I remember the first time I ever drove a van. It was dark blue, held 15 passengers, and the radio was stuck on a station which constantly blared a very repetitive play list of hip hop music. It was eight o'clock at night on a Thursday in the middle of March. The windows were open to let in the 80 degree night air. The moon was rising in the inky, hazy sky ahead. The van was full of college students, their stomachs happily digesting a delicious, homemade meal, their heads nodding to the beat of the music, and their bodies swaying and bouncing as the van followed the curves of the road and jumped over the numerous boulder-sized bumps and swimming hole-sized potholes on this road which hadn't been paved for decades. Traffic zoomed all around us, driving with total disregard to any sort of traffic laws, miles over the speed limit, changing lanes suddenly and without the use of a blinker, some lacking even working headlights.
If I had dared to tear my eyes off the vehicular chaos surrounding us, they would have wandered over scenes of immense, feel-sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach poverty. Skinny, dirty-faced children chased each other around barefoot, over the broken glass, sharp rocks, and rotting trash which was strewn everywhere. As they ran, their too-large pants often slipped down their frail frames. Their worn and creased mothers were standing in the yards, hanging their secondhand laundry out to dry while keeping a watchful eye on their swarm of little ones. “House” does not accurately describe the structures lining the road; “hut” or “shack” would be closer. They are all of one story, rectangular, composed of a single, multi-purpose room, and pieced together from scraps of discarded wood, corrugated metal, and cardboard. There are gaps in the walls where the wind blows the dust through, coating the family's few, carefully organized, precious possessions inside. Chickens flap noisily about and efforts made to contain them stand about in the form of barbed wire fences placed haphazardly around a few homes.
As I tried to focus all my attention on navigating this monstrosity of a vehicle through the speeding traffic, the lack of marked lanes, and the sporadically-placed, unannounced speed bumps, other thoughts crept into my mind. The scene out the windows which was so foreign to so many, including everyone else in the van, seems like home to me. Though there are no road signs or directions to follow, I know where to go. I turn left at the thorny bush, and then right at the graffiti-covered cardboard sign advertising a purified water delivery company.
Here I am, a nineteen year old American girl, chauffeuring fifteen of my former college classmates around some of the poorest areas of Mexico in a van whose sides declare “3ra Iglesia Presbitariana Ministerio de Fe” in peeling white paint and whose back windshield sports a bumper sticker heralding Jesus Christ as the prescription for life.
It all seems so normal to me, yet, looking back, I could have never guessed the road upon which I would be walking, or driving a van, as it were. A year ago I was an innocent college freshman attending the College of William and Mary, a prestigious, high class university in moneyed Virginia. I thought Christians were some sort of deranged, possibly dangerous, brain-washed cult. I spoke about ten words of Spanish. I had never done a day's worth of work in my life. I said things like “Oh my God, I can't believe she's wearing that sweater with that skirt.” But today, I was a Christian missionary, a college dropout, and an experienced and hard-working concrete house builder. I worked eight-hour shifts in the hot sun laying rows of block and mixing vast amounts of concrete. I slept on a hard, uneven concrete floor and had two pairs of pants, one for going out and one for sleeping in. I had friends named Marta, Cheque, and Jorge and more adoptive Mexican family, than blood-related American family. I said things like “how many wheelbarrows of rock do we need for this batch of concrete?” and translated Pastor Alfredo's sermons for the Americans who visited our ministry. And I smiled more.
A girl in the back row of the van calls “They have cowboy boots there! Can we stop?!” and I am called back to where I am and realize that, without my guidance, the van has managed to steer itself to our destination. As the parking lot attendants guide us towards an unoccupied parking spot, I turn my thoughts towards my next adventure: parking this enormous vehicle, and, as I have learned to do with each new and extraordinary task that presents itself to me each day, meet it with a smile and patience.
