"Rockin" it!

Our first and last work days during Shack Week were rock picking. Sitting on the beach, watching the waves, and picking rock, after rock, after rock. And not just any rock. Only the perfect rocks. They had to be the perfect colour, perfect texture, perfect size, and have absolutely no flaws. If that sounds crazy, try doing it for a whole day!

Now let me give a little bit of background about rock picking. Here in the Baja of Mexico, the tide washes up billions upon billions of rocks on the beaches. These rocks are collected and sold to the United States where they are then used for landscaping. The rock picking industry employs a lot of Mexicans, both men and women. Sometimes you will even see whole families picking rocks together on the beach. The workers are usually self-employed and pick the rocks on their own time and then wait on the shore for the various companies to come around and purchase them. They are paid $1 per bag of rocks, and it takes one and a half 5-gallon buckets to fill one bag.

Every time we have gone to the beach here in Mexico, we have seen people bent over picking rocks, but until this past week, we've always thought that it must be an easy job to do. Our first reaction about rock picking was "Sweet, we get to spend the whole day on the beach!". However, by the end of the day, our minds felt numb from the amount of rocks we had seen. It's amazing how everything started to blend together. After a while it was hard to even remember what colour of rocks we were searching for. All I can say, is that making a living off of this type of work would not be an easy thing to do, never-mind to provide for an entire family! As a family of six, each work day we only got paid three people's wages in order to make it more realistic. By the end of our rock picking days, we made approximately 330 pesos per day (around $30) and after rent, water, and transportation costs, we were usually left with around 200 pesos per day (or about $17). As mind-numbing and boring as this job was, it was something that we were able to set personal goals for. We would set a goal of having 50 buckets picked by lunch, and we would push through until we got it done. Some may have said we "rocked" it.... ;)

Stay tuned for another shack week blog coming soon!

Ubuntu - I Am Because We Are.

"Ubuntu" - This South African concept is described as the recognition that our humanity is caught up and is  inextricably bound up in each other's humanity. I am because we are. A person with ubuntu knows that they belong in a greater whole and that they are diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.

 Life has officially taken on a whole new meaning in my mind. Everything I once thought to be normal, usual, or typical has been erased from my memory, and replaced with a new way of thinking. Two weeks ago, I was complaining about the lumps in my mattress and how uncomfortable it was to sleep on. Two weeks ago couldn't stand waiting at the sink for a couple of minutes while the water heated up and I was annoyed that our kitchen shelves weren't stocked with my favorite condiment: Nutella. The saying "You don't know what you've until it's gone" is absolutely, one hundred percent truthful.

During the month of March, my friends and I worked with approximately 190 Canadian high school students and built 12 houses here in Mexico. We worked alongside families who spent each day of their lives trying to survive until the next, living in shacks made of cardboard and plastic, and working rigorous hours to provide for their families. I had always been sympathetic of them, but had never truly given much thought to the way they lived each and every day. This past week I got to experience first-hand true Mexican life: how they work, how they eat, how they dress, bathe, sleep, and everything in between.

My friends and I spent two days collecting trash from the sides of the roads and putting it together to make our house for the week. We picked up things like cardboard boxes, plastic garbage bags, palm leaves, sticks, cement blocks, scraps of wood, string, and much, much more. We were given some long scraps of wood from a friend and a few tarps with which we used to make a traditional Canadian Indigenous "tepee" shack. Our goal was not for it too look pretty, but to be a shelter from the wind and the rain (and yes, it did rain). A few weeks ago, while building houses with Hero Holiday, we cut all of our with with powered table saws. If a nail bend, we threw it away and grabbed a new one. However, while building our shack, we were given only an old hand saw, a hammer and a few nails. This meant putting much more thought into where and how we put things together!

As we left our house and our belongs behind and set out to our first day of work, we had no idea what was in store for us in the next few days ahead. Sure this week would teach us how to cook over a fire, be frugal with our money, wash laundry by hand an pick the perfect strawberry ... But little did we know, we would be learning more about life in the next seven days than we had between all of our lives put together.

Stay tuned for more info on "Shack Week"!

"Shack Week": Living the real Mexican life!

