I was especially looking forward to meeting three of the boys at the school: German—pronounced more like “Erman”—Matias, Jonas, Joshua, and Jorge. I had gotten to know them through Conversation Club, where we would get online together and give them a chance to practice their English.
There is something a little strange about finally meeting someone in person after you’ve spent months talking to them through a computer screen. You already know each other, but you don’t. Suddenly the face you’ve been seeing in a little box on your computer is standing beside you, and you discover pretty quickly that teenage boys in Mexico laugh at many of the same things teenage boys in Ohio laugh at.
They’re also about the same age as my grandson Caleb. I hadn’t really thought about that before the trip, but once I was around them, I think it had something to do with how quickly I connected with them. Being a Papaw does something to you. You start seeing your own grandkids in kids halfway around the world.
Before we left for Mexico, Pastor Lazaro had sent us some pictures of the school gym. There was a wall they wanted painted, and I was told it was about ten feet high.
I remember looking at the picture and thinking, That sure looks taller than ten feet.
There was a basketball goal mounted on the thing. But I figured perspective can be deceiving in a photograph, and certainly somebody who actually lived there knew how tall their own wall was.
As it turns out, the photograph wasn’t deceiving. The translation was.
It wasn’t ten feet. It was ten meters.
For those of us who still stubbornly measure things the American way, that’s somewhere around 33 feet. And somehow, after this discovery was made, nobody reconsidered whether the 65-year-old guy from Ohio should be the one painting it.
So there I was, working my way up a 20-foot extension ladder with a roller on the end of a 13-foot extension pole. The wall was enormous. At one point I looked across that giant green thing and thought I was painting the Green Monster at Fenway Park.
Except Fenway probably has scaffolding. And union rules.
We had Jeff.
And, of course, there wasn’t just one wall. There were two.
I have no idea how many times I moved that ladder, climbed it, stretched that roller as far as I could reach, climbed back down and started the whole process again. By the end of the project, I had developed a whole new appreciation for the metric system and a strong suspicion that Pastor Lazaro should never again be allowed to estimate the size of a painting project for me.
The funny thing is, I loved it.
Not necessarily the part where I was twenty feet up a ladder wondering whether my travel insurance covered stupidity. What I loved was being there with these people I had previously known only through a computer screen. We were working together, talking, laughing and doing something that needed to be done.
The boys were incredibly respectful and attentive to me while we were there. I had gone into Conversation Club thinking my role was to help them practice English, but by the time I was standing in their school in Mexico City, it didn’t feel much like teacher and students anymore. We were simply getting to know one another.
And not all of that happened through conversation.
We had brought frisbees with us, and one day all 28 kids were throwing them around. Frisbees were flying everywhere. Kids were chasing bad throws, laughing at each other and figuring out what to do with these things the Americans had brought with them. It was wonderfully chaotic.
Then somebody apparently decided the old guy hadn’t done enough physical activity painting a 33-foot wall, because I ended up playing basketball with them too.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate what happened here. There were teenage boys running around that gym. And there was me.
Nobody from the NBA was taking notes.
But I was out there with them, and I love the picture somebody took of it. German has the ball and Jonas is coming up beside me, and I’m right in the middle of them trying to remember what my legs used to be able to do.
That picture may say as much about the trip as any picture I brought home.
We weren’t doing a project. I wasn’t teaching an English lesson. Nobody was giving a presentation or trying to create a meaningful mission-trip moment. We were just playing basketball together.
And somewhere between painting that ridiculous wall, throwing frisbees and chasing teenage boys around a basketball court, Conversation Club became something different to me. These weren’t kids in Mexico whose English I was helping with anymore.
They were German, Matias, Jonas, Joshua, and Jorge. They were boys I knew.
They were my friends.
That’s also why I’m excited about what happens next. Next year, six students from the school are scheduled to make the trip in the opposite direction. They’ll come to Ohio, spend time with us at our church, participate in ministry alongside us and experience our culture the way we were given the opportunity to experience theirs.
And, as things stand right now, German, Matias and Jonas are three of the students planning to come.
I really like that.
Conversation Club started with three boys appearing in little boxes on my computer screen. Then I got to step into their world—meet them in person, see their school, paint their gym, throw frisbees with them and discover that I am considerably older than I used to be while trying to play basketball with them.
Next year, if everything works out, they’ll step into mine.
They’ll see our church. They’ll meet some of the people they’ve heard about. Maybe they’ll meet Caleb, who is about their age. They’ll serve with us, eat our food, experience our culture and probably discover a few things about Americans that don’t make much sense to them either.
I hope somebody remembers to bring the frisbees.
I’ve been thinking a lot about missions since coming home from Mexico City. We usually describe a mission trip in terms of what we’re going there to do. We’re going to serve. We’re going to teach. We’re going to build something, repair something or, apparently, paint something considerably taller than advertised.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that. The work matters.
But I wonder if sometimes we concentrate so much on what we’re going to bring that we miss what is being passed back and forth.
A conversation. A name remembered. A joke that works in two languages. A frisbee. A basketball. A friendship that started in a little box on a computer screen and became something much more real when we finally stood in the same room.
I went to Mexico thinking I was going to serve.
I did.
But that’s only half the story.
They gave something to me, too.
Test COmment