is in control, he led the congregation in a prayer where he asked that God help the campers not to feel guilty when the work day in the colonia is over and they get back on their air conditioned vans and head back to America.

We Americans want our air conditioning. We want our smooth roads, our cheap clothes and our clean water. We don't want to see the poverty everywhere around us. We don't want to face that problem because we can hear God calling out to us through it, crying for us to abandon our own desires and be fulfilled in his. But sometimes seeing the poverty is inevitable, so we come up with insulation: Reasons and ways of thinking that let us explain away the poverty and keep our riches for ourselves.

God's real call is not to insulate ourselves with explanations so we don't feel guilty knowing we're withholding so much of our wealth from the poor in the world. God's real call is for us to let go of the material things that cause our guilt and take part in his economy of unconditional love.

Back to Mexico

We finished up our week in South Dakota with a cookout for the campers and the families they built for. Marletta, our contact in Rapid City who is connected to the Native American culture in the area, explained to us how white kids helping out Native Americans does a lot to bridge the rift that's been created by hundreds of years of racism. The plight of the Native American people is still bad — two of the women we built for had husbands who had been beaten and abused by police barely 50 years ago. Normally when white suburban Americans think about Native Americans they think that whole ordeal happened forever ago and is gone, and now the natives live tax-free on their reservations, making money off of casinos. The truth is in places like Rapid City, racism is still an overt, powerful force.

Michael and I flew back to McAllen on Sunday, just in time for this new week to start. I'm still shooting photos. This week we're in a Colonia Mission Discovery has never worked in before. It's also got a large population of scorpions and rattle snakes, which should make for at least a cautious, if not exciting week. Here are a few photos I took today that I like.





If anyone out there reading my blog wants more on a specific topic or has any questions, please leave a comment and I will try to reply with a blog posting.

Veronica and Chloe

In the mornings about a third of the campers here in South Dakota head over to a community center for children where they hang out with kids from the community, play games with them, and basically just show them some love. Today was the first work day and the first day for hanging out at the community center. Two sisters — Veronica (9 years old) and Chloe (8) instantly loved my camera. I showed them how to take photos and we talked for a while. Veronica drew a picture of me, and both of them said they would be looking for me tomorrow. It's pretty cool to be able to communicate with the people I'm taking pictures of and the people we're building for. In Mexico I barely manage to communicate essential things like where people are or what's going on. Here I can talk and hang out with the kids and the people we're building for, and it's pretty awesome.


Veronica

Chloe

Veronica's drawing of me

Dinosaur Park

Rapid City has a dinosaur park, with giant dinosaur statues roaming the hillside. Michael and I, and this week's worship leader Drew Gibbs, ventured to the top to watch the sun set from the feet of a brontosaurus.




This is the view of Rapid City from the dinosaur park. I actually combined two images, one exposed to bring out the sun and sky, and the other exposed to bring out the city. On the raw exposure for the sky, the city is too dark to see, and on the raw exposure for the city, the sky is completely blown out. Combined, everything looks awesome.

The Badlands

Update: we left South Texas on Wednesday and traveled to South Dakota, where we'll be having one week of projects.


Michael and I went to the Badlands on Friday.


We drove through Robert's Prairie Dog Town, a huge field of prairie dog communities, with lookouts everywhere.


As we were driving along, we saw three or four buffalo along the top of a ridge. We stopped to watch them, and as we waited, more and more kept showing up over the ridge until there were around 30 or 40 buffalo on the side of the hill.


This buffalo is not dead, he is rolling in some dirt.


This guy was right by the side of the road, so I got to snap some shots from very close-up.

We have everything worked out and pretty much ready to roll for when the church groups get here Sunday. Today we're picking up the musician who will lead worship. We also still need to buy some food and supplies(paint, wood, nails).

We'll be working on three homes in the north rapid area. All three are homes for native American families who are caught between the reservation and city and not really accepted by either culture. We'll be painting, repairing porches, patching roof leaks and a few other odd jobs like replacing broken windows.

Friday

Friday is the last day of work each week in the colonia. Every group has some kind of dedication ceremony with the family they the house for. Dedication ceremonies aren't the most fun thing to shoot for me, because I have to intrude on the group and Mexican family's intensely personal and emotional moment with my camera click. Here are some photos of the foot-washing(most groups wash the feet of the family they built the house for, as a form of non-verbal explanation of their motives), and some more photos from VBS.




These were taken in the family's new house. The house was built for a man and his wife, who have children and grandchildren. The group who built the house prayed with the family, washed their feet and sang hymns.












This last one is a close-up of Josh Clancy, one of the interns. I am in the reflection from his right lens, and Macon, one of the Mission Discovery staff members, is in the reflection from the other.

The Colonia Through A Camera

One of the Mexican families we are building a house for this week.



A street in the Colonia, and some kids hanging out across from Pastor Sobrevilla's church, the church we're operating out of this week.


One of the two brothers I took pictures of the other day. He loves my camera, and always has me take a picture and show it to him whenever he sees me.





Colonia kids. Most of these kids attended the VBS we hold in the church during the week. Two of our interns supervise, but it's up to the individual groups that come down to put together the content for VBS.



Some more shots from around the colonia. Pictures cannot communicate accurately how uncomfortable some of the more devastated areas make you feel. But the colonias are not without their own beauty.


This tree is growing in the heavily-fenced yard of a man who lives across from the church. Pastor Sobrevilla's wife told us yesterday he is not a very happy man, and he does not like the presence of the church in the colonia. This man, along with every one of us, is our own colonia: filled with poverty, starvation, dust and trash, but also filled with an unexplainable beauty.


This one is for my friends from Fellowship Bible Church in Arkansas, who discovered my blog while searching for Camp Cone before they came down to build.


I am doing very well, with the exception of my left ear. A wave hit my ear while we were at the ocean the day before the first campers arrived, and everything has been very muted ever since. I have tried every remedy known, and today I am heading to a clinic in Weslaco, Texas, to have my ear examined. That's all for now.

First Contact

Today everything got busy and it's not going to slow down until the summer is over. On Friday we went into the Colonia where we'll be building houses this week, and met some of the families who will be receiving a new home.
The kids in the colonias are always the most willing to be photographed. Here are pictures of a couple brothers who were playing on tricycles while we counted the lumber for their house, as well as a picture of one of the main intersections in this week's colonia.