Hola amigos! I know I haven't updated in a while, but I thought I'd let you all know that for the next week, I will be living in a homemade "shack" along with my 5 other leadership students. Since Monday, we've been collecting plastic, cardboard, and any wood we could find around the streets and we've been constructing our very own "tepee shack"! A Canadian version of a Mexican shack. We'll be sleeping in it, cooking over a fire, and going to work with the Mexicans on various jobs such as clamming, strawberry picking, and rock picking. With the money that we make each day, we have to pay for our land, our water, and all our groceries. It will be a challenge that's for sure! We've spent lots of hours so far running around to all the local stores to see which ones are the cheapest and where we can get the most for our peso! Up until now I've been pretty worried about shack week, but seeing how much 6 girls have accomplished in just a few days, I'm confident that we'll have a blast this week and learn a lot too! As far as we know, we're the first group of students to make a shack tall enough to stand up in! Never under-estimate a girl! Hehehe!
If you would like to follow my progress throughout the week, you can check out Live Different's facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Live-Different/189864944417296, or you can visit their website http://livedifferent.com/ where our leaders will be posting pictures and blog updates from our work days! Thanks for keeping posted and keeping me in your prayers!
Hasta luego! :)
Cynthia

Highlight of the Day

Today was an amazing first day to a new house build! We're working with a team from Penticton, B.C this week and they are all hard-workers! In one day we got all the lumber cut, the roof panels and the walls put together and painted, and the whole house standing up on the cement pad! It was the fastest I've ever seen a house go up! It's really great getting to know yet another Mexican family whom I can call friends. This particular family has four children, one son is 21 and married to an 18 year old girl and they have two children together. Their next daughter is 18 years old and married with one child. They also have a 15 year old daughter and a 13 year old son as well. It was so interesting conversing with the two 18 year old girls who are both married and have children already. They both asked me how old I was, followed by the question: "How many children do you have", followed by: "Are you married?", followed by: "Well, do you have a boyfriend????". They were very shocked to think that at 19 years old you could still be living a single life back in Canada.
One of the most exciting parts of my day today was walking back to visit the family that I built for last week with my last group. I had seen their son around the neighborhood and decided to take a stroll over to their house to check in on them. I was so amazed at what I saw. Rogelio (the father of the family) was standing on the roof of his family's old shack, pulling off the remaining pieces of plywood and tarp. As I got closer I realized that he was wearing the tool belt that my father had given him last week on dedication day and had my dad's hammer in his hand. I felt so proud knowing that not only had we given this family a house to live in, but also the tools to maintain it. As I greeted the family I was flabbergasted by the smiles on their faces and how happy they were to see me, even though the rest of the team had already departed and headed back to Canada. They didn't hesitate one bit to welcome me into their home, show me around and point out all the finishing touches they had made to transform their "house" into a "home". It was an amazing feeling knowing that this family now considers me part of their family after only one month of knowing them, and seeing how much of a change we had in the future of this family. Felicidad told me that they plan to keep all of the old building supplies from their old house in case they plan to build anything more in the future. A month ago they told us that their plans for the future were to get a proper house for their kids and it's amazing to me that now they are able to look to the future and think about what else they might be able to make and achieve.

Hero Holiday - Give love, Bring hope, See change.

Hero Holiday Numero Uno

This past week was a very exciting one for me! Not only did we have 150 high school students here from Victoria, Vancouver, and Madawaska, and not only was it my first time helping lead a Hero Holiday trip, but I was also privileged enough to have my parents come down to Mexico for the week to participate in our house build. I was personally involved with the team from Victoria, a group of 30 amazing students grades 10-12. These kids were so ready to help everyday as soon as we got to the build site and were never ever sitting around with nothing to do! We quickly got ahead of schedule on our house build which allowed for some extra exploring time! The community we've been working in is called Padre Kino and it is actually just a dry open field with a few shacks here and there made of cardboard and tarp. There is no running water and no electricity in this community. In order to get drinking water, the families have to wait for a truck to come by once or twice a week and fill up their small water jugs. Our team split up into two groups which each built their own house for two very deserving families. The family that I helped out with had three kids, one of which was very shy and had a speech impediment. However, by even the first hour, he had opened up to everyone and was right in there with all the other kids helping out and proudly painting his own house. Most of the kids on the trip had never been on a humanitarian trip before so it was really cool to see how they grew and what they learned. Every night at group debrief, the kids blew me away by the things they said. You would never have imagined that just one week ago, half of these kids would have never talked to the majority of the people on this trip. They all got along so well together and began to trust each other with their personal life stories. I got to know the group really well and it was hard to say goodbye to them today, but it was really cool to see how much of an influence I had on their lives. The girls were constantly asking me questions about my leadership program, my plans for the future, and what got me interested in Hero Holiday. It was really encouraging to see how much of a role model I can be in young lives. Seeing such an amazing group of young kids really had a big influence on me! I'm really going to miss them and can honestly say that it will be pretty tough to find another group as awesome as them.
I felt so lucky to have my parents here for the week as well and get to show them what I do here and why I love it so much! I'm really going to miss all the people I spent the past week with, but it's exciting for me to think that I may have planted some seeds in a few kids lives.
So far this week we've built 8 houses, which leaves 4 left before the end of the month.
I can't wait for the next team to arrive on Monday! Let week two begin!

