Persecuted church in Ocosingo

I co-led a project team to Ocosingo in Chiapas, Mexico. The project trip was rescheduled over Heather's birthday. We had planned on going to Atitlan together. She was still able to go with a friend (read here)

To save costs, Todd, Matt, Josh and I decided to drive my ratty old van up to Tuxtla to get the team and then on out to Ocosingo Mexico. On this 12 hour drive we only brought cookies to eat although we had a ton of cookies. We ate them until we were sick. There were over 100 speed bumps before we actually got to the airport in Tuxtla. The only way for my van to get over them was to go fast and jump the low spot in my van over the speed bump. I don't have many pictures of the trip because I left my camera at the border :( .

We made really good time considering that we needed to have my brakes done in Huehuetenango and then when we arrived to Tuxtla, to where the airport was supposed to be, we found out that 4 months prior, they had moved to airport to a new location about an hour away. The tickets even still listed the old airport as the destination. So, bunches of more speedbumps later we arrived at the airport to find that the team had taken a cab to the hotel 15 min prior. We returned to where we were to start in Tuxtla. The next day we PACKED the van full of stuff and the team. With tires bulging we slowly climbed the mountains to Ocosingo. Most all of the signs in Mexico have to do with leaving the signs alone. "Obey the signs" "don't destroy the signs" "Don't mistreat the signs" and the like were about 80% of the signs.

We arrived and that first evening I was informed that I would be preaching to about 600 people. God was gracious and the sermon went well. I was able to share about the cost of discipleship as seen in a "tour" of the gospel Luke and encourage them about the value of faithfulness. I felt unqualified to say these things to them because they suffer much more than me but they are always ready to be excited about heaven. whenever I didn't know a word or just got stuck, I would just shout, "amen" and the crowd repeated it back to me very graciously.

We stayed at the church on cots and the next day the team got to work. There were a couple of issues to address. First was the design of the two story children's building. The church has a wonderful ministry to children but has no place to hold them all. They currently have a wood plank structure that has two classrooms that should hold about 15-20 kids but they squeeze about 60 in them. There still are too many kids for this so they also meet in several locations around town like small groups. The building will also house a real kitchen. At times they are cooking for over 1500 people and right now they are doing it in an open plank wood shed. The second task to address was the settling of the sanctuary. One corner was showing signs of significant settling. The third was just to check on the back wall of the property because it looked like it was going to fall.

I was the resident "surveyor" so I started surveying with a 50 meter tape and an eye level. Matt and I spent the day surveying and at the end of the day after having moved from one spot to the other out the wall, down the street and through a field, we came within 3" of matching the elevation of our first shot. I was able to get rough existing utility information to work with. The water for the site comes from a 1/2" drip irrigation pipe and the drainage pipe just runs under the building to the stream. The stream also runs under the corner of the sanctuary. This is where the trouble with settling was. The footing of the building had 2x the weight on it than it was designed to carry.

We decided to look at the failing wall and saw that it was about 20 feet high and about 2 1/2 feet away from the back wall of the church. We walked around the block to see how high the dirt was on the other side. We found the wall only to be about 3 feet high, meaning dirt was filled up almost the entire hight of the wall and this neighbor was parking huge bucket trucks on this dirt right next to the wall. The only reason the wall hadn't fallen was that they had put wood blocks between the top of the wall and the columns of the back wall of the sanctuary which had now caused cracking in the wall of the sanctuary. The legal documents for the property line has no bearings or directions only distances. They roughly matched up with mine but there was an ongoing arguement with the neighbor behind (whose wall was falling) as to the interpretation of this document whether the dimensions are from the center of the road or the edge. If it is the edge of the road then the neighbor needs to fix the wall. If it is the center of the road then the back wall of the church is technically on the neighboring property. YIKES! As far as I understand, the propertyline would come from the center of the road but then why would all the surrounding neighbors including this one construct their wall 3 meters away from the propertyline when land is so valuable? It was a matter that we pressed as important to the church though I really don't think they find it very important.

