Hot Times in Juarez Trip Log--Day 5: Live long and prosper
rob...@robertgidley.com
Thurs, Feb 19, 2009
6:00 am
I didn't think it was possible to sleep better than I did on Tuesday night, but Wednesday night was an even better sleep experience. I slept long and hard and was ready to wake up at 6:00 am.
Today is our last day working on the house and we think we'll be done about noon. Then we'll have a "dedication," which is where a local pastor will show up and say something in Spanish and we'll say something in English and we'll be done.
That's the plan, anyway.
7:07 am
Fr. Dan, who showed up five minutes late, says "We won't surrend our schedule to stragglers," and declines to wait for anybody who is later than he is.
As it turns out, Fr. Dan didn't spent the night in El Paso (hence his somewhat sour mood). The lady that he took to the Emergency Room responded well to IV treatment and they released her after an hour or two (and the wait to cross the bridge into the US wasn't very long and the wait at the ER wasn't very long).
Between getting in about 1:00 am and not sleeping in his own bed (with his own wife), Fr. Dan wasn't in the mood to surrender to any stinking stragglers.
Also, an update on what the breakfast cereal "Choco bolitas" translates as (breathlessly delivered by Fr. Jim): it means "chocolate baby balls." So, if you're looking for the authentic Mexican experience, be sure to ask for chocolate baby balls!
8:00 am
Both vans are loaded and we head out to the build site. Our van, driven by Guinea Pig Ed (who likes to drive very fast over the speed bumps), follows Fr. Dan and the other van follows us. After a few minutes, we notice that the other van isn't doing such a good job of following us through the streets of Juarez.
Fortunately, thanks to the power of cell phones, they are able to call Fr. Dan and tell him that they are having car problems (we are in a rented van, so we don't have no stinkin' car problems). He asks us if we remember how to get to the job site, and we ponder the subject for a while. We've been going there for three days, but was anybody paying attention?
"Go straight, turn left and you'll get there," he says. Well, shoot, we're pretty sure we can handle that!
8:15 am
The nice part about making our own way out to the job site is being able to stop and take pictures. We stop at "our" rectory and get a few shots from the street (we didn't knock on the door and say, "Hi! We built your house, can we come in?" although I thought about it).
Also, we get some good photos of The Mound of Bikes. For reasons that seem impenetrable, there is a large mound of bicycles at a business next to the road. The stack is thirty or forty bikes high and there's probably at least a hundred bikes in it.
We're having a hard time imagining what the purpose of The Mound is. If it's a used bike shop, how do you get to a bike in the middle? Same thing if you're selling used bike parts. Still, it must make sense to somebody, and we're all quite enchanted with The Mound and we finally have an opportunity to stop and get some proper pictures of it. When the owner starts looking suspicously at the van full of gringos, we wave and drive off.
He'll probably have an interesting conversation with his wife tonight, "This van packed full of gringos, looking pretty grungy, pulled over and took a picture of the store, waved and drove off. Maybe it was a mental hospital field trip?"
8:30 am
We manage to drive straight and turn left and arrive at our work site. Jose is already there, along with his son, Aner. He's the leader of our work crew and he looks like he is in his 60's (although he's probably stronger than most people in their 30's). He's been working with Fr. Dan for many years and knows how to build things.
He's been working on learning English better, so that he can come visit Washington and give a few sermons and raise a few bucks.
Ed, being the caring concerned Servant that he is, helps him:
Ed: "Good afternoon, Jose"
Jose: "I may be late, but I'm not tired."
Oh, and the car trouble was easily solved with a quick jump and the other crew made it to their site in good time.
9:00 am
Stucco: This is essentially cement that's applied to the outside of the house (over the R-B chicken wire). It's about the consistency of thick oatmeal and is an unappetizing greenish brown color.
"But wait," you may say, "Something the consistency of oatmeal won't stick to a wall!" You're right. Stucco doesn't stick to the side of the house. As soon as you put it on, it falls back off.
"I HATE STUCCO!" declares Karin after about five minutes, apparently finding that watching stucco fall off the wall isn't a lot of laughs. Fr. Jim dives right in and starts slapping stucco up like he's done it before (this is his fifth year, so he has).
My favorite part of stucco is that you get to use a "hod," which is a 12" square flat piece (made from aluminum) with a handle in the middle (on the bottom). You plop stucco on top and then use a trowel to ladle the stucco onto the side of the house.
Hod is one of those words that describes a very particular piece of equipment and nobody ever knows what it's called. Today I get to use it a lot.
So the hods are broken out, and the hods are loaded up with stucco and soon hod loads are spread on the side of the house and are falling off.
10:00 am
All week there's been a handful of neighbor kids hanging around (including Carlos). They've been calling me "abolita," which for a while I thought meant "Give me a soccer ball."
Today I find out that "abolita" means "grandfather." Little snots.
They're also fascinated by my earrings. I brought enough to wear a different one every day. They were quite taken with the rubber chicken, and the joker, and today I wore one made by Suquamish Indians, so I was trying to explain to them that it was made by Indians, but not from India. Did I succeed? Quien sabe.
10:15 am
Ed is inside finishing up the electrical work (screwing in light switches and sockets). I ask him how long he thinks it will take. He replies, "About five minutes longer than the stucco takes."
11:00 am
Stucco is probably the physically hardest part of building the house--way harder than hammering (even hammering R-B chicken wire), harder than lugging walls around, and harder than cutting insulation.
The stucco is mixed in a gas-powered cement mixer (yay!) and then poured into a wheelbarrow, which has to be wheeled across sand (ugh!) over to where people with hods are standing by.
Once the hods are loaded with stucco, as only hods can be loaded, you then fling it up against the wall and try to smooth it into place. After about ten minutes of hod holding and flinging, your shoulders are killing you and you begin to think that maybe you'll never be able to use a mouse again.
