Week#48 Tecamachalco is still

We've have been serving for 354/701 days of our mission, just over the halfway mark. The time has gone by quickly and rarely drags as there is much to do. Wednesday was an exception as we both woke up with all of our church accounts blocked, meaning we couldn't even use our computers, let alone access anything related to the work we do, not even on our phones. What the technical folks think happened is our accounts were set up without checking that the expiry date matched our release date. We were off line for 24 hours - yes, a first world problem. We lost our work internet connection twice over the past year and both times it took a full week to get it back, resolution in 24 hours was a miracle.

We had a senior missionary council meeting on Thursday morning that was presided over by a member of the area presidency, Elder Sean Douglas. The area goal is to have at least one senior Mexican couple or companionship of single sisters serving in each stake and district in Mexico. There are presently 230 stakes and 44 districts and only 27 have senior missionary couples or single sisters serving in them. There are 60 senior couples/companionships currently serving here with about half of them from Mexico - there is much to do to meet the area presidency's goal. Service missionaries (i.e., a commitment of less than 40 hours a week) are all Mexico-based and they expect 2000 individuals, including many couples, to be serving by the end of this year. A service mission can be preparation for and a stepping stone to full time service (a commitment of 40 hours) for senior missionaries. One of the principles that we counselled together about is how coordinate the work of service and full-time missionaries as both are equally valued in helping to move this great work forward (inviting all to come unto Christ i.e., peace on Earth, good will toward men:) There are many advantages of having senior missionaries serving in Mexico that are from here, among them, they can hit the ground running instead of having to learn to speak the language and navigate through the culture. After a year of missionary service, and given the amount of time I have spent in Mexico in my life thus far, I didn't expect to be experiencing culture shock but I am. 

I think it is that I have never been so fully immersed and exposed to clase alta culture before (the lives and attitudes of the top socio economic decile - see gini coeficient ranking income inequality). We live and work and live in a surreal neighbourhood by any economic standard. On the way to the gym a couple of weeks ago, my stomach started to rumble. Its about a 50 minute walk to get there (about an hour on the way back because its uphill or maybe I'm tired...) and I was only 15 minutes in. I took a bit of a detour to Palacio de Hierro, a shopping mall, hoping there might be a public washroom - though I have never seen one anywhere before except Walmart. I asked one of the security guards at the entrance (bullet proof vested and armed with automatic weapons with a finger on the trigger), who looked me over and then told me there was one just on the left side of the "Chanel store". I had never been inside this mall before. The place was filled with what I assume are designer stores, no Walmarts or Dollar Stores here. It was raining so had my umbrella and has been puddle jumping in my secondhand sneakers I brought from Canada and I was wearing the bottoms of my BJJ gi with a rash guard on top with a polo shirt over it with the rest of my gear slung over my back in my gym bag. The washroom was other worldly, gleaming and finer than that of any 5 star hotel I have ever seen globally. 

Later that evening I realized that the privilege associated with my white skin, blue eyes, accent and perhaps my missionary tag are what got me into the mall. Dressed like I was, people approaching me on the sidewalk usually act as if I don't exist. I have to dodge them or they would run right into me or over me-especially women. Their gaze is either away from or through me. Crossing the street and I feel as disposable as a rat might be. I bought and wear a reflective vest to be as visible as I can in the dark but as I scurry across the street, most drivers still look right through me as if I didn't exist and they drive as if I didn't exist. I recoiled just in time once as a car just about ran over my toes.  I could have tapped the middle of her roof with my waterbottle. This magically all changes if I am dressed in regular missionary attire, a suit or dress pants and shoes, a pressed white shirt and tie. Perhaps I look more likely to be packing either a gun or to be accompanied by a burly body guard who is or like I am one of the tribe. It grates on me and I am conflict. I don't want to be one of their tribe, but I am, like them by birth, and I sure appreciated the privilege of being able to use the washroom at Palacio de Hierro versus the alternative and I was close to exploding... I recall one of my university professors here telling us that he was in his forties when he noticed for the first time that there was a lineup of other people waiting their turn to be served at the bank, up to that point he had always just walked right up to the counter expecting to be served and he always was. Here I am most comfortable when I am with Agustín the street sweeper, the Martín Martinez that sells lottery tickets in the traffic at the corner of Avenida Palmas, and with Rogelio, the shy returned missionary that cleans the Palmas building where we work. We are all God's children. I have much to learn yet about loving the tribe of my birth and this appears to be the time and the place. I can take the parts that are of great worth and build on them. 

