The summer of 87 i was 15 and basically a good if somewhat sad christian girl. i'd had my problems and some of them very severe but by 15 i'd resolved all but the normal teenage issues, and mom and i were beginning to wage the war of independance. i was beginning to awaken to my own thought process, and with that the anger and pain that comes with use a new faculty or barely formed muscle. the first moment of encounter the mystries that lurk in day to day events that surround our lives is a frightening time for a child of any years. I was beginning to awaken to my own concept of life, death, sexuality, etc... and every new discovery touched my brain like fingers probing raw skin, but with a desire for new experience i involved myself in the newly discovered otherworld as much as i could.
i signed up for mission to mexico, intending to give my time in charity and gain a new appreciation for the blessings of my life. and the trip did change me, but not in the presumptious way i had imagined. not that i changed that day or within that year but that what i saw in mexico has kept changing me ever since.
big experiences are like that, they don't happen at once, and they don't end. they continue to color how you react to what happens in your life for the rest of it. among the keepsakes i've had and lost (but sit in the mind in small dark frames of their own ) is a small typical third world hungry dirty child picture, with what was for me a big difference.... that hungry dirty child wraped his arms around my neck every morning (and made me nervous because i still can't abide children) and loved me to death. the truck that took us in everyday was chased by children who swarmed us much in the same way the flies swarmed the children themselves. they greeted us in one excited voice and love spilled over everyone. then we taught them about god. even then i suspected that they should have been doing the teaching. as for family, some had nothing but and some had none but then true poverty is like that. they were all each other's family, solitude being a luxury of western culture.
many of those children are dead right now, and there is nothing for worms to eat off their bones anymore.
we left the children after morning everyday and worked construction for a new wing of a hospital for the local people. we were fire clearing a field to pour a foundation (construction in mexico works a little different from here) and right before we set t he fire, a litter of puppies and mother came out of the brush. we cleared them safely from the field and began work. first chance i got, i visited with the puppies. the coordinators explained a couple of things to us, firstly that none of the tender hearted teenagers were taking the puppies home, largely because they had several illnesses common to the area and wouldn't live through quarentine. this however didn't stop me (who is terrified and hateful of dogs, and what the hell i'll admit to children and mexicans too) to watching these puppies until i cried every chance i got. the coordinators thought i was crying because they were dying or i couldn't take one home but i was crying because i was having one of my first encounter with mystery and it was too big for me. i was crying because these puppies were more alive than i was. i would go and watch them, and they played so hard, they even slept hard. it was as if they knew their alotment of life was small so they were going to squeeze it for everything. they were vibrant. they were happy to see everything, like they knew they would never see it again. they drank their life so deep and loved absolutely everything because it was not nothing.
then at night i would return and watch my california friends. i would see how nothing had meaning to them, how these people barely older than the children they loved to help were already taking on the palor of the walking dead. i could see how wonder had slipped from their views. then again the next day i would watch the puppies and drink in their lesson and cry for the coordinators who tried to comfort me. and by now their bones are dryer than the dead children's.