Thursday: Shoe day at the colonia

Today we returned to the colonia. Justin put a lot of thought into how to logistically pull it off. The Iglesia Mi Dios es Real has two buildings. As you look from the front of the property, the church is on the left and the other building is about 25 feet to the right. In order to keep kids busy, Justin decided to have several carnival-style game areas. One in front of the church and one area behind the building on the right. On the bus ride to the colonia, he gave team assignments for lunch servers, working the games, the shoe distribution that would be inside the church, and "security". The plans he created worked great.

When we arrived in the colonia, we again split up into our teams and went house to house. Our team (the same as on Wednesday) headed in the same direction as we had yesterday but the first thing we did was to put our remaining stakes out. At the first few houses we stopped at, people either knew about our Club de Biblia or had actually come yesterday. We got to one house and an older man came out. I was talking to the kids in the house next door so didn't hear what happened but the man invited the team in to his house. This is a great honor to be invited into their home. I saw several of our team going in and Cameron came over to me and asked if he could. The house was small and we didn't want to overwhelm him with the whole team going in but I noticed that every family on our team had at least someone going in so I told Cameron yes.

Sarah B, Jeremiah, and I talked to the kids that were outside. We learned that one of them was Jesus and he actually attends the church. He lived in a house across the street while the boy he was playing with, Jose, lived next to the older man's house. The team stayed inside visiting with the older man for probably 15 minutes while Sarah, Jeremiah, and I talked with Jesus and Jose. When the team came out, Jose and Jesus (pronounced hey-ZUS) went with us to continue going door to door. Jesus even helped us taking our flier to several people as we invited them to the church.

There was a little neighborhood grocery store. We had stopped in yesterday and the person working their said he would invite his customers to come to the church so we wanted to stop again. Cameron had wanted some jalapeno potato chips so we got them and I got some other little Mexican cookies (they were a chocolate cookie with marshmallows on top). I shared those with everyone, especially Jose and Jesus. Neither of them begged or seemed to expect it which I thought was interesting.

We left the store and kept going house to house. The wind was blowing and kicking up dust; we'd have to deal with this all afternoon. The blowing dust really is miserable. After we had walked for a bit, I realized Cameron didn't have his backpack so along with Jesus and Jose, we headed back to the store to retrieve it. Having Jesus and Jose along was fun and allowed us to really bond with them. Jesus would hang around me for much of the day and kept asking me "Donde esta su hijo?" (where is your son). We retrieved his backpack and caught up with the team.

As we caught up, Lorna was talking with a woman and her daughter. The daughter saw us coming and got excited telling her mother she saw gringos - not something they see very often in their colonia. Lorna talked to them and invited them to the church. From there we returned to the church as it was getting time to serve lunch. There was already a line of children waiting for it to be served. The tradition here is to put the young children in the front of the line so they get fed first. I was high fiving and talking to kids in the line, seeing many of the same kids from yesterday. As we began serving, several of us were helping the little kids to carry their dish. I did this for a bit and then went over to the front gate area to help with "security". Kent was there. The process was to give everyone a name tag and a number written on their hand. This number would be used in distributing shoes.

Vern was around the front area too. He had attracted a bunch of kids with a trick he was doing with them. He'd squeeze their wrist to get the blood out and just after he lets go, he pretends to pull a needle and thread from the center of their hand. As the blood flows back to their hand, it feels like someone pulling something from your hand. The kids thought it was really cool and everyone one wanted Vern to do it to them too - it was fun to watch.

I noticed that the trouble we had yesterday with some of the kids being rough and starting fights didn't exist today. I really think there was a heavenly protection that we had inside the fence of the church. We had also prayed for peace today and God heard answered our prayers.

After a short stint at the front gate, Justin asked me to man one of the carnival games in the back - the ring toss. It was next to the fishing pond and both games had a long line of kids. It was a great time for me to interact with the kids. One little boy named Jose who was about 5 years old kept coming through to do the ring toss. Every time he "won", I'd let him punch my hand and I would exaggerate how he hurt me. He busted up laughing every time.

My knee was bugging me and I was having a hard time bending over to pick up the rings. I was really blessed by a boy named Alexis - without me even asking, he came over and basically took over running the game. I had noticed that Alexis was acting up a a bit (nothing bad) so it was an incredible blessing to me when he helped. And he helped me for over 90 minutes so it was great. I asked Lorna to let him step to the front of the fish pond game and asked to give him a good prize. I told him this was for him for helping me with the game.

One of the challenges was the wind blowing the sand. It was interesting for me to see the kids act like it was just a part of live - they dealt with it. I think if there were U.S. kids at a park and something like this happened, they'd all go home. But these kids seemed to just want to have fun with us no matter how much sand was being kicked up.

I didn't get a chance to work in the church distributing shoes but heard later from others who did, including Cameron (my son). He told me he remembered one boy in particular who was wearing shoes that didn't have any soles. Cameron told me his feet were all cut up and looked rough. He said the smile on the boys face after he got his new shoes were great. Others had similar stories to this. Inside the church, after someone got their shoes, they'd go over to an area where the number on their hand would be cleaned off and they'd share the gospel with them. Distributing the shoes was hard work - the "aroma" from some feet was very difficult but the smiles and blessings of seeing people get new shoes was amazing.

It took about 2 1/2 or 3 hours to get everyone new shoes. The final count of people who showed up was around 360. When we finished, we sent everyone on their way and gathered in the church for a time of prayer with Pastor Martin, his family, Jose Luis (Mexican leader for IFM), and our team. We first prayed from Pastor Martin (you'd say this Mar-TEEN), his family and the work they have in the colonia. After that we prayed for the city of Juarez. We had gifts for our hosts which Sunny presented to them. We loaded the bus and headed back to the border.

The kitchen staff at IFM had made sack dinners for the Mexican border guards. We hoped to have the opportunity to either be inspected or just pull over and give them the dinners and Spanish New Testaments that we had for them. We were not asked to pull over but Andy (our bus driver) pulled over to the side. One of our interpretors asked if we could talk to the commander. It was some of the same guards as the previous night and they were very happy to see us. They were really blessed by our stopping again and giving them dinners. We also passed out the New Testaments. They needed another one; I had one and gave it to Cameron who took it to guard. Given the guard has a heavy duty automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, this took a lot of courage for Cameron to do. No other team has been able to minister to the military police so this encouraged us all. We told them we would be praying for them.

As we've had to do every night, we got off the bus to go through U.S. Customs, which we've done each day through Santa Teresa, New Mexico (here's a link to their website map so you can see it: http://www.nmborder.com/maps.html). After sailing through that, we got on the bus and arrived back to Fabens for another late dinner.