12

This video was supposed to go with my last blog update, however I forgot to tag it in here, so please take a moment to watch it now! It's so good! Look for me, I'm shoveling! :)

Hey everyone! Here's a little update on what has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks since our first house build! About three weeks ago we started going through applications to decide who would be getting a house in March. During the month of March we will be building 12 houses in a community called Padre Kino, which is about 20 minutes from our house. There will be around 6 groups coming down from Canda to build with us and 150 people will be here all at once! Needless to say, it's going to be a very crazy and busy month, but I'm looking forward to it so much! Especially after what we've been doing the last three weeks!

After a long process of interviews, we finally determined which 12 families we would be building for and got to go to their houses to tell them the good news. Every family we met had something special about them and we've already gotten so attached, but one family in particular has made a huge impact on us already. As we were at the land office three weeks ago discussing which families could be potential Hero Holiday recipients, in walks in a 17 year old girl with an 8-month old baby boy on her hip. Her name was Katheryne and her and her boyfriend were living with their baby boy, Abdiel, in a tiny cement house with her mother and her older brother and they used an old RV as their kitchen. Two weeks before, the family had lost Katheryne's step-father in a drowning incident while he was trying to save his other son. The day we met Katheryne she was 6 months pregnant with her second child. We knew right away that this would be a worthy family to build for.

The next day on our way to teach English at an elementary school, we got a disturbing phone call. Katheryne had lost her baby just a few hours after we finished talking with her. We were devastated. We had only known this girl for less than 24 hours and already we were so attached to her. As hard as it was, we still pushed our feelings aside for an hour or two and put on happy faces to teach the kids at the school. A few days later we attended the funeral for baby Paloma Michelle. It was so hard to watch Katheryne's and her husband, Jesus (pronounced "Hey-zeus"), pain as they gazed upon their unborn baby being barried in the ground and covered with a pad of cement. It was definitely an emotional day, but to add to the craziness, we still had to go back to Padre Kino that same day and tell 12 families that they would be getting a house, one of those families was Katheryne and Jesus. Talk about a mix of emotions!

We decided to wait until the next day to tell Katheryne and Jesus because we didn't want them to be overwhelmed with emotions and boy were they happy to hear the news! The land lady decided to donate a piece of land to the couple so that they could start off their lives on a new step.

In the past two weeks, we've started preparing the houses by pouring the cement pads for the floors. And not just pouring ... Cement trucks do not exist here in Mexico, so everything is mixed in a small cement mixer at the site. First you put in two and a half buckets of water, then one bag of cement mix, and a whole bunch of gravel! Us girls were in charge of shoveling the gravel into the mixer, and BOY was it a hard job! Within 12 days we poured 10 cement pads.

I hope reading this post has gotten you as excited for these families as I am!
Please feel free to check out this video-montage of our cement pouring fun! It's amazing and makes me tear up every time just re-living the excitement!

Adios for now!
God bless,
Cynthia :)

One week down, So many more to come! :)

Well, I have survived my first week here in beautiful sunny Mexico! So far, I've built a house, fallen in love with a Mexican family, explored our town, played charades with the man at the meat counter at the grocery store to explain "ground beef", watched the sunset on the ocean, attempted to tan my pasty white skin, eaten goat, shark, and lots of authentic Mexican food, and gotten to know so many amazing people in our community including the seniors at the old folks home we volunteer at, and the kids at the schools we teach at!  Everyday is a new adventure and it's so exciting to see what the next day will bring. My spanish skills are improving daily and I'm beginning to be able to carry on full conversations with the Mexican people!
I'm learning so much and having a blast.
Thanks for checking in on me!
I'll post again soon.

House Build Numero Uno : The house that changed me.

