Yucatan Mission Trip

Wow, my first blog post ever. A couple of weeks ago I traveled to the Yucatan with 32 members of Covenant Pres. Our ages ranged from 17 to 58 and we had two families of four that made it their family vacation.
We flew into Cancun and then drove to a small town called Piste, which is about 2.5 miles from Chechen Itza. Our work for the week was to put a cinder block and concrete roof on a sunday school building and lay some concrete slabs. You can see the SS building in one of the pics (I didn't try to match pictures with content, too difficult for my first post). The hardest work day was sealing the roof with concrete. We built scaffolding and handed buckets of concrete up to the second floor roof. VERY hot and messy work. Cement burns hurt.


One of the pictures shows a chicken coop made with scrap materials. Our chickens are so spoiled. Almost every house there has livestock (pigs, chickens, ducks, turkey) but I was surprised that I didn't see a single vegetable garden. During bible school one day a large pig walked down the street and started rooting up someones yard. Many of our Covenant people were making a big deal out of it and a small child asked me "you don't have pigs in your country."
I told him we did but we keep them in factories, not really.

We slept as everyone does there, in hammocks. Getting used to non-nap sleep in a hammock would have alone been difficult enough, but we also had to acclimate to sweating at night, dogs fighting outside our hut, roosters crowing (not just in the morning), and one dude who snors really loudly. Luckily we worked hard during the day and I had ear plugs.

Most days followed this schedule: breakfast, work til 1pm, lunch, siesta, bible school and women's craft (I went one day and made Emily some earrings, partly because I love her and partly to rebel against the sexism), whole congregation play/hangout time, dinner, more hangout/play time, devotions, hammock. The thing that struck me most about the trip was the congregations example of Christian community and their willingness to share it with us. The pastor and many congregation members worked with us each day and the whole congregation played sports (soccer and basketball) with us (they called me Michael yordan). They also prepared a meal for us, gave us gifts, worshipped with us, and proudly showed off their Mayan history.

They took us to see Chechen Itza which is amazing and very difficult to describe. The amount of astronomy and mathematics that they not only knew but incorporated into Chechen Itza is quite astonishing. Almost the coolest part though was the way we got to see it. Since the town is so close almost the whole town works at Chechen Itza and therefore the town's economy is based almost solely on tourism (which is down 50% from last year). One congregation member and vendor at Chechen Itza told me that during the Swine Flu scare no one came for 2 months and he did not eat. Anyway back to the cool part, the congregation was proud to show us their history so they loaded us in the back of three trucks, waved us through the parking attendant (congregation member), and through the entrance. Once inside two tour guides (congregation members) gave us a tour. It was fun for us to experience such a turisty thing in a non-turisty way.

They also took us to a cenote (google pictures) one afternoon. A cenote is a cave with a deep spring fed pool that you can swim in. There are hundreds in the Yucatan. It was an amazing experience that I can't describe adequately.

The last day and a half of our 8 days we spent on a beach in Akumal (place of the turtle in Mayan). It didn't feel at all like mission work or work at all (I was getting paid and earning time off) but it was certainly restful and generally wonderful. The beach is gorgeous. I went snorkeling out on the reef and saw many fish and turtles. three other guys and I also went on a very nice boat ride and held fishing poles for a couple hours.

It was a great trip. I really enjoyed the intergenerational aspect and the hospitality and community of the Mexican people. I loved being picked up at the airport by Emily, Carson, and Collier.