i got a fever of 100 and barfed twice

Ricky L. · 04-07-2008, 05:15 PM

In the Summer of 2003 I went on a trip to Mexico. It was my first time
leaving the United States and I was both excited and nervous. I went with my
church youth group to volunteer build houses for poor Mexican families. At first I
didn't want to go because I didn't know if I wanted to do all that physical labor.
My friends who were going tried to convince me to go. And then my Dad told me
it would probaly be a lot of fun to be in Mexico so I decided I would go. When I
got there the work, the people, and the landscape was different then what I
expected it to be.

When I got to Mexico I thought the work was going to be very hard. I
figured the days would last forever and I would be totally exausted each night.
I was worried that I wouldn't be able to do some of the stuff of keep up with the
other people while building, and also feared I would get confused and not be
able to figure out what to do. I knew we wouldn't be working with power tools.
But it turned out to be not so bad. The first day we didn't work, we just unpacked
our stuff and set up tents in the desert. The next morning we woke up at 6:00
A.M and put on our work clothes and sun tan lotion, and then some vans come
and drove us to the work sites. They said that mixing concrete would be the
hardest. I had a hoe and had to use it to mix the concrete with water and stucko.
I had to dig in the sand with a shovel to flatten the land where the base of the

house would be. We sawed boards and nailed stuff and after a week a house
was formed. The work was not as hard as I first expected it to be.

The people of Mexico were not how I expected them to be. I expected to
see guys wearing bull fighting outfits and sitting leaning against a house with a
huge sombraro hat over thier head with it pushed down over thier eyes with a
piece of hay sticking out of thier mouth. I never saw any guys like that at all.
Since we were in a very poor town in mexico next to the border I thought that the
people would all be skinny and thin. I didn't think that they would be starving to
death, but I thought that they would be so poor they wouldn't be able to eat
enough to become fat. While 95% of them were thin, I did see a few fat
Mexican girls. I expected that everyone I saw would be brown skinned. It was
pretty much true, there was no black people there. But I saw a girl who had a
light skin color, she almost looked white but was a Mexican. I thought that the
Mexican people would act like Americans. But they were all very nice. While
working Mexican kids who lived in houses near by would walk up and watch us,
and try to talk to us. They would offer to help us do things, like help us nail some
boards. The Mexicans were a good people.

The landscape and area of the part of Mexico was different then what I
thought that it might be. I thought it would be all flat desert with tons of cactus
everywhere. I pitcured owls flying around and huge hawks. I thought there might
be gravel roads. The land was very hilly, I didn't see very many cactus I can't
remember see any really. All roads were dirt roads except highways. There
wasn't as many rivers or lakes as I thought I might see. There was trash

everywhere you looked. All along the dirt roads was garbage, in empty desert
plains there was trash all around. By stores there was trash. Walking down the
roads you would see a lot of broken down old cars, and destroyed cars. It was a
lot dirtier then I expected. But it was a memorable landscape.

When going to Mexico the work, the people, and the landscape was very
different then I ever would have imangined. The work wasn't as bad as I thought,
the people were a lot nicer then I would have expected, and the landscape was
dirtier and less American then I would have guessed.