Church Work Party: Final Update
About the Author
Ben spends most of his time working with underprivileged kids in Tijuana, Mexico, encouraging them to continue their education. He's an unofficial member of Iglesia Bautista Monte Horeb, which runs the elementary school, Centro Pedagógico Didaque.
This morning I went to a junkyard just over the border in search of a taillight (it was not my fault!). The young man escorting me around the oil-soaked gravel lot asked me the usual questions about how I learned Spanish, etc. It came around that my wife is Mexican. “We got the best [women],” the young man said. I agreed that I love my (Mexican) wife, but that doesn’t mean that Mexicanas are better than Americanas. He agreed and then took it further, talking about all the good looking Americanas. I attempted to move the conversation away from women by saying there are good things and bad things about each culture. He agreed. “So, it’s really not the culture but the individual,” I said in a teacher’s tone. “Wow, that’s heavy,” he replied. Then without a blip we switched back to junkyard jibe.
Changing the subject a little, the church painting project is done. (What project you say? See my article “Is Our Church HAZWOPER Certified”). We painted the ceiling of the temple in four Thursdays. My thoughts are now collected: we should do it again. Not paint over paint, but do some other, or many other, simple teamwork projects. It brings people together, and it gets stuff done.
Our attendance was never 100 percent, but the same goes just north of the border, I suppose. There I participated in work parties where the only folks who showed up were the organizers. That’s no fun and, in fact, downright frustrating. But that’s the way it is—regardless of culture.
What I’ve learned from volunteer work parties is that no difference exists between the cultures—sometimes it’s pullin’ teeth. Hopefully we (active Christians anywhere today) will be able to change the current church-at-large culture. Then we might actually get things done—rather than talking about mujeres while at the junkyard.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:12 am
I had almost the same conversation with people in my English class yesterday. It was a good opportunity to teach the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”