Before we had kids, my husband Rob and I were the youth leaders at our church. Well, actually, Rob was. I was more like his executive assistant. Anyway, one year, we took a group of teenagers on a Habitat for Humanity mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico. The mission was to build houses in an area where people were living on a trash dump in structures that were cobbled together from items scrounged from the dump. Habitat had already built half a dozen houses that were just four walls and a roof. The floors were dirt. Our group was asked to paint the outsides of each structure. Nobody got any training or orientation. They simply handed us brushes and cans of paint.
We were all city people. We had no idea how anybody survived in places like this. And nobody explained why each new house had a plastic drum full of water on one corner. When it was time to finish up, one of the kids decided to wash the paint brushes in one of those drums of water. It turns out that those drums were positioned to catch the rain running off the roof, and those were their only source of water. Oops.
Looking back, it's amazing to me how ignorant I was. I'd like to think we'd have known better if we went now, and would have asked our Habitat liaison how to handle the project more sensitively. Honestly, though, I don't have the energy for that sort of mission trip now anyway. And I wonder if it would be that easy to get there and get back anymore.
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