Juarez Hammer Time! -- Day 2
rob...@robertgidley.com
It seems that saving the world requires an inordinate amount of hammering.
Mon, Feb 15, 2010
You may be wondering how things are for mission groups in Juarez these days. After all, Juarez shows up on the news pretty regularly as being a place where bodies are found in the street on a daily basis.
They haven't been doing too well. A big part of their problem is that they never accounted for the inherent risk in coming to a foreign country where most of the people coming don't speak the language or know the culture.
Fr. Dan's group, on the other hand, has always been risk mitigated. They have a team of Mexicans who work for them, and Fr. Dan works closely with Pastors in the area. He's careful to avoid the "Here's something we're giving to you poor Mexicans" approach and takes the "Let's work together to build something."
As a result, he's well-respected in the community and he knows the community. He also concentrates just on West Juarez (specifically, the suburb Anapura). Most of the violence is in East Juarez, not the sleepy community of Anapura.
6:45 am
I changed the time on my computer. I changed the time on my watch. I did NOT change the time on my cell phone, which I used as an alarm clock. So when Carl turned on the lights at 6:45 and announced there was 15 minutes until breakfast, I thought "No way!" Yes, way. Oops.
8:00 am
We're driving out to the build site, which is on the grounds of the unfinished Cathedral of St. Jose. To get there, we have to drive clean across Anapura.
It used to be that a couple of miles from St. Jose, the road turned to dirt and tar paper shacks sprung up, with mattress coils and pallets for fences. Now, the road is paved (!) and there's electrical poles (the electrical lines used to run across the ground) and even street lights (!!).
And there's more businesses along the road, and more people, and the houses are nicer. In short, it's gotten all touristy, which we think is great!
The 11 years that Fr. Dan has been planting seeds here (over 200 houses built), have slowly but surely paid off. The people here are landowners who go to church and want a nice, quiet community and that's what they're getting.
Ten years ago, you couldn't get the cops to come visit Anapura, and now there's regular patrols. Yowza!
8:30 am
Our goal is to build a Children's Outreach Center in four days. Fr. Dan explains that a group of 10 middle school girls (plus one gramma) built the exact same building in four and a half days. (And it was supposed to be built by a group of 30 from Canada who chickened out at the last minute.)
Can our group of 23 do what a group of middle school girls half our size did? Um, maybe. We can try, anyway.
8:45 am
It is COLD out here. It's about 37 degrees and there is a nasty, nasty wind blowing across the desert. Our build site is on a slight rise, so we're above all the other buildings and straight in the path of the wind.
It's sunny, but with the wind blowing, it's hard to feel any warmth. Even Fr. Dan is whining about the cold (and Fr. Dan doesn't whine about much).
Fortunately, we all brought enough T-shirts and sweatshirts and jackets so that we're warm-ish (or at least not developing frostbite). I'm SO glad I decided to toss in the extra-warm wind-breaker/raincoat.
9:00 am
Step one of building anything here is to measure and cut the lumber. Fr. Dan hands me a "cut sheet" which has a bunch of lengths and how many of each type we need. I holler out what we need and the other folks figure out how to measure it and mark it and give it to the guy (Fred) running the circular saw.
After about half an hour of this, a pile of fresh lumber is replaced with a pile of shorter fresh lumber of different sizes.
9:30 am
Now we divide into two teams: the Green team, lead by Kelly (with a lime green blazer on) and the Old White Guy team (guess which team I'm on?). Each team begins building walls.
In case you ever find yourself needing to build a wall, here's how:
- Get two long pieces of lumber (called "plates" even though they're wood). These are the tops and bottoms of your wall.
- Put a bunch of pieces of wood crosswise between the plates and nail them to the plates.
- Every once in a while, you'll need a window and that's more complicated, because it involves extra pieces of wood all around.
And everything needs to be hammered together. With three nails where each piece of wood connects to each other piece of wood (approximately 10,000 by 14 million nails).