Once the survey was done I drew it up on AutoCAD and noticed that the sanctuary came out looking like a parallelagram. This couldn't be right so I took interior measurements to find out what the problem was. What I found was that the drawing was correct. The sanctuary is 2 meters out of square!! The building was not built by a contractor. People in the area are poor so instead of being able to offer money to build they offered their time and sweat. It is kinda cool that the congregation itself actually built the church with their own hands but then again you end up with a parallelagram church.
There were lots of engineering difficulties that we were able to address with the pastor so their future construction can take a much better path.
The people of the church were VERY hospitable, offering their very best for us. The meals were incredible with the ladies ofthe church cooking for us each meal in the shed and then we ate with them there in the kitchen.
The last day of our design we presented to the leadership and now we are finishing the details of the design in the office.
We were able to visit a widow of a pastor in a village of exiled Christians and a family who had their home burned for being Christians. I was challenged by the extent of their faith.
Each morning we had our devotions together and most mornings we sang a hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God being the favorite. The pastor and the people of the church often heard us and asked us to sing it in the midweek service. It was great to join with them in worship and prayer.
On the way back we spent a day in San Cristobal de las Casas which is a very clean and touristy town in the mountains. We took the team to the airport and returned home again eating cookies all the way.

Up, up and away!

I had another oportunity to design another jungle airstrip for AGAPE ministries. I was able to bring EMI intern Josh with me on a voyage to Chel . Chel is a small village in northwestern mountains of Guatemala. It has no electricity and little influence from outside.

Our job was to survey the land and design the new airstrip. We took and hour and a half flight up north into the middle of nowhere in the northern mountains in Guatemala with Ludin from AGAPE in a small single engine 'jungle hopper' plane. Ludin even let me fly the plane for a while when we were up flying around stormclouds. Once the GPS said we were there we flew around and made our way through the maze of clouds as we descended to our destination. We flew into a small dirt runway on the side of a mountain in the farm called "the pearl" La Perla (see the video below for the landing)...

At La Perla we met with the local pastor and got ready for our couple hour journey even further into the jungle. We packed up his horse with our surveying equipment and Josh, Ludin and I went on the motorcycle. I rode the motorcycle and took Ludin part of the way and then returned for Josh. Once we arrived on the other side of the river we were able to ride in a pickup the rest of the way and the pastor took the horse back while Ludin followed us on the motorcycle. The road, or should I say path, continuing on to Chel was almost more than Josh could bear. He was already not feeling well and now he needed to stand up for a long bumpy ride on a container of diesel which got all over his pants and the fumes were making him even more sick. When we rounded the final hill, the sight of Chel was almost magical. It was beautiful. A little village nestled in a small valley with a river running through the middle.

We arrived at the church and we settled into our room. There would be no work done today because it was already getting dark and we were tired from the trip. Josh went to bed to try and shake the sickness while Ludin and I went to a lady's house to get food (because there are no restaurants in Chel). After dinner we went to bed at about 6pm. It was an early night because there are no lights so when it gets dark most people go to bed. Some people have solar panels and car batteries for minimal electricity and lighting but for the most part the sun rules the sleep schedule. My bed was just some boards with a blanket on them and my jeans for the next day for a pillow.

The next morning Josh had a fever and did not get out of bed the whole day. We traveled to the site to begin the survey. The truck could not make it all the way up the rocks so we walked the final bit. To my surprise, I found that about half of the area to be surveyed had thick brush about 15' tall. We decided to start the survey at the bottom where it was clear but after a few shots the battery was dieing in the survey equipment. I didn't know there was no electricity in Chel so I had not thought to charge it prior to leaving. we tried to charge it over night using a car battery but to no avail. The next day we were up against the wall. Would we need to go back just because the battery was dead?

I remembered that the equipment had a second battery but it was useless because it couldn't accept a charge so I had a hairball idea to cut up the battery to use it as a shell that can snap into the survey gun and then wire the two walkie-talkies together and then wire them to the broken battery in the gun and...it worked! we held the broken battery in place with a plastic bag we found that we rolled up into a rope and tightened it up by twisting a twig in the loose part of the bag. We held the walkie-talkies on top of the gun with Ludin's hankie and vuala! we had equipment that worked again.

The other problem was the brush. We had 5 guys with machetes and we told them a path to take and marked off every 100' where they would branch out to both sides so we could take side shots. This did take time but it worked It rained on us a while and we kept going with another plastic bag put over the gun with a hole cut in it so it could take measurements. By God's grace we finished the survey just, and I mean JUST in time. At the last scheduled shot of the survey I could barely see the yellow target good enough to take the shot and within 2 min, while we were taking down the equipment, it was totally dark. The next morning we set back out for La Perla and waited at the pastor's house for the weather to clear enough fro takeoff. Our one day trip turned into three and the fam was very happy to have me back home.