April 2003 Mission Trip to Guadalupe, Mexico

Tapestries of Life Ministries

http://www.tapestriesoflife.com

We meet at Wyoming Methodist Church – Saturday April 26, 2003 for a worship service for the 11 missionaries and their families. This group picture is in front of the church before we left for the airport

From left to right in the back row are Gordy, Rod, Dan, Jerry, Mike and Judy. From left to right in the front row are Rita, Donna, Curtis, Andrea and Jolene

We arrived at the El Paso airport on time and collected our baggage. We were greeted by Pastor Steve’s daughter. We loaded our bags into one of the two Tapestries of Life vans and left for Guadalupe. During the drive we were given our first orientation session about going into Mexico. No photos were to be taken at the boarder crossing, hats had to be off and sun glasses had to be off. We drove across a very narrow bridge that had fence on both sides. You literally had to worry about your outside mirrors hitting the on coming vehicles. Most pickup trucks or vans had to pull their mirrors in to give more room to pass the on coming traffic. Not only the did you have to worry about the on coming traffic, you had to worry about the curb tearing up your tire sidewall and the fence on the side of the bridge that could hit your right mirror.

We got to the Mexico side of the bridge and stopped. We saw guards with machine guns just as we were told. On into Mexico we went. The first town right on the boarder we were told not to stop at, because it was a staging area for drug traffic to sneak across the boarder in to the US. As we drove through the town, there were people on the side of the road selling various things like statues and other trinkets as if this was their means of earning an income. The store fronts were in disrepair - buildings falling down.

You can clearly see these people are poor and have little to no money for the upkeep of the business’s buildings or homes.