Sister Schlachter and I participated in a protocolario event on August 1 in Chalco (check out the video), a community just southeast of Mexico City in the State of Mexico. Chalco has a lot of needs. We worked with an NGO called Muúchi Xiímbal to provide food hampers and nutritional supplements for undernourished children and their mothers, often young widows or women that have been abandoned by their husbands. We were the recipients of a miracle of getting an Uber driver to take us there because its not a neighbourhood where there will be fares for the return trip and what's more he was from Chalco. 

Traffic here is always unpredictable and it was especially slow that day, I was praying we would arrive on time. I knew the organization had put a lot of work into the project up to this point and into organizing this event.  We got there 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. It rains nearly every day now and the organizers were concerned that we needed to be done and gone before the rain to avoid complications, and thankfully we were. Chalco has now been under water for past three weeks. The headlines read "negligence, garbage and poor infrastructure". Rain is torrential and usually what happens is garbage plugs the storm drains and then the ewater quickly rises. Sister Schlachter really wanted to meet the president of the organization as she often sent affectionate emojis during in her communications with me during the project's development (calling me "Señor Alan"). Being a very small organization, they needed a lot of handholding to get to the finish line, but they made it. 

The food hampers are to help bring the recipients up to a normal weight and for children, address wasting. Their mothers are being provided training on nutrition, self-care and employment skills to help them become self-reliant. An area manager will check on the project in a few months to see how things are going. When we arrived it sounded very much like a party with a gal belting out tunes to quite a large crowd with a few people dancing and three street dogs observing the proceedings. I asked but no, I couldn't convince Sister Schlachter to dance with me. The small number of hampers that you see being given away in the video link above were part of what attracted the crowd which will help direct Muúchi Xiímbal to those in need. Like Canada, its not cool here either to be publicly seen as recipients of aid. 

The dogs in attendance reminded me of a sacrament meeting that I went to in a small branch in Veracruz. I didn't know where the building was but spotted a couple of men in white shirts about a block away who led me to the meeting. Attendance that morning included the two missionaries that I caught up with, one or two member of the congregation, the branch president, me and a couple of dogs that wandered in. One laid down right beside my feet and I watched as a handful of ticks dropped off of it and slowly crawled toward my shoes. I learned you can't squish ticks while you are seated on a chair. At that moment I was grateful that I didn't press my friend (Rubén) who I had gone to visit, to come with me. However, as the meeting progressed it became one of the most spiritual and uplifting experiences that I have ever had and I regretted not insisting my friend to come look for the church with me. Decades later Sister Schlachter and our children visited him again, he now with a family of his own too. 

Last week I reviewed a new project proposal from a kindergarten in Chalco. They are asking for a small donation of paint and bags of cement to fix up their washrooms. I requested a call with them to see how else we might consider helping them in addition to what they asked for. Our focus this year has been on larger organizations that impact larger groups of people. It may take considerable effort to get a little project like this one approved.    

During the same week of the Chalco event we helped run an education booth at a For the Strength of Youth Conference, these are large events that bring youth of our church together to learn more about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our task was to help raise awareness of the educational opportunities that are available to increase their earning potential here in Mexico as elements for becoming self-reliant. We travelled there with another couple and took a wrong turn taking us through Chalco and adding at least an hour of very scenic time on a federal highway that wound through the Sierra Madres to the event site. The photo is of us having lunch with the youth. It was amazing to see how they fed tacos to about a 1000 people in about an hour.We spent a lot more time driving than we did working that day as the traffic in Mexico City, going and coming, was intense. 