10:00 am
Every year, we're warned that the bathrooms on the build site can be nasty. "Evil, festering open pits of yuckiness and smell!" And every year, they turn out to be actually quite nice. One year, we even dug the hole for our own outhouse, went to Outhouses-R-Us to buy the building, and installed it.
This year, it's a nice, indoor bathroom that's quite pleasant. But I discover there's one hitch: if you pull the door shut, you can't open it again, because it's locked. If you are inside, you need a key to get out.
Fortunately, there's an opening in the upper left part of the door and the bathroom has a mop in it. You reach through the opening and use the mop handle to push the latch on the outside to get out.
So, not so much "festering" as "are you smarter than a Mexican bathroom?"
11:00 am
We are still building walls for this place. Apparently, it is a multi-dimensional house because it features 12 walls (not counting the roof, which adds another dimension, so apparently, the final building will be in 13-dimensional space).
12:05 pm
We break for lunch! And we all head inside the current Children's Outreach Center, which is about the size of a Gateway House. In fact, this IS a Gateway House--the first one they ever built. It has a large pillar supporting the roof because the original design was a teensy bit defective and the roof beams sagged, so they had to go back and add a pillar to keep the roof from meeting the floor.
But the design was modified about House #8 and the other 192 or so houses have all turned out fine.
Anyway, Fr. Dan explains that the kids are offered classes in Art, Music, English (learning to speak), and Computers. Sure enough, the room we're eating lunch in has a bunch of 90's computers in it, complete with 3.5" disk drives and big CRT monitors.
Lunch is NOT Magali burritos (she's Fr. Zuniga's wife, and he's the priest of the church where we're staying). Every year, she's made us burritos that are tiny, but packed full of filling yummy stuff.
Instead, we get ham and cheese sandwhiches on white or wheat bread. They're filling (heck at this point, fried worms would be pretty tasty), but not the same.
Fr. Dan informs us that we are about even with the middle school girls (and the gramma, who was probably a construction foreman, we figure). Or they were a little ahead...
12:20 pm
A bunch of us pile into one of the vans and head to the local store for the traditional "buying and consuming of amazing Mexican sweet stuff" (I'm not there just for the sweet stuff--I need to get some more batteries for my camera).
Three of the Mexican workmen go with us (Hetor, Aner, and Luis-Daniel) and they notice that I'm wearing my chili pepper earring, which they think is totally awesome (I got it at the Tabasco factory).
Then they ask (courtesy of Kelly, who actually speaks Spanish) if I remember dancing at the nightclub a couple of years ago (back in '07), because THEY sure remember it, and they give me big thumbs up and tell me "You are Crazy!" but in a nice way.
[Back in '07, we went to a Mexican nightclub, and the MC liked to call on Gringos to come up on stage so he could make fun of them by having them do goofy things. He didn't count on me being able to do the goofy things better than he did. Apparently, it also made an impression on the locals.]
1:00 pm
The wind has finally died down, although it's still chilly. But if you stand in the relentless sunshine (even with my sunglasses on I'm squinting), it's not too bad. We begin to shed our jackets.
1:50 pm
Now we start building walls that have doors in them for our multi-dimensional building. There's a different procedure for building walls that have doors in them:
a. Put the door on the floor
b. Build the wall around it
c. Argue about how to make the door fit, decide to ask Fr. Dan, can't find him because he's wandered off to talk on his cell phone.
2:20 pm
I discover a new tool! It's called the "cat's paw" and you use it when you've pounded nails into the wrong board and done a dang fine job of nailing them in. Yup, I managed to nail a big ol' board into another big ol' board so that they'd be forever joined. And those big ol' boards were in the wrong place.
A cat's paw is like a tiny crowbar. You hit it with a hammer, sometimes missing and hitting yourself, or the board, or the ground and eventually, you get enough of a purchase on the nail to wrench it out.
But you definitely learn to triple-check before you pound in a nail.
3:05 pm
Fr. Zuniga stops by the build site and he's very impressed with the wall sections. He's pretty much the only Anglican priest in the Juarez area, so he visits a bunch of different churches and he's also the one responsible for starting the classes for kids.
