The living condition for the families we were building for are pretty bad, this one particular in the picture. The whole yard was filled with garbage, lots of broken car parts, the soil is probably contaminated with engine oil and car's grease, broken glass everywhere. In canada here, we talked about safety hazard everywhere and make such a big deal out of it. If people see broken glass or sharp rocks in the park, they'll probably try to sue someone and make a profit out of it. But in Mexico, this is where the people live, this is what they see when they walk out their house, that's where they play everyday. And you can see there's a big hole in the ground. It seems like people are burning garbage in there or something, or there's a broken pipe in there. It was constantly releasing toxic smoke when we were building. We felt sick just building a house beside it for a few hours, imagine the family living right beside it. That hole was less than a foot away from their front door.
On Wednesday night, God led us into this Chinese restaurant. After two nights of Tacos and one night of Pizza, we wanted to eat some Chinese food. When we went in the restaurant, we saw all the waitress are Mexican. Then we notice there is a young girl behind the counter who looked like a Chinese. So we ask her, "Do you speak Chinese?" Then she shoke her head. Okay, so we just sat down at one of the table. The menu was also in Spanish, no Chinese or English. How are we going to order? We were worried. Our teammate, Sam, (the one on the right hand side of the photo) decided to peek in the kitchen and he was brave enough to go in there and called a Chinese cook out. We not just got to eat some good Chinese food that night, we also had a long talk with this Chinese cook about their life in Mexico.
Most of the Chinese who immigrated to Tijuana work in a Chinese restaurant. They work long hours just like cooks in other places, from early in the morning till late at night. They don't really have a social life outside of work, or they don't have time for it. To some people, that's called no life, and that's very sad. From talking to him, we can feel their loneliness. They probably haven't talk to any Chinese visitors for a long time. God has put a burden in our heart to care about these Chinese people and we will certainly follow up with them by mail.
God answered our prayer right away the next day. We have a chance to play with the local Mexican, not just the family we were building for, even the neighbours came. Most of them were girls. We invited them to our worksite to build house with us. We played frisbee with them. The best thing is, we showed them how to make the gospel bracelet. Its amazing when we see God is listening to our prayer and that really build up our faith.
Partnering with Mexico Caravan Ministries...
Quote from their website. "Mexico Caravan Ministries is a missions mobilization ministry. Our primary objective is the revelation of God's heart for the world, the presentation of His plan for worldwide missions and the motivation of His people to take part in His global plan." MCM helped us find the families to build for, get the building material, offered us the expertise to finish the job, but most importantly challenged us to feel God's heart. Each morning before we went out and built the houses, we were given a message from the MCM staff or guest speaker. They made us aware of the unreached people in the world, especially the 10/40 window, as well as prepared us spiritually to submit to God. On the shirts they designed for the ministries, there are three logos. 1. Eyes lifted - get our eyes off ourselves, and feel Gods passion and compassion. 2. Open hand - let go of things in our life (relationship, money, dream, etc), so we can receive things from God. 3. Bend knees - to be obedience to God and follow him. I think their ministries is very powerful and really triggered us to think about where we take part in God's plan.
I'm going to walk you guys through our trip in the future posts.
