Amor Por Juarez

After being here in Juarez a week now, a question I keep thinking about is what it really means to be a missionary. Being part of YWAM and doing a short term trip to Mexico, not necessarily what I consider being a missionary. But again and again I will hear my teammates calling themselves missionaries, talking about how we are living like missionaries, or more often how we aren’t living like missionaries. It’s a funny conversation that spins around and around.

Thinking about it more, I suppose we are missionaries in a sense. The way I like to define it is living with people, doing life with them, building relationships, working in their community alongside them, seeing needs and filling them, all to point them to God. In some ways I think it’s fairly natural to be a missionary, by this definition, and often we try too hard or expect that being a missionary is unnatural. Challenging, definitely, but not necessarily unnatural. 

Here in Juarez we are living on the YWAM base in a small neighborhood a little ways outside of the city. We are serving at the children’s home, Rancho Los Amigos, which is on the base, at a soup kitchen a few blocks down the road, and on miscellaneous grounds and maintenance projects around the base.

This last week I was mainly working at the soup kitchen, Commodore. We helped clean the dining area to prepare for lunch, played with the kids as their parents cooked, ate lunch and talked with the people there, and helped do dishes after. Commodore was a community affair. It was fun to see all the different people from around the community come together to prepare the meal and serve it and eat together. We were able to play a small part in that with them, lightening the load for the people who normally cleaned and did dishes, and showing love to the kids who came. We also got to practice our Spanish a lot, as most of the people didn’t speak any English.

Our normal schedule got quite interrupted last Thursday due to rain. There were flash flood warnings all throughout Juarez, and with the roads being sand the whole neighborhood was torn apart. We still went to Commodore, but spent most of the morning putting buckets under leaks in the roof and mopping up rain water, and hardly anyone was able to come. Also that day one of the girls on our team got the flu from the water, another girl stepped on a piece of glass that cut through her foot, and one of our trucks got stuck in the road that turned into a muddy, sewage river. Definitely an eventful day. Later when talking to some of the women at Commodore they said that it hadn’t rained like that in over 40 years. There is now damage all over the city because it is not developed enough to manage heavy rains, it is really awful.

Seeing the community gather together during the flooding though was encouraging to see. They might not have a lot of money, but relationally the people here are rich. Another example of this was today a few of us had the opportunity to help a family move. So many people from the neighborhood were there helping clean, pick up trash, and move furniture. It wasn’t really fun work, but it was fun to be there and help and watch the people interact and be there for each other.

Many times since I’ve been here I have wished we were more integrated into the community, since we are on the base most of the time, but moments when I can be out in the neighborhood I cherish. It is odd that we are only going to be here another two weeks, but I will do my best to make the most of this time.