The Mexico Story

In 1993, not long after I’d finished animation college and still a few months from turning 21, I moved to Lubbock, a small town in West Texas to study in a programme called Adventures In Missions (AIM). For nine months, with a class of 80 people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, I studied subjects like the Old and New Testament, Apologetics, team dynamics and teaching methods all in preparation for the practical side of the programme which would mean working as an apprentice missionary in a foreign city. After the nine months were over our class had been divided up into teams to be sent to countries all over the world and my team of six…four girls and two boys…had chosen Mexico city as our home for the next nineteen months.

That year and a half was the most amazing time of my life. We lived in two apartments (one for the girls and one for the boys) in the south of the city close to the university where the 1968 Olympics took place. El D.F. (pronounced “El Day Eff-Aay”), as it’s known to the locals, is one of the largest cities in the world. At the time it had something like 29 million living there although how they could possibly come to any reliable figure I don’t know. I’ll never forget the first time I flew over the mountains and saw the city stretching from horizon to horizon.

As I sit here and try to encapsulate it all I find it almost impossible. So many experiences and emotions were crammed into that short time that I’m afraid I’ll misrepresent it in some way. Part of my hesitation is the job we were doing there as I know that many people would raise their eyebrows at the thought of mission work. Usually, here in Ireland anyway, when I’ve told people I spent some time as a missionary they think one of two things: either they picture a nun or medical missionary working in the jungle, or they think of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that call at the door. Neither one describes my time down there.

We didn’t really have a typical day, it changed depending on what stage we were at in our Spanish and what was going on in the church that we were working with. The Metro congregation is a large group of Christians that meet in the centre of the city and a lot of our activities revolved around their young people. One day we might be playing football in the park with the deaf members of the church, another day we might be painting the building. We were there to soak up whatever we could and hopefully help more than we hindered.

But that was just the framework of it all. My memories of that time are a mixed bag of the weird and wonderful experiences:

A daytrip to watch autopsies at the city morgue with a law student friend of mine.
Wednesday night dinners with Mama Carola.
Terrifying bus trips into the mountains that I thought I might not survive.
Watching Ireland get beaten by Mexico in the World Cup and the celebrations on the street afterwards.
The 7 point earthquake that rocked my bed across the room one morning.
Learning how to salsa in the middle of a huge street party.
My short-lived career as a model.
The citywide (and somewhat scary) egg and flour fight that happens on Independence Day…

…and so many more.

Niall asked in the comments to my previous post why I left. Well, I could have extended my time there, and others did. In fact some of them have gone back and are living there now. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I had stayed but really by the time the nineteen months were up I was ready to go home. I’d formed such strong bonds with my teammates (eventhough we had fights that would put Big Brother contestants to shame on a regular basis) that I didn’t want to stay once they’d gone.

So I went home and started the difficult process of finding my feet again. It took me four years to find a job as an animator and during that time I actually had some worries that I’d made a mistake by flitting off to Mexico instead of getting my career off the ground. I don’t have those feelings anymore; in fact I miss it every day.