We spent Monday morning, the 28th, finishing the shopping and visiting the local banks. The part of Mexico where we would spend most of our time is not a cash-less society like the U.S. We were required to convert our USD's into pesos however you could only exchange $500 USD per day and the closest banks to the town we would be staying at was over 45 minutes away. James, Doug, and Maria each took $500 to exchange into pesos and made the rounds of the banks they could find in the Villahermosa area. We were able to convert most of our money into pesos that way and soon we took our overloaded vans and bulging travel security wallets and started our journey to Plan de Ayala.
Upon arrival in Villahermosa we had our first opportunity to practice 'Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility'. When we left the US we understood that the team would be staying at the SDA school in Plan de Ayala. Instead we were informed that we couldn't stay there the last 4 days of our trip since school would be in session. We were offered the SDA church (kitchen and Sabbath school rooms) in Plan de Ayala instead. So off we headed to our new destination!
We knew that Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico and so our expectations weren't too high. We found that there was much cleaning and reorganizing to do, but were pleasantly surprised to find that the accommodations would turn out to be even better than what we had expected at the school. God, once again, met our needs before we even knew what they were.
The kitchen (cucina) was in desperate need to be cleaned and painted, but due to the high humidity and rain we could not paint prior to settling in. James, Doug, Pastor Chuc, and Maria (a Maranatha worker) went to work pulling everything out of the kitchen so that the walls could be cleaned. They worked all afternoon scrubbing the walls while Cheryl organized the supplies and I worked on cleaning and readying the Sabbath school rooms to use as our meeting/eating room and bedrooms as well as cleaning the toilet/shower areas.
Kitchen, pre-cleaning:
We had 2 toilets/shower rooms - blue for boys and pink for girls:
There was a raised well in the kitchen with a hose that ran from the main city water line. Once a day around 8am the city would turn on the water for residents to fill their wells. The water came on for about 30-45 minutes (Mexican time...whenever someone turned on the water and for however long they chose to run it). The walls of the well were coated with a greenish substance, the bottom of it had a small amount of garbage in it, and you could on occassion see tadpole-like organisms swimming in the water. We chose to not use this water for anything except flushing the toilets and showering (and that was only out of sheer necessity!).
There were 4 Sabbath school rooms and we used the closest one to the kitchen as a meeting and eating room. The next one was set-up for the leaders, nurse, and kitchen crew (6 people total) since they would have more erratic wake/sleep hours than the other participants. The 3rd room had 5 men in it and the final room had one couple plus 4 men. The rooms with females also had a portable shower unit that was used as a changing room.
Cheryl set-up a station outside the kitchen to sterilize all the new pots, pans, and dishes while the men cleaned the kitchen. She had a 3 burner and a 2 burner propane stove in which to prepare all cooked items during the trip.
We had some of the neighbors come help us set-up camp:
So after copious amounts of bleach, germicidal wipes, bug spray, hand sanitizer, Lysol spray, and newly installed toilet seat covers we were ready for the arrival of the team!
And 'The Pampered Chef' was ensconced in her newly cleaned and stocked kitchen:
No comments:
Post a Comment