Last week Sister Schlachter and I accompanied contracted project evaluators from the US and representatives of UNHCR to an informal encampment in CDMX not far from where we live. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. Many cities in the world have similar encampments of homeless people, this one however had a much different vibe. There are about 1000 people temporarily living here. Doctors Without Borders has recently started coming a couple of days a week to provide medical care but the people in the encampment are otherwise being cared for by the generosity of a Roman Catholic Church priest and his congregation. The priest and his congregation provide a couple of meals a week to children and the elderly, water and access to showers for everyone once a week. There is no rule of law in Mexico and life in the camp at night is fraught with violence among and between internal gangs and instigated by organized Mexican crime groups who prey on the encampment's vulnerability. Most of the people in this encampment are from Venezuela and Haiti. I said the community has a different vibe in that those we spoke with seemed to be quite happy and filled with hope. I expect this is the case as reaching Mexico City is a significant milestone on their way to the United States, the promised land. Their tents are set up on pallets to keep things dry during the rain. There are no public washrooms and a single water tap that the church provides. We partner with UNHCR and other organizations to provide basic necessities of life to migrants like these but this encampment is relatively new and as yet unsupported in a formal way.

UNHCR told us they have helped to legally settle more than 45,000 refugees in Mexico over the past 5 years and that more migrants are now considering Mexico as the primary destination instead of just a stopping point on the journey to the US. For those that continue to the border region, Hell awaits them as they are at the mercy of organized crime. Often whole busloads are held up at gun point and/or kidnapped. In the lead up to US elections in November, the US border is increasingly harder and harder to cross and migrants will be trapped there for much longer than anyone expected. I have heard it said that organized crime's business with migrants is now more lucrative than the drug trade as far as the money they make (i.e., robbing them of everything they have and human trafficking). The vision of the American dream drives them onward nonetheless.    

We regularly walk or drive by armed soldiers like what the photo below depicts. I am reluctant to pull out my phone and take a picture. A truck with armed young men and women like this one regularly parks across the street from where we live, we scurry by them on our way to or from the office. Adding to my personal angst, someone explained the difference between military and regular police in Mexico this way; the focus of regular police is prevention while the military's approach is elimination - they just shoot, there are no questions later and no accountability. We keep our heads down. 

We are preparing a hymn to sing in an upcoming meeting of mission presidents. I love these Elders (left to right: Berrett, Mayberry and Andelin. One of their wives is our pianist and director and the other two are also singing).  The Church is publishing a new hymn book globally releasing it in stages online. The first instalment was published earlier this year. We will be singing one of the new hymns, "It is well with my soul". I am not sure that it is well with my soul at the present time but sing I will with that hope and assurance. As an answer to my prayers, last night just before I went to bed I came across something called the burnt toast principle that has given me great comfort. In a nutshell it is a mindset and parable that suggests that minor time-consuming inconveniences, such as burning and remaking toast before traveling to work, could avoid greater harm or lead to other positive outcomes. My personal application is the reminder to fully trust Our Heavenly Father, being all-knowing and omnipotent, if something isn't happening the way I hoped or happening when I expected it to in the humanitarian aid work we do, it may very well be to protect me or someone else and I should be grateful. The clase alta mindset here permeates and influences everything we set out to do.   

Elder Andelin (far right) asked me a few weeks ago how long it took me to climb the stairs to the 11th floor.  I said I had never done it but I would give it at try. My first go at it carrying my water bottle clocked in at 2 minutes 12 seconds, only a couple of seconds better than him. My second attempt, this time without my water bottle was 2 minutes 4 seconds. I was chatting with one of the lawyers in the office on Friday who gave it a try later in the day, he beat me by a full 10 seconds. There is always room for improvement.

We are off to another protocolario event tomorrow at a shelter in Hidalgo with an organization that helps migrants and internally displaced persons in Mexico.