When 12 area high school students traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico last month, they went to provide a family with one of life's basic essentials: proper housing.
Their journey brought them to a family living at the base of a steep ravine, close to a soccer field and city life but isolated enough that it would have been hard to find the place if you didn't know where you were looking. The old house, torn down before the students arrived, was more shack than home, a ramshackle combination of wood and scrap metal. A blanket served as the door and the whole place was surrounded by thick brush and dense vegetation. As far as anyone could tell, it was the home of a mother, father, and two children though, with so many kids running around, it was sometimes hard to tell who belonged where.
Over the course of several days, the students and their four chaperones negotiated the steep ravine while hauling concrete, gravel, bricks, and the other building blocks of what was to be a new and stable home.
Organized largely by a group of local United Churches, the group, known as Team Mexico, has been fundraising for more than two years. Similar groups have gone to Nicaragua in 2005 and Mexico in 2007 and 2010. For all of the Mexico trips the team's local contact has been a man named Gerardo Debbink, a former Alberta dairy farmer who founded a non-profit organization called Quest Mexico in 2001. According to its website, Quest Mexico is dedicated to giving "a voice to the voiceless, the poor living in Mexico." Debbink helped Team Mexico find the right family to help, and once the money was finally raised it was time to go.
They finally landed in Mexico on Feb. 8, destined for two weeks in a country that was to shock them in a variety of ways. The surprise began on the day they left Saskatchewan, when they woke up in tiny Humboldt, Annaheim and Middle Lake; a few hours later, they stared out the windows of a jetliner at the never-ending lights of Mexico City, stretching from horizon to horizon.
After a 90-minute bus ride they were in Cuernavaca, a city of about 340,000 people know for its perfect weather and status as an escape for some of Mexico's richest people. Of course, they weren't there to meet the rich and famous.
After speaking with several members of Team Mexico, as the group was known, it became obvious that the five or six families they met in and around Cuernavaca were memorable.
"They were just joyful and grateful," said Landon Selinger.
"They had an incredible spirit and pride," added Taylor Hausler.
Selinger and Harris Ford recalled meeting a family in a small mountain village. Despite their obvious poverty, the family's matriarch insisted on making an endless stream of tortillas for her visitors.
"I couldn't stop. I ate nine or 10," Selinger said with a laugh.
It wasn't just that the people were generous with what little they had; some also showed a nearly infinite capacity for hard work, chief among them the father of the family for whom a new house was being built.
"He was always doing something," said Diana Sarauer of Annaheim. "He would throw a bag of cement over his shoulder and basically run down the hill."
While they were very busy during the day, at night the members of Team Mexico had a chance to reflect on all that they had seen and learned. Perhaps most important was the conviction that the people they were helping weren't to be pitied, but respected for their endless optimism in the face of such hardship.
"You didn't want to pity them, but to look at them as equals," said Connor Guillet.
"I looked at it as though we were sharing with them, rather than just giving them something," said Sarauer.
All of the Team Mexico members agreed that spending two weeks in the country, "smelling the smells and seeing the sights", as Ford put it, was worth more than any amount of learning from a book.
"You just develop an appreciation for what you have," Sarauer said. "Here we take going to school for granted, but there that's all the kids wanted to do. They just wanted to be able to go to school and learn."
Hausler said that the girls from Team Mexico would often sit up at night and talk about what they had seen during the day. Every day it seemed as if there was something new and unexpected to talk about, whether it was the shock of seeing someone living under a bridge or the goodwill of the children who would walk a mile just to bring back some water or pop.
For Brenda Curtis, the Reverend at Humboldt's Westminster United Church and one of the trip's chaperones, the goal is always to make the kids more aware of the world around them.
"They always come away with a better sense of their own privileges, and the fact that they've got a lot to be grateful for," Curtis said. "They start to look at poverty in their own country differently. They recognize that just because you work hard doesn't always mean you're going to be well off."
The trip was three years in the making, so it was almost inevitable that the two weeks they spent in Mexico wouldn't seem like nearly enough.
Selinger remembers standing on the roof of the hotel the night before Team Mexico was due to return to Canada. The lights of Cuernavaca glowed against the dark slopes of the nearby Tepozteco Mountain and it was all Selinger could do to convince himself it was time to go back home.
"I didn't want to go," he remembered.
He was speaking only for himself, but it was a sentiment that could have applied just as easily to everyone else on that trip.
Note: The members and organizers of Team Mexico would like to invite the public to a presentation at Westminster United Church in Humboldt at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 30. The team will be offering stories of their experience in Mexico and showing pictures from the trip.
