A Potential Handle

I have recently returned from a 2 week trip to San Carlos, AZ.  There are several things that may appear in a post about the experiences had, but we will start small with something that tells a bit about Amor culture and the trip.

One of the ways we communicate when many people are in the field in Mexico is with radios.  To designate the person the message being spoken goes to, Amor likes to give people a radio handle.  Handles tend to be picked for people and usually reference some sort of blunder, quirk or awkward thing that they were a part of.  ("Froggy" for example, is the handle for a man who freaked out in the middle of the night when he saw a frog on his pillow and woke everyone up in the process.)  Several of my co-workers think they might have found one for me.

The first few days of this trip there were spent organizing and delivering tools and materials to eight different building sites that we were going to have people working on.  I volunteered to lead the Lowe's truck (who was thankfully delivering the pallets of cement and stucco to the sites for us with forklift power...that is a lot to move by hand) to the different sites.  I was armed with the preparation of having been to each of the sites at least once and a GPS.  All was going well until when heading to the seventh site (one I was relying on my GPS to find) I was looking on the wrong side of the dirt road and missed the turn.  My stomach sank when I saw the distance to destination start to increase and I hadn't seen the site.  I continued up the road a couple hundred feet to an area big enough for the truck following me to turn around in.  It was big enough, but the dirt/sand mixture did not allow the truck easy passage.  It got stuck.  Due to my handy skills with the GPS, the current nomination I have heard for a radio handle for me... Magellan.

Because I tend to be a planner, cautious and think before I speak, I didn't know if I would have the "honor" of a radio handle, but the life of field work, I have learned, leaves ample opportunity.

¡Building Baños!

What did you do at work today?  Yesterday, I ventured to Tecate, Mexico with a small group of staff to one of Amor's campsites to help get it ready for the spring groups.  Our task, build the baños and shower houses.  Yes, my friends, outhouses (sorry I didn't have a camera, you would be impressed) and wood walls for privacy.  The Amor camping experience.  (For those who have been to Family Camp in recent years only, these will be a new experience for you...bring shower shoes for sure, shower houses have gravel "floors.")

Another part of the trip was to preview a work site where I will get to lead-in my first group tomorrow for a day trip.  They will be laying the slab for an addition to a house, something I haven't done before.  There are several Amor houses built in the same area and the occupants came out to visit with us.  The ladies were very friendly and excited to see us coming back to the area.  So far there has been an entertainment factor in working through the language barrier, too.  One thing to learn, if you haven't already.  A smile goes a long way.

This day trip to Mexico is kind of an anomaly as next week I will be headed back to San Carlos and will be there for two and a half weeks before returning to San Diego.  Right now there are 10 or 11 groups scheduled to work on the reservation while I am out there.  Last time I was out there we worked on some indoor finish work (mainly stucco touch-up and gluing down floors at my sites, a little bit of roof work).  There are all kinds of possibilities for these coming groups.

At Last, A First

Many have been waiting quite a while for this and it has finally arrived!  An update!  Due to the lack of previous updates, this one will stick to more big picture ideas, otherwise you would likely need to pour yourself some coffee to keep yourself awake.

The trip out to San Diego, CA was rather uneventful.  My mom drove out here with me and then flew back to Indiana.  On the way, we stopped at the Hoover Dam for a tour.  The ingenuity, cooperation and determination that went into planning and building the dam made me proud of the men who went before us.  They were a part of something great but were actually working for something completely different but greater...their families.  The Depression brought people from all over the country to work on this structure so they could feed their families.

The Hoover Dam

View from Hoover Dam of the new bridge they built to bypass driving over the dam.

From inside the dam from about halfway up.

We also saw some incredible landscapes (was expecting flat deserts) but got different rock formations and mountains and beautiful sunsets.

In San Diego, I met Wendy, who I lived with for the first month of my time here.  She works at Amor and has an adorable dog, Ginger.  I knew I was going to meet a lot of awesome people and the first one I met set the bar pretty high.  

Since starting with Amor (it is official, I can be found on the website http://www.amor.org/join/interns), meeting most of the people who work there and having some training I now find myself often on the move.  My first trip into the field was with Field Specialist Clint and we were working with a volunteer group of Koreans, from Australia, who spoke English with an Australian accent.  Over the week we built a home for a lady and her two children.  It was an incredible week interacting with the family, neighborhood children and the Aussies.  

After that, I moved to an apartment, likely "home" for the rest of the year, right before I headed to San Carlos, Arizona to work on the Apache Reservation.  The San Carlos homes are significantly more involved and therefore volunteer groups only have the opportunity to work on a few phases of the house in their short time here.  I have now been out there twice, the first group had over 150 students from a high school who worked to put up the outside walls of six houses, the second group consisted of 14 hearty souls who endured camping in high winds, cold weather and rain to help with some finishing work on some of the houses that had already been started.

Now you have had a very general look into the start of this year with Amor.  It appears there will be plenty to fill in, in the future.

Before I sign off for the night, I want to thank everybody who has been (and continues to be) a source of encouragement on this journey.  From the prayer to the sounding boards to the financial support it is all connected through a bigger purpose and for me personally, I seem to be learning the basics of how to move by faith.

Peace,

Mary