2100 Lbs. of Food - Day 4

This is a picture of all the bags of food we made (well over 300 bags). Each t-shirt bag contained 2.5 lbs. of flour, 2.5 lbs. of rice and 2.5 lbs. of beans.


Here, KC and Myson are building frames for the doors (which they later put in). A team from Pennsylvania arrived at Resplandor De Vida a couple of days before us with the intent to build a house for a painter in the colonia. God had different plans. They ended up building this - it will be used to house future mission teams. They completed the outside of the building in about 5 days - Martine, Renee (Mexicans that live at the home) and a gentleman from the colonia were busy working on putting stucco on the outside when we were leaving to come home.

When you build with wood in this environment, you need to build quickly and get the stucco on. The conditions warp the wood and ruin it very quickly. A majority of structures here are built with cement blocks and cement.

Bagging up rice...

Day 4 - Tuesday: Sylvia, Anne, Vicki, Sue and I bagged up 2100 lbs. of beans, rice and flour. When we started, we didn't think it would take all day. Then we got into it and realized... this is no small venture. By lunch time (and we started at about 8:30), we only had the rice done. A lot of it was we needed to develop a system of bagging - after lunch, the beans and rice went much faster. And knowing that over 300 families would be blessed by the food made it all worthwhile.

And looking back on the day... it probably seems boring and uneventful to bag up food all day - quite the contrary; the five of us really got to know eachother - we spent much of the day swapping funny farm stories (some old, some new), stories about our kids that brought tears to our eyes (from laughter, of course) and we sang songs (I found someone else that actually knows Peter, Paul and Mary songs)! And after you look at all the bags, even though it isn't enough for everyone in the colonia, it gave us a real sense of accomplishment that we would be able to bless a few of the families when we go out on Thursday.