Coming to Mexico, I always knew that I would be building houses for Mexican families who can't afford them. I knew that they would be living in makeshift houses that leak when it rains and wearing tattered clothes over and over again, but for some reason I just wasn't expecting what I experienced these past few days.

On Saturday, January 21st, our first Hero Holiday team came down to Mexico to start their house build. They were building for a family with 7 children who live just over the hill from our house, about a 5 minute drive down a bumpy dirt road. The mom and dad both work in the strawberry fields full time, leaving the four older children to go to school during the day, and the three younger ones to stay home and take care of themselves.

On Saturday afternoon, my friends and I arrived at the work site. As soon as we stepped off the bus, we were surrounded by little Spanish-speaking kids asking us for "capucci's (piggy back rides). There were so many of them! We definitely had our work cut out for us: paint and play with kids at the same time! But the kids were quite willing to help as much as they could. They weren't afraid to get their clothes covered in paint, that's for sure! After I had gotten a bit used to the amount of excitement around me, I had a chance to look around. What I saw was a dozen sticks used as support, tarp and garbage bags used as walls and roofing, and a sheet for a door on a "house" that was the size of my bedroom. The children ran around playing in the dirt, wearing the same clothes each day we were there. The mom explained to us that she wakes up every morning at 3am to prepare food for the family before work, and spends her evenings doing housework after a full day on the fields. The mother showed my friend and I how she does the laundry for her family every day and let us try it out. Let's just say it's no piece of cake! The family's bathroom was a hole in the ground enclosed by tarps and garbage bags and the children would have all slept on a dirt floor. For the next three days, we worked on building the family a brand new house with the help of the mom, dad, and their children. I worked so hard on getting the paint job done perfectly that I think I almost forgot what we were actually doing there. I forgot how big this was for the family. They had never been able to afford a house before in their whole entire lives, and now they were getting one for free!

Before and After

Today we finished the house and had our "dedication ceremony" where we each said a few words to the family, prayed with them, then handed over the keys and got to watch as they explored their new home. Of course they had seen the house all along, but now with their few belongings in it, some brand new outfits, 5 beds and a fully stocked kitchen, this was their home, and I had been apart of making it possible for them! It was honestly an overwhelming experience to be apart of. Last night they slept in a leaky hut made of tarps in the pouring rain, and tonight they will be sleeping in their own brand new beds, with blankets, and with food ready to be put on the table in the morning. I can imagine they probably feel like they've just been given a mansion. I will never forget the smiles on their faces and the gratitude they had for us. This family truly had an impact on my life, and I will always remember my first house build.

Mailing Address

If anyone would like to mail me while I'm away, here's the address to mail it to. I know it says California, but we don't have a mail service in Mexico so we pick up our mail in San Diego whenever we're there!


Cynthia Burmaster
C/O Rose Friesen
Box 7669
Chula Vista, CA, 91912

Primero Dia en Mexico!

Hola Canada! Que pasa?

I am safe and sound here in Vicente Guerrero, Baja California, Mexico! Quite the long name for a town, but in actuality, our little community is significantly easier to say, it's called Zapata and it's a cute little busy community just off the main highway that runs north to south on the peninsula of Mexico. Arriving on Friday night in the dark, it was pretty difficult to make out the neighbourhood, but since then we've had some time to roam around a bit. This morning we ventured out with our leaders to the Saturday market in town where local people come set up tents of merchandise. It may not look like a lot, but it is quite the treasure cove! I found a really nice pair of jeans for $4 US (which I decided would be my painting jeans haha), and a pair of genuine leather cowboy boots also for $4 US! You can do some real good bargain shopping around here!

There is currently a Hero Holiday team here that drove down with us yesterday and they are building a house in our community for a very nice family with 7 children. This afternoon we got to go to the job site and help paint the walls and trim for the house, as well as play with the children. They are so much fun to play with and they're extremely good helpers, that's for sure!

I had a lot of opportunities to practice my Spanish skills today. It was a bit stressful trying to communicate with the vendors at the market this morning, but by the afternoon, I was carrying out conversations with the kids at the job site. Obviously I'm not fluent, but hearing it spoken around me and listening intently to the words I don't know is helping me a lot. The kids are also very eager to help teach us new words and phrases!

So far I'm having a wonderful time and looking forward to what tomorrow will bring! We're heading back to the job site to help put up the walls tomorrow morning so I'm sure that will be exciting!

Thanks for keeping me in your prayers!

Hasta luego = )