Just got back from a Tijuana Immersion trip with Bellarmine yesterday, and it was kinda crazy. 4 days of manual labor to get a concrete foundation, 2by4 walls, roof, and stucco all done was no easy task. On top of that, we had to live in tents and take cold bucket showers.

Honestly, I didn’t enjoy it while I was there, and I had a lot of complaints. Like how the trip to Mexico involved very minimal spanish speaking! I felt under the weather for the majority of the trip, so I worked, ate, then slept. Last, a lot of the guys were so immature and insensitive to other people. I understand they’re teenage boys, but the way they talked about girls made me really indignant. And racism on a cultural immersion trip is just unacceptable.

But as I look back on it now, it was a great trip and I’d be willing to go again. My body is already recovering and I feel clean. I actually did get to use lots of spanish with Hector, our bus driver who drove us and also worked at a site. The house we got done was so nice, and the family with two kids was so grateful. Some of the discussions I had on the bus were really meaningful and enjoyable (e.g. having a Vietnamese Jesuit Priest who we called ‘The General’ tell us about the movie Bruno).

Anyways, getting to the post title, here’s Howie’s story:

[Howie was our construction supervisor who’s worked with Amor Ministries for 20+ years]

I was with a group of highschoolers coming back from the worksite when they told me that they were hungry. So we stopped at a McDonald’s and I let them get some food, if you can call it that. As we got off the van, I noticed that a security guard had taken notice of me and the group. He sorta followed us to McDonald’s and stood outside looking in. I thought he was just suspicious of us or sensing the trouble a group of teenage americans could cause. But then, after a while, he came up to me and told me, “Twenty years ago, you built my house. It let me get an education and now a secure job to support my family. You could say that you, in one week, made me a man for a lifetime."