By Karlie Baker
IV Leader Editor, Sept. 13, 2007
For six weeks, Ken Decker called Santiago, Mexico, a small valley town, home. The IVCC student recalls “waking up every morning to mountains,” as he shows me a picture of the view, graphing an invisible village on the table in front of him for clarification.
With his finger, he draws the house he stayed in and its surrounding buildings. He also points to roads and other mountains.
“I miss that,” he said.
Decker was not vacationing on a yacht or exotic beach. His stay was part of a missionary trip for the Vida Nueva Missionary Clinic. The clinic is an affiliate of Cup of Cold Water Ministries, which was established to offer a combination of “spiritual and medical outreaches.”
Vida Nueva focuses its efforts toward medical care and construction, as well as a soup kitchen. It is located in La Nogalera, roughly one hour south west of Monterrey, and serves the neighboring villages.
Decker started contemplating the trip a year ago to help out some friends who run the mission. Yet the deciding factor
came for more personal reasons.
“I’d developed some bad habits in my life,” he admits, “and wanted to get away from those.”
He deferred his spring semester and prepared for the trip. June 13, Decker packed up a few possessions--mostly clothing, a camera, and a package of Pop Tarts--and headed to Santiago. Fellow IVCC student Lindsay Ristau accompanied him.
When Decker arrived in Mexico, the clinic was run out of a church. Many of his tasks for the clinic did not stray far from casual, household chores. Decker said he helped out where he was needed, cleaning houses and getting “really good at cleaning cars.” He explained that the families he worked with often did not have time to complete these menial tasks.
Ristau worked more within the clinic, completing tasks such as creating labels for medicines.
The clinic acted as a soup kitchen for both its patrons and recruits. Decker said one woman in particular prepared large meals whenever a group came down. While many of the dishes involved hot dogs, she also served lots of eggs, chili, cactus, and of course, tacos.
While there, Decker also saw the construction of a permanent building for the clinic. A missionary group from Tennessee was indispensable to its creation. He said the group was composed of mostly older people with extremely thick accents, but found them to be quite entertaining. This group remains “the coolest people [he’s] ever met.”
Besides the ride from Santiago to La Nogalera, travel within the country was par for the course. “Every day was a day trip,“ Decker said. He traveled to the nearby villages of Laguna and Lagonias, The village of Lagonias is located on a 10,000 foot elevation in the Sierra Madre mountains. Getting to the village involves taking a road with mountain on one side and a 2,000-foot drop on the other. Decker made the journey in the back of a pick-up truck.
“You would be on the road, and a cloud would get in your way. Not like a cloud of fog, but a real cloud.”
Other day trips were reserved for exploring the nearby landscapes, which Decker often speaks of in awe. When asked of significant experiences on the trip, he immediately recalled a visit to the Cumbres de Monterrey National Park. The park features a number of natural springs that come out of the mountains. It is also home to the Cola de Caballo Falls and Santa Catarina Canyon. Decker and company explored the park’s caves.
“The water would come up beneath you in blue, and you could drink it right from there. You can’t do that anywhere else in Mexico,” Decker said.
Looking back, he found very few low points in the trip. Concern with preparation for the trip paled in comparison to actually being there. Decker said laziness and procrastination played an integral role in packing for the trip, thus the abundance of clothing. But he said that if anything, he actually packed too much.
The clinic does not require knowledge of Spanish which was an advantage to Decker, whose vocabulary boasted only a few colorful curse words he had picked up from his employer. This limited knowledge was apparently enough to get him around for the duration of the trip. The six weeks did however acquaint him with enough Spanish words to “get around with some difficulty.”
A young man who admits to “flying by the seat of [his] pants,” Decker enjoyed the significantly more relaxed nature of the natives. They love to sit around together and “burn” each other--rather, insult and prank. “And if you burn them back, they think it’s the greatest thing ever,” Decker said.
He added that while prone to staring (which is not considered rude in Mexico), they are quick to initiate conversation. They are also very well acquainted with Illinois.
“Every dude has been to Chicago once, or so they say.”
His trip could be called enlightening, relaxing and informative all at once.
It came with its hitches — not enough toilet paper, Decker said — but positive enough that he wishes he were still there, cleaning off vans in the mountains.