Hard Work, Good Days

March 27, 2012

Chacacal, Chiapas, Mexico

A wonderful day, full of hard work. We are exhausted, except for Michael C. who does not seem to get tired. 

We are stuffed. This community has gone out of its way to provide food for us. Mostly black beans, rice, and noodles. Sometimes we have eggs.

Yesterday, we cultivated and terraced two gardens. We even got to plant one garden.

Chacacal is a small village with 79 kids and we don’t know how many adults. (Two of the young men form the church not only counted all the kids, but wrote down their names.) Like most of Chiapas, it is a mountain community, so everything is on the side of the hill.

Building terraces is the only way they are able to grow gardens. One of the things I have noticed in the village is the lack of vegetables. In San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the city, one of my favorite places to visit is the farmers market. You can buy almost any fruit or vegetable. I often go before breakfast and by some bananas and a mango or papaya. In Chacacal, we only get a few slices of potato or carrots in soup, never any fresh fruit.

The seminary students are trying to help the village women recover their history of growing vegetables for their family, thus the gardens. They are teaching both women from the church and from the community how to grow small gardens for their families.

Today, we worked much harder. We were digging the footers for the support posts for Pastor Mario’s new house. These had to be 80 centimeters (about 30 inches) deep and 80 centimeters square.  Mario has eight children and several brothers all living with his parents. Pastor Mario is 38 years old. (You can see him on the YouTube video explaining the new fish pond.) He really needs a new house. It took us all day to dig these ten holes. Digging around the rocks slowed the process to a crawl.

Others in our group helped lay adobe block.

We were all relieved when the rain came at about 3:30 p.m.

We had a late lunch, about the same time as the rain started. They killed a bull and prepared a stew with the beef ribs. This was, of course, accompanied by tortillas and Koolaid.

Then, two seminary students arrived with the leftovers from the bread that they sell to raise money for the students. The whole community shared this bread. Then we had dinner at 8:30 p.m. I am so stuffed.

Oh, we also had a time of teaching with about 50 children from the community. Rich Blanchette taught the lesson. The seminary students organized the activities. The rain complicated everything. Some of the adolescent boys colored pictures for more than two hours.

After dinner, we took a bath in the river, and if I finish this post, I will head to bed (the last one).

Tomorrow, more digging, more laying block, and a community basketball game. God is good. 

Hopefully we will get caught up with the blog by tomorrow.