So, this Outreach Center will be his baby, and whatever benefit comes from it will be a direct result of his efforts. So we're pretty happy that he's happy!
3:30 pm
There's less and less stuff to do. We could put together our 12 wall sections, but they're heavy and we're tired and putting beams on wall sections involves standing on ladders and there's a good chance that we'd manage to drop one of those sections on top of ourselves. So Fr. Dan decides to do that tomorrow.
But we're running out of things to do. Eventually, we're all standing around watching Kevin and Simon hammer things (they've been hammering all day putting together the roof beams).
4:07 pm
On our way back to the compound, we encounter a checkpoint! The Army is pretty eager to make sure that things stay peaceful in this part of Juarez and they also want to stop any bad guys from smuggling bad stuff into town.
So, they're pulling over all vans and SUVs that look like they could be smuggling something. And that includes us!
They're polite about it and we don't feel threatened, but they sure pat down all the van seats to make sure we're not hiding anything. (And boy, am I glad we unloaded all the chicken wire from the back of the van--THAT would have been suspicous!)
After the check the van, they thank us, and we climb back in and wave at them as we drive away.
4:30 pm
We stop for ice cream. Fr. Dan leads us to a Mexican supermarket and everybody wanders inside and gawks at the strange and bewildering assortment of ice cream, chips, and sweet goods that are available. (When you get "hot" potato chips in Juarez, they are HOT!) It's a lot like any supermarket you'd find in the US, with a bakery department, cookie department, ice cream section and aisles full of people shopping after work.
I wander off by myself to buy the strangest thing I can find. This is a package of something called "Vuala con sorpresa" which features a small yellow birdlike creature on the front wearing three hats and the legend "Funki Punky" emblazoned near him.
The actual product itself bears little to no resemblance to the packaging. It's a small croissant with chocolate filling. But it also comes with a bookmark that has a devil's head on it.
I also buy an popsicle that's coconut ice cream covered with pineapple sherbert, because we did stop for ice cream and I feel like I should buy some.
One of the great things about being an older white guy with lots of gray hair and a goofy look is that strangers tend to treat me like their slightly deranged, but beloved grandfather.
Once again this comes in handy, as it quickly becomes apparent to the sales lady from my broken Spanish ("Good Morning! How am I?") that I'm a clueless gringo. So she undercharges me (it should have been slightly more than $2, but she only charges me two bucks for everything). I smile a lot and say "Gracias!" enthusiastically.
[Cool Juarez job: there's guys in the parking lot with whistles, who help drivers when they back out and drive away. It's pretty slick and probably keeps accidents to a minimum.]
5:05 pm
We finally make it back to the compound where everybody heads for the showers, or grabs a book and relaxes or (if they are young and haven't used up 110% of their energy slamming hammers into nails today) has a spirited game of soccer with the local kids.
7:00 pm
After a yummy dinner of tacos with a hot sauce that burns you down to your toes, we head for "debriefing." Everybody talks about their worst moments today (hammering came up a lot, along with the cold and bitter wind), their best moments (wonder that this group of strangers got so much done in so little time).
Then we stop and talk about any "God Moments" that people had. (My favorite one ever is from last year, where Fr. Pete said "I met Jesus in the desert" referring to the cutest 5-year old boy named Jesus that hung around the build.)
Folks who are new to Juarez and Anapura tend to be struck by how poor people are, particularly compared to how we live in the US. This is an interesting contrast to how I now see Anapura--they've come a long way and are doing great!
Anyway, that brings us to the end of the day of endless hammering (seriously, all day long, hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, hammering all over this land). Tomorrow should be the cool part where we take an empty slab, put up 12 walls and turn it into something that looks like a building!
(Everybody is fine. About the worst injury all day was a couple of hammers wielded by Will hit a couple of thumbs not belonging to Will, but nobody was upset. All limbs and people accounted for.)
Robert
Juarez Hammer Time!