Casas por Cristo

Casas por Cristo: Juarez, Mexico

So I've been on Juarez trips lots of times before, having experienced four with Georgia Tech CCF, one with Southwest Christian Church, and then an entire summer of Casas when I interned there in 2006 (I'm returning this summer and for the future to work there as well). But to lead a trip from El Pozo...that's never been done before...across Mexico...this was going to be an adventure.

We left Sat. March 15th, the first day of Spring Break here, and return Easter Sunday, the 23rd. After taking off in our 11 passenger van that treated us very nicely, we made it up to Juarez from Puebla in two days, stopping in Torreon along the way. Once in Juarez, we met up that Monday with our friends from GTCCF in Atlanta and built two houses for a couple of families that really needed them. I led the construction of one of the two, and Michael West, a Georgia Southern alum and former El Pozo and Casas intern, led the other. By Wednesday, two more houses stood in Juarez (along with 27 more, actually, a Casas single-week record), and the students at El Pozo had gotten a taste of humbling yourself for others, getting multiple days of good hard work, and roughing it for a bit by sleeping on the hard floor in a church in inner city Juarez and eating foreign food, including the first peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for some of them, if you'd believe it!

On the way back from Juarez, we stopped by the beautiful city of Chihuahua for two days, the magnificent Copper Canyons in the SW corner of Chihuahua state, and the gorgeous city of San Luis Potosi. Some amazing stories came out of the trip, students talking about how this changed their perspective of how the view "necessities" in life, how others live - even in their own country - and even one person, Malena, decided to apply to intern at Casas this summer! THANK YOU SO MUCH to those of you who helped to support the trip; the students already can't wait to go on next year's trip...and that's exactly what we needed, was to get a group of students at El Pozo motivated about it to make it a yearly tradition.

Make sure to check out the video from the trip (in Spanish) online at YouTube! Here's the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLg4o8ruf1U. Harold