When I left Rancho Sordo Mudo on May 1st (my birthday) to catch a plane to Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, I was admittedly skeptical. I knew that the previous three months I spent at the ranch would be a tough act to follow, and was not all that excited to leave what I have come to view as home to go to an area with an active and dangerous drug cartel. I didn't really know what to expect from my time in Los Mochis, but I think it's safe to say that almost nothing I did there was not something I would have expected to find myself doing 1300 miles or so south of the Mexican-American border.
On my first Sunday all of the staff from the school piled into a suburban and drove to a ranch out in the middle of nowhere for church. The first two-and-a-half to three hours were spent listening to announcements and impromptu personal testimonies, singing worship songs, and watching the pastor stand up and preach for well over an hour. I say watching because he was speaking in rapid Spanish, which I hardly understood a word of, so I did quite a bit more watching than listening. It turns out that I had made it for a very special Sunday, because after the service was concluded everyone from the church stuck around to celebrate the combination of Día de Niños and Día de Madres AND the church's 13th anniversary. We feasted, we played group games (that I lost every time because the directions were, of course, still in Spanish), and we talked for five hours before finally taking off. Then two days later, the students arrived.
Things were stepped up several notches after the arrival of the children (unlike the ranch, only three were deaf and the other couple dozen were hearing). I went from doing nothing all day to constantly moving from one task to another. Over those two-and-a-half weeks that the students were in school, I did so many different things I can't take the time to list them all, so I'll just hit the main ones. I worked on constructing bee boxes for a few days (the ones used by bee keepers to harvest honeycomb from the bees), I spent three nights working from 9:30pm to around 4:30am scraping paint off of the ceiling of the kitchen, I taught math to the three deaf students almost every day, and I ate. Oh man, did I eat. We went out to hot dog stands several times to have the biggest, most delicious, most covered-with-everything hot dogs I have ever eaten. We also had some amazing chicken, and, of course, tacos.
I can't properly describe my experience at CCMR without talking about how much fun the students were. And since I can't talk about everyone of them in one blog post, I'll limit myself to one: Brayan (pronounced almost the same as the American name Brian). Once the kids got to school, I shared a room at night with three boys: Juan Pablo, Alex, and Alex's little brother, Brayan. Brayan is eight years old and has to be one of the cutest children I have ever met in my entire life. After my first night of scraping paint off the ceiling, I didn't get to bed until the boys were just waking up to get ready for school. When Brayan realized that I hadn't slept all night and was about to spend the whole day sleeping, he came back in the room after I was already in bed. He walked over to me and proceeded to tuck me in. Yes, the eight-year-old child tucked in the 19-year-old man. He even pulled the blanket all the way up to my chin to make sure I stayed warm (the temperatures during the day there were consistently above 90 degrees so the last thing I needed was a warm blanked covering my entire body, but I decided to let him do his thing). Then he prayed for me, kissed me on the forehead, and whispered "buenos noches" in my ear before turning off the light and closing the door behind him. And if that wasn't cute enough, he couldn't say "Andrew" right so he spent the entirety of my stay calling me "Anduke."
I have many more stories from my three weeks in Los Mochis, and if I tried to fit them all into one writing it's length might cause people to mistake it for a copy of the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy. So I'm going to end this post with a quick update on where I'm at for my friends and family back home.
Today is Saturday, May 24, and I leave in exactly 10 days. It hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm about to leave this amazing, beautiful, blessed place in less than two weeks, and I'm not eager for the day when it does. It doesn't help that I'm still feeling profoundly uncertain about the direction my life is headed after I'm done at the ranch. If there is one thing I would like to ask for prayer for, it is that I will be able to put God's plan for my life above my plan for my life over the following days, weeks and months as I am faced with decisions that will affect where I will spend the next several years of my life and what I will spend them doing. As always, I appreciate all of the prayer and words of encouragement I receive from friends and family very much.
Thanks for taking a glimpse into my time at Colegio Christiano Magdelena Rincon in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico. I'll be posting more than usual as my time here comes to a close, so stay tuned for more of Drew Lund's Mexican Adventures.
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