Reynosa Pictures

In Reynosa we stay in a building called Casa Verde. It's ugly on the outside, but the inside is so warm and inviting. There's an atrium area, open to the sky, with benches and rocking chairs. If you sit there and look up you see this cross and below it this poster, plants, etc. It's a great place to meet for worship, talk with friends, play spoons. . .

This sign can be translated, "Isaiah 55 Mission - Hope for the Deaf"

There were three work sites this year, as well as Vacation Bible School which was held at a local orphanage. The picture above is of the hospital site. This building willing become a place where patients can stay who are being treated at the hospital and have no place to live. Now they are sleeping in the cars, on the street, etc. I was at this site Thursday and Friday.

Across the street from the hospital site was this site - a second story for a Baptist church. This site was known as the "sweat box".

This is the site where I worked - the Isaiah 55 deaf school. Last summer volunteer teams were building this school; this summer a second story was added for more class rooms and office space! I was at this site, laying block and mixing concrete (by hand!) to put benches in the park surrounding the school. On Thursday evening we came to the park and had a cook-out with the deaf students, their families, and the community.

This picture is from Thursday, the day I worked at the hospital. The big job on Thursday was to pour concrete into the wooden frame that you can see in the picture of the church. The piles of rock and sand and the cement mixer were across the street at the hospital site. One team of workers filled wooden boxes with rock and sand and poured them into the cement mixer with water and cement mix. The cement mixer spit out concrete into wheel barrows which another team wheeled across the street to a couple other girls and me. We shoveled the concrete into buckets and handed them to a couple guys who passed them up the stairs to the second story of the church to a couple guys on ladders who poured the concrete into the frame. The emptied buckets were handed back to us, and so on. I love when we pour concrete. Something about the noise and rush and urgency appeals to me. I turn into a beast armed with a shovel. Maybe it's a New Jersey thing.

I roomed with these three sweet girls (and another one not pictured) from Macon, Georgia. The team from Georgia adopted me into their group, I joined them for their evening meetings and enjoyed hanging out with them. I was a bit worried about coming without friends from Covenant but everyone was so kind - all the church teams, the summer staff, the Isaiah 55 team. What a great experience! I really hope to come back next year as a summer staffer!

This is Robert, a deaf man from Pennsylvania who came down as summer staff. He is raising support to be a teacher at the deaf school. We all learned the sign alphabet so we could talk to him.

This is almost the whole team on Friday after cleaning up at the hospital site. The last work day was a half day and in the afternoon we went shopping in downtown Reynosa. We all left Saturday morning.