Fortunately, Kristen and Annika are teenage soccer playing girls who do 100 push-ups a day and they both take to stucco like ducks to water (unlike their Mom, but sometimes hod skills skip generations).
So I find that keeping their hods supplied with stucco is a profitable way to spend my time, without risking injury to my mousing skills.
11:50 am
The first day of work, I remember thinking "Wow! I'm tired, it must be lunch, right?" only to find out that it was only 10:05.
Today I'm thinking that it must be only about 10:05 and find out that it's 11:50 am (I put my cell phone in the van, because dripping stucco on it doesn't seem like a good idea). Already?
12:30 pm
The stucco is finished (!), but we have some extra stucco in the wheelbarrow. What to do with it (because you can't unmix stucco once it's mixed)? Build a stoop for the front door!
Some boards are scrounged and arranged in a square frame, and some gravel is added to the stucco and a nice front step is poured.
Jose finds a bunch of little rocks and presses them into the cement to spell out "M. de D." (Fr. Dan's ministry is called "Manos de Deos" which means "Hands of God" in English). He gets one of the cute little girls who will be
living in the house to press her hands into the cement. Then he gets Annika to press her hands into the cement.
It's pretty cool.
12:36 pm
Ed finishes up our electrical work (by shoving bare wires into an extension cord) and MarKay finishes touching up the Raspberry Mouse window trim (some of which inevitably got stucco on it).
We are finished!
We get word that the other house, with a crew of 17 people (to our 13 people) is still trying to finish up. As good Christian people, we look into our hearts and do the "Booya! We rock!" dance.
1:05 pm
We are ready to eat!
Petra, the lady of the house (the mother of the woman who will live in the house with her four kids), has prepared for us a Mexican feast the likes of which are seldom seen by gringos.
Here's the menu:
- Chicken made with adobo (a kind of not-too-spicy chile pepper that makes your mouth turn bright red and which sends everybody back for seconds)
- Beans with hot dogs (can't tell you much about them, as I was busy filling up on adobo chicken)
- Rice (every meal here has been accompanied by a kind of red-tinged rice; it's sort of like eating in Hawaii, except that Hawaiian rice is white)
- Homemade corn tortillas (and when I say "homemade," I mean, "starting with the grains of corn, grinding them into flour, and then making the tortillas over a wood stove and delivering them to the table")
- Homemade flour tortillas (Fr. Dan says, "Homemade tortillas are like homemade bread--you haven't eaten tortillas until you've had homemade ones")
- An avocado spread that was a little spicy and you spread it on the tortillas and was really yummy
- Jamaica flower water (pronounced like "ha-my-kah") which is a lightly sweetened drink made from hand-picked Jamaica flowers (of course) and brewed up like tea
- A drink called "cucumber water," which was said to be very refreshing, but I was too busy drinking the Jamaica flower water to find out
- A homemade cake (like Petra would use a mix?) decorated with (in Spanish) "A thousand thanks, God bless you)
I asked Petra (through Ed) if she had grown the sugar cane to make the sugar in the cake frosting, but it turned out she hadn't. I think that was about the only part of the meal she hadn't created from scratch.
1:30 pm
We are all stuffed as full of good food as you can possible be, and everybody's lips are red from the chicken and blue from the icing. Smiles couldn't be bigger.
Fr. Zuniga (who runs the church where we stay) shows up and drinks some cucumber water while we continue to stuff a few more crumbs in our mouths.
Finally, we are ready to begin the house blessing. Various members of our group tell Petra how we feel about building a house for her (pretty dang good) and she talks about how she feels (ditto) and Jose gives an impassioned speech about how rich in spirit the Americans are, and how we have a lot of heart and the gifts of the heart we give to Petra are received by the heart and they enrich all of us (only it sounded even better in Spanish).
1:40 pm
Fr. Zuniga brought an aspergellum (a rod with a small ball full of holes at the end used to spread holy water). I assumed (along with everybody else), he'd be sprinkling a few drops in each corner of the room.
He picks up his aspergellum, I turn around and get a face full of vigorously applied holy water (which is on the surprising side). At first, I thought it was some kind of practical joke, but he moves on to the next person and they get a faceful and pretty soon everybody is laughing and feeling very blessed.
I think that any house that starts out with that much laughter in it, will be a good house to live in.
We present the family with a bible we all signed and then the youngest member of our crew (Ed's son Kyle) gives the keys to the family. Kyle is an interesting person, and is clearly destined to great geekdom.
Ed asks him to say something appropriate, we all hold our breath and Kyle says, "Live long and prosper," which is bizarrely appropriate.
We all pile into the van and wave goodbye to our house and drive off (which feels really weird).
3:51 pm
Since we're the first folks back to the mission center (the other crew is still working on finishing up their house because Our Crew Rocks!), I can take a shower and get some time to relax.
I grab my Sci-Fi book and head outside to the sunshine, only to find MarKay sitting there reading "Atlas Shrugged," which makes reading just about anything else feel cheap and tawdry.
Still, it's sunny and I don't feel that cheap and tawdry.
7:45 pm
Dinner consists of steaks cooked on a newly-assembled BBQ. Since Fr. Dan lives in Texas, he knows how to BBQ (it's a requirement of Texan citizenship) and so he cooks up 40 steaks to serve to all of us, plus our work crew, who bring their wives and children with them.
I'm sitting at the table with the young folks and their parents and the conversation turns to the "due diligence" they did before bringing their kids to the "Most Dangerous City in the World."
The Hype and the Reality are very, very different. Harrison, one of the teenagers, aptly summed it up: "The most dangerous thing on this trip was riding in the van with Ed."
Tomorrow: Homeward bound
Robert
Hot times in